Months before any of this, a friend at school mentioned a hackathon. I nodded along and had no real idea what he meant. At that point I had about a year of experience. I was building small things, learning as I went, and mostly discovering how much I didn’t know. I went home and spent the next two days reading about hackathons: what they are, how they run, what people build at them. By the end of it I had decided I was going.

The morning

On 28 September 2025, Arniko Hack Club ran Daydream Biratnagar 2025. More than 250 people turned up, which made it the biggest teen hackathon Nepal has had, and I don’t think anyone had planned for that many. The room was already full when we arrived. Old school friends, seniors I hadn’t seen in a long time, and a lot of people I’d never met.

Finding a table was a challenge. Finding a chair was worse. The room was boiling. Power was the real problem, because there weren’t enough multiplugs to go around, so getting a laptop charged meant negotiating with whoever had got there first. The venue wifi didn’t work at all, and I spent the first stretch of the day on mobile data at about 2 Mbps.

It settled, and it settled because of the people in the room rather than anything else. Teams doubled up on tables. Multiplugs got shared around. More access points went up to spread the traffic out. Within a couple of hours it went from unworkable to merely cramped.

The build

Then they told us to build a game. This was a complete surprise. We had prepared for a hackathon, not for game development, and most of us had never touched it. We had a few hours, and we used them to put together a small 3D game with three.js. It was a minimum viable thing and nothing more, but it ran. That turned out to be the first cut: only the top 40 teams went through, judged on what they had managed to make. We were one of them.

Only then were the real themes announced, and there were several. We spent 30 to 45 minutes doing nothing but arguing about which one to take, and settled on tourism, with communication. We had a partial picture of what we wanted and no clear idea of what came after it, so we spent another two hours planning properly. Then we spent about four hours going through map APIs, comparing them, working out which one would actually do what we needed. In a twenty-four hour event, four hours on one technical decision sounds reckless. It was also the reason everything after it held together.

Then things started breaking. You fix the thing that looks broken and find out it wasn’t the problem. You fix the next thing and something you finished three hours ago quietly stops working. Somewhere after midnight the work stops being about building and starts being about staying clear-headed enough to think properly. We made a few bad calls at 3am and spent good daylight hours undoing them.

What we ended up with was Echo Trails. Nepal lives on tourism. But if you land here and need a guide, a ride, a drone operator or a doctor, there is no one place you can trust to find them. The people who do that work have no good way of being found either. Echo Trails puts both sides on one map. Providers sign up and get verified. Visitors can see who is nearby, what they do, and book them straight away.

The next day we had to demo it to mentors and explain what we’d built, and that round took the field from 40 down to 16. We were given a bit more time to finish and tidy up, and then it was the stage, with judges. I had never spoken on a stage before. I had never held a mic. I was more nervous about that than about any part of the code. We got through it, and I think we explained the project well, but we didn’t get through all of it. We ran out of time before we had shown everything we meant to show.

The result

Because the presentation ran short, I wasn’t expecting anything. Third place: not us. Second place: not us. By that point I had already had the conversation with myself. It was a good experience, winning isn’t everything, I’d learned more in two days than in the previous two months. All of that was true, and all of it felt slightly hollow.

First place: Team Alpha.

I wasn’t even facing the stage. I had stopped listening properly and was getting ready to leave. The mic wasn’t loud and the sound in that room was poor, so what I actually heard was the word “Alpha” and nothing around it. I turned to the people next to me and asked whether they’d heard “Alpha” too, or whether it had been something else. Then it came again: “Alpha, please come to the stage.”

I found my teammate. There were two of us. We went up, took the photos, and that was the end of it. Reading it back, it sounds like something I made up. It isn’t. That is exactly how it went.

What I’d tell someone going to their first one

  • Spend the time on the decision. We used 45 minutes on the theme and four hours choosing a map API, and in a twenty-four hour event that sounds like madness. It was the best time we spent.
  • Expect the format to change. We came prepared for a hackathon and were asked to build a game in the first few hours. Turning up able to learn something quickly matters more than turning up prepared.
  • Practise saying out loud what you built. We ran out of time on stage. The code was fine. Presenting is a separate skill, and I hadn’t practised it at all.
  • Sleep a little. The bad 3am decisions cost more daylight than the sleep would have.

Afterwards

The win turned out to be a beginning rather than an ending, and the part that followed was harder than the event itself. We did not receive the full prize money, or several of the other things that had been publicly announced beforehand. A problem that came from the organising side was attributed to us instead, and when we asked about it we were threatened with disqualification more than once.

I’ve kept that short here, because it deserves its own post rather than a few lines at the end of this one. If you’d like to read that, let me know and I’ll write it up properly.

ICT Frame covered the event if you want the organisers’ version of the day.