Webcup Maurice 2022
The Webcup Event
The Hackermen, representing HackClub Mauritius (Nathan is the president), was comprised of Sookun Dharineesh, Farhaan Iqbal, Ashmit Gadekar and myself. Our objective: create a fully-functional website in 24 hours.
The prompt was a startup company which deals in digital time capsules. So basically, you give them your data which they will publish to the world in so much time. The capsules could be stored in data vaults on Earth or sent in orbit around any body of the solar system or to the depths of the galaxy.
Our team was funny in the sense that it's only the second team ever to be comprised of college students. Everyone else was either uni or pro level. And boy did we have a skill level to match. The three youngest of us (ie minus Farhaan) had never touched HTML until a few days prior and it was the first website we had ever built. I think you can guess just how well it went for us. And pity the jury which had to test our barely functional website.
Meet the team (at midnight)
The challenge did not stop there as we were given additional specifications from the "client" as the competition progressed. The first one was given at around midnight, with the client wanting customers to be able to pay with cryptocurrency. I'm sure you can imagine our faces just as the news dropped - when everyone was starting to get sleepy and eyes to close on their own. Given that I have a bit of experience in Blockchain tech, I ended up soloing this bit of the job and then going to sleep a bit.
The second specification was the client wanting a change in colour scheme to fit their "lucky colour" which was bright pink! Fortunately though, we did manage to finish the aesthetic aspect of the website in time.
We worked at SDWorx, where I got to go down their slide (joining 2 floors) some 20 times. The offices are found at the 12th floor of the Nex building in Ébène Cybercity. Basically, we survived off the not-very-good food given by the WebCup organisers, McDonald's and coffee (at 5rs a cup, the best trade deal in the history of trade deals possibly ever). One of the highlights was everyone save me going to buy McDonald's at midnight and realising it was closed.
It was extremely weird seeing the sun rise, having barely slept at all. The view was really nice from that high up though. And it was funny thinking I was up before even my dad. But there is something extremely fantasy-like with watching the pale sun rise and the world slowly coming to, with the roads gradually having more cars on them as people get on with their lives.
Now, I don't think I need to specify that our website was pretty garbage. It didn't exactly work. You couldn't upload data or retrieve data but at least you could pay via cryptocurrency. Maybe if we had another week, we could have finished it. But, the framework for the website was totally new to me and I had no experience in it. And add my lack of experience in HTML and JS. Eek.
I had wanted to keep working on the website in my free time, as a showcase of what we can do but then school got in the way and I haven't updated the repository since the end of the event. It is still visible at its GitHub repository here: <GITHUB>
Our messy table
Coffee
Awarding of Certificates
If you think all the fun stopped after those 24 hours, you're dead wrong. A while later, we were invited to the "ceremony" for awarding certificates. Ceremony is putting it extremely highly. Rather, it was an assembly of all teams and sponsors in a large room at Outremer Telecom in Next Teracom 1, if memory serves. Among the sponsors were Rogers Capital, and MoStickers, a sticker company owned by Nathan. Unfortunately, the rest of my team was unable to make it, meaning I was the sole representative.
Outremer Telecom is the company managing the undersea fibre optic cables running across many parts of the world, providing us with internet. Connecting countries like Mauritius, Reunion, Rodrigues, Madagascar, South Africa and extending all the way to France, this undersea giga-network was nothing short of impressive. In the control room, they have a huge wall-mounted screen which displays the throughput of all those cables, as well as their status. It is something straight out of some bad-guy's lair.
After the tour, it was back to awarding certificates. And I had the chance to give a speech to a room full of professional web developers and company directors on our team's experience, given that we were by far the youngest team there. It didn't go too badly, I'd say
The display of all managed undersea cables.
The green lines show one cable. Sometimes there are up to 4 parallel cables joining the same places.