Team Tech Pirates Strategically Capture The 1st Runner-Up Title For Tally CodeBrewers 2022

Tally CodeBrewers 2022, a hiring challenge conducted by Tally Solutions called out to undergraduate engineering students to showcase their skills and gain exposure to the workings of the industry. In a world where online challenges and hackathons have emerged as great ways to learn and grow, we thought why not give it a shot? So both of us- Subhi and Deepak Kumar, named ourselves the Tech Pirates and took part in the challenge.  

The challenge saw 3500+ entries from about 100 institutions across the nation. We are both engineering students from the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Kurukshetra. The competition was definitely tough, but we held our own and brought home the title of 1st runner-up of the Commander of Full Stack track of the Tally CodeBrewers 2022.

The Beginning Of Something Fun

The challenge started with an exciting Round 1 which had 2 parts. The first part was an online quiz and the second part was an online coding test. Both of these parts aimed to test our basic programming knowledge and spot-coding skills. We cleared these rounds with flying colors and moved on to the next phase of the challenge.

Round 2 was the Weekend Hackathon, where we had to select one of the 2 technology tracks- system programming or full stack. We chose Commander of Full Stack and were eager to get cracking with the rest of the challenge. Even at this nascent stage, we could tell that the challenge was going to be rigorous and an adventure in itself. 

We then prepared and submitted our working solutions as a part of the challenge in the next round. There were 12 teams in our track that were declared the finalists from round two. Even though we did not see any other presentations, we know that all finalists must have developed good applications to reach that level.

Focus On What's Essential

With our chosen topic in hand, we had to come up with a working solution in 48 hours. We could already tell this was going to be the most fun and difficult weekend we will ever have!

Since the problem statement was very large, we decided to first focus on what was essential and was at the core of our solution. We worked on the problem for 2 days but our priority was to implement just the basics, and then in the remaining time we decided to implement the extra features. It took us the first one and a half days to implement the essential features before we were able to move on to implementing the additional ones. Working on our solution required us to learn a lot of new things that we would have never come across if it wasn’t for this challenge. Implementing them efficiently was challenging initially but we tried our best and were able to accomplish what we wanted.

Our strategy to primarily work on the essential aspects of our plan and then move on to progressively add more features worked well for us in the end. 

The Magic Of Mentor Feedback 

The framing, quality, and organization of the competition were all very good and well thought out. The competition was designed in a way that there was sufficient time to implement the problem statement, which we must mention clearly defined everything we needed to know about the problem. 

However, the best part of the competition and its team was- the mentors. Our mentors were very nice to us and they gave us a lot of constructive positive feedback. Since the first stage of the judgment was with our mentor, their input was critical. The mentor discussed every facet of our project in detail, mentioned both the good and bad aspects, and provided an accurate evaluation for choosing the right direction for the finale. 

The most memorable moment of the competition was when we presented our final demo in front of the jury. Another highlight was when the mentor applauded our effort and responded positively to our solution.

All Work, No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy

We both believe that it is essential to enjoy what we do and made sure to have fun while we aimed for the best. We made an awesome team and helped each other out when one of us was stuck with something. Team Tech Pirates was a conflict-free zone and collaborating was the norm!

Deepak admires Subhi’s front-end web development skills a lot. She contributed a great deal by efficiently preparing the designs for the website. Not only that, she learned a lot of new things during this competition just so that she could implement them in their solution here. According to Deepak, working in this team was a great experience. It was a great learning experience and the most important takeaway for him was the insight into the standards of industry-level projects. 

In a nutshell, this was a great experience with many fun-filled and lesson-filled memories, something we will cherish for a long time.

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