This is going to be a detailed post including everything that we did in CodeDay Lucknow. Was it successful? Did we change things? How was the kebab like? All your questions will be answered in this page of mon-cahier. CodeDay Lucknow was a 24-hour event, first of its kind in Lucknow and a rollercoater of organisation. All the pictures are from CodeDay Lucknow, obviously. I don’t know why I had to clarify that.
The set up
It took roughly four months to plan CodeDay Lucknow. We started in a cozy cafe with the three of us friends. We had no idea about anything but we brainstormed a few ideas to start work on. Our first to-do was to get a team.
Our team consisted of people from all around Lucknow. Nobody knew each other. We were from different schools with different strengths. I think we found our place in the team pretty quickly as the creative work started.
The Creatives
One of the first things we designed was the CodeDay Lucknow logo. All Pavani’s hardwork. (A lot of our creatives were Pavani’s work. The entire team pitched in but the direction was usually Pavani-guided)
We posted our first instagram post with a good response from awadhi audience. We had an art direction, too, with our colour scheme being:
Violet - #67509F
Beige - #E1D0C1
Code-day pink - #FF686B
Teal - #52B5B5
We almost entirely used figma for all the instagram posts at the start. We jumped to Adobe Illustrator for some later posts and then canva for some recent ones.
I love figma because of his freedom. You can make anything you imagine. Yes, it takes a lot of time but it’s worth it, at least for me. Canva on the other hand is simple and easy to use, but the output generally is too basic. Illustrator requires a very high level of skill so we let Isha handle illustrator.
The workshops
Workshops at CodeDay Lucknow were a huge success, thanks to Partho and Vangmay. We sat down and decided what we wanted to do. We wanted to look at workshops from a different perspective. Quoting our registration form:
“At CodeDay, we’re reimagining workshops. Workshops are not classrooms, but rather places where like-minded individuals come and create something new! If you’re interested in hosting a workshop, you don’t have to have a whole workshop planned out; just come with an idea (something you’re passionate about) and we’ll help you design your own workshop.”
Partho wrote emails to interested people and potential workshop hosts. One of his emails included our idea of a “GOOD workshop” which clearly explains what we were going for:
“OUR version of a good workshop:
- people go back with something new and different that they learnt
- it inspires them to go home and try more of it; not just for the session but also beyond it
- fun and creative
- it is not a class or a lecture where attendees are simply listening to you and seeing you do stuff, it should encourage them to actively engage in building alongside” - Partho
Some people actually thought the “Do you want to host a workshop?” toggle button was “Do you want to attend a workshop?” We crossed out about 50% of the people interested because they thought they had to click on “yes, I wanna host a workshop” to attend a workshop.
I’m really thankful to Partho for working on this day and night, emailing so many people and telling them about our views on workshops. It’s not an easy task when there are just so many kinds of people.
Next step was to prepare the workshops. Vangmay and Partho brought in an AMAZING group of people for hosting a workshop. We’ll talk about how workshops happened at CodeDay itself, but these people were not some experts with PhDs, they were very human, very normal teenagers. All they wanted was to share their knowledge with a group of enthusiastic people. I could see the excitement and the enthusiasm. We’ll come back to the workshops later in this blog post.
The Outreach
“OJAS, WE DON’T HAVE ANY ATTENDEES. I AM VERY CONCERNED,” said Mahi when she called me 10 AM in the morning (I wake up at 12. So does she.) Mahi and I make a great team. We’ve worked on so many things together and our ideas typically align perfectly. She’s the kind of person who’ll take everything under herself just for it all to be perfect. I respect that.
In the last second week of May, I was diagnosed with hepatitis-A (not serious, very mild) and it messed up with my capacity to work. I took some long weeks off everything which caused us halt the outreach for CodeDay Lucknow. Mahi was in the US. We did have a few registrations by the first week of june, but we had missed something really important. Summer vacations start by the first week of june in our state so we could only go to one school, City Montessori School, Gomti Nagar 1. It’s a big school, it got us about 30 registrations but it was enough at all. We couldn’t physically go to schools (I couldn’t physically go to schools). This was when Mahi called me all concerned. (shout out to Akif and Prakhar for taking initiatives even when I was offline. They made sure we had consistent outreach through our social media)
We sat down as a team and came up with stuff to do. We ended up getting in contact (Akif and Prakhar again) a councellors’ WhatsApp group which helped in outreach A LOT. We also got our brochures sent to WhatsApp groups of the essential schools in Lucknow. (Isha and Manya helped contact La Martiniere)
By the end, we had 124 registrations and our event ran out of seats. So, outreach was, ultimately, a success.
The Registrations
For CodeDay Lucknow, we planned to use Microsoft Office Forms and we did! You could look at a small summary of what happened here.
Why would we even do that?
Primarily, to have more control over our registration flow. We wanted to know more about our audience (but I do think we missed a lot more “survey questions”). To a certain extent, we did learn a lot about our audience. If an attendee sent us their photography portfolio, we could refer to that when meeting this attendee at the event. It just makes the event kind of more “wholesome” because the organisers’ know more about their audience. One of the downsides to this was that lack of experience making forms. The CodeDay registration forms is a product of a LOTTTT of events which makes it really appropriate for the job. We didn’t have that expertise. Region specific questions All CodeDays are different flavours of the same amazing event. I think the culture of the city the CodeDay is hosted in, makes up a lot of the atmosphere at the CodeDay. The splash of culture makes CodeDays have these many flavours to a large extent. So, I think we should have questions which are generally specific to the city or region, as well! What’s your favourite kind of kebab? Or what’s your favourite transit colour? These questions don’t “contribute” that much but they make the form more friendly.
What problems did we face?
The tickets weren’t registered automatically on clear OBVIOUSLY so we had to use our CodeDay API and GraphQL to mutate clear tickets. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED spending 5 hours figuring out how to do that + 3 more hours troubling Lola and Tyler (you guys helped a lot, thank you sooo much), but it was a little tedious. I didn’t want to spend another 10 hours typing out our 100 registrations manually into GraphQL sooo I did what any normal teen would do. I spent 3 hours writing a Python script to automate running 100 instances of the createTicket mutation. I messed up my code and it caused a little problem so I had to manually fix it using clear (happened 30 minutes ago). It hath beeneth doneth now so exhales
Restrospectively how did we use the third-party form?
Logistically, some information like “What school are you from?” made it easier for us to send letters/certificates to schools and it also added another method of contact (School culture is big in Lucknow).
Someone mentioned having “peanut allergies” which also helped us make sure our event was completely safe for everyone. The emergency contacts in the form turned out helpful, as well, because one of the parents wanted to contact their daughter and I could confirm it was legitimate.
For the attendee experience, the form turned out more than just a thread of questions. We knew a lot of attendees’ hobbies and passions. All this information helped us pair people up and help them in better ways. For example, one of the conversations with an attendee went something like “Hi, I’m ojas and you must be?” “Garv” “Oh you’re applying to be pilot, right? That’s so cool” “Oh yes, I am. How’d you know that?” and we turned out to be really good friends by the end. It’s just little moments like these which I think made our CodeDay really special for the attendees and volunteers alike. Everybody felt like they belong here and all 50 students got along way too well. I wouldn’t credit the registration form entirely for our attendee experience, but it was a good combination of amazing background on attendees, friendly volunteers and excited coders.
The food
Okay so I kept the easiest for the last. Food is SOOO easy to think about in Lucknow. Thank you, Deven, for the domino’s pizzas. We planned for our CodeDay to be very culturally appropiate, so we chose to have awadhi food for dinner which included biryani, kebabs and very awadhi breads. Breakfast was going to be sharma ji’s samose and ban makhan, but due to some sharma ji reasons we couldn’t do that. So, Deven, for the rescue again, got us Ram Asrey’s Samose, Kachauris and Jalebi. All in all, you can’t not love Lucknow’s food, man. You just can’t. Everything was bursting with flavour. I wrote our menu down in a crumbled piece of paper, which I might just keep as a souvenir.
The execution
After all this planning, after all the ups and downs and after all the calling people, the day was here. I didn’t sleep that day because my mind kept asking “What have I forgotten for tomorrow?”. We took a few days to just call everyone to find out if they were coming. Yes, it was tiring, but I think it’s worth it. There’s so much that happened in the 28-hours. It changed a lot of things forever.
The Check-in
Smooth. Deven, Akif and Isha were checking people in. Me, Manya and Mahi were welcoming people. Everybody else was making sure everyone was comfortable inside. It was fun seeing confused faces and us going like “Hi, here for codeday? Welcome!”, while they stared at us in fantastical awkwardness. The weather was amazing. It had just rained and all the colours were blushing so everyone was excited. It WAS humid though. In the one hour, I got super sweaty. Our team did sometimes start chatting and ignoring attendees, but not in concerning amounts.
We met with a lot of parents. Concerned ones AND the excited ones both were really open to conversations which was amazing. Mahi showed people around the venue which made them more at ease. Everything seemed perfect.
The Kickstarter
“When I say CodeDay, you say Lucknow” We brought in the right CodeDay vibe. No one thought of it as a school activity. Everyone was hyped up and excited for the next 24-hours. I think that’s what kickstarters should do. At the start, even the mic-holders are awkward which just makes everything more friendly. Just think of the stupidest things to say and say it, that’s how you break the ice. We thanked our venue sponsors, Shri Rasmswaroop Memorial College of Engineering & Management who helped us througout the event, making sure everything ran smoothly and with no hurdles. We went through everything about CodeDay and showcase and judging and everything. Basic present.codeday.org stuff.
The Icebreaker
We had a hard time coming up with an icebreaker. I remember getting on a call with 4-5 people in my team while everybody stares at their screens without saying anything, because we were thinking. Thinking about ice-breakers. What could break the ice? When suddenly, Pavani goes like, “Hey what if, we come up with conspiracies…”
Pavani had recommended a Netflix show to me then, Inside Job. It’s a comedy about conspiracies. I was sold on the idea right there. Her idea was to come up with 15 conspiracies and give one conspiracy to one team. The team would have to come up with reasons to support their conspiracy using a PowerPoint Presentation. It was the perfect icebreaker.
The range was absolutely insane at the icebreaker. Some teams tried to use maths to prove that GIF is actually pronounced “IF” and some teams straight-up had a stand-up comedy routine. The laughs and the “oh wow, I might actually believe this” just made this group of 50 people so much closer. They had never met each other, but they all knew how everyone talked and thought like. Again, a perfect icebreaker.
One of the things I noticed was how the shy population almost opened up or at least tried to, after looking at the outgoing presentations. It’s interesting because we clapped and cheered for all the participants, and I could see the clear uptick in everyone’s confidence. I think that’s a successful icebreaker.
The workshops part 2
I’m not sure if it was pure coincedence or our hardwork but workshops at CodeDay had everything I wanted it to have. Even before starting off with the planning, I had an idea of how I wanted to do workshops at this CodeDay. We’ve talked about my thoughts on that earlier in this blog. I didn’t want our workshops to look like lectures or the workshops that most hackathons have. Workshops for me means primarily taking home something, weather it’s a creative project that you learnt how to make or new ideas. Partho instantly realised my intentions with CodeDay Lucknow’s workshops when I pitched the idea to him. We were lucky to have really amazing people from all around the world working on these workshops.
All the workshops at the event were just excited group of people working together on something. Luke’s workshop on Colour Grading is the perfect example of the kind of workshop I was hoping for. Imagine 15 people sitting together with their own photos and Luke helping them edit the images to perfection. The outcomes were genuinely perfect images. The fun thing was that everybody had their own images to edit. There was no lecture. Luke had a PPT with all the things he wanted to tell these people and then he let them run wild with the saturation and the colour contrasts. He even told us about how AI is affecting photography and how we can use AI to edit fascinating pictures.
Luke’s just an example, I’d like to give a huge shout out to everyone who came up with genuinely insane workshops. Kushagra had an astronomy workshop where he asked us to stand up and inact what we think a black hole was in groups. Manas and Sameer’s hacking workshops went deep into Pi Picos and rubber duckies, we could see how engaged people were. Devang started off with a react workshop but then he decided to pivot to MIT AppInventor. Now imagine rethinking an entire workshop and changing the topic completely (in just a few days) and still being as good as he was. The App Inventor workshop was a huge success with everyone learning something that probably isn’t that common anymore. Moreover, the way Devang helped everyone individually was truly incredible.
The Pixellate
The projects
It’s been a long post. Well, it was a long CodeDay. It was just as fatastical though. Even after everything stupid and wacky and fun we did at CodeDay, everybody stayed up at night coding away their genius ideas. The projects were some of the best hackathon projects I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot to talk about everybody’s projects, I’ll limit myself to my favourite ones. The great white sharks’ created this absolutely futile food selection app which had no meaning whatsoever, but the sheer creativity and wackiness of the project got it the Best In Show award, deservingly. It had all symptoms of a perfect CodeDay project. I don’t think I can describe it well so you might just open the link and check it out yourself (AUDIO ON).
The chappal protect-inator 3000 was a python marvel to look at. I get how they won the best in class app because of their stupid ideas and the hilarious concepts but the technology behind the project was so intriguing to me. The project was basically controlling essential tasks like pausing a video or changing a tab using hand gestures but how a language like PYTHON can handle AI so fast was unbelievable to me. You’ll have to use the app to realise how fast and effective it was. All the gestures were perfect which even smartphones can’t pull off these days. The game that team kraken made based on a doremon storyline was just as funny and creative as any other platformer I’ve played. It felt like a fully produced game with really fine finishing touches. The game itself played so well with fluid mechanics and everything. I’m doing a really horrible job explaining these projects because you’ll have to use them to really get what they were made of and I promise they’re worth your time.
