Save The HACKER

Vignesh Natarajan was a final-year student of computer science at an engineering college in Chennai, India. He was armed with reams of theoretical knowledge, programming languages, and what not. And he was staring at the prospect of working for an IT major – mostly probably a joyless, high-paying job.

India has thousands of engineering colleges, which spew out over 1.5 million graduates every year. A lot of them will get wooed by large multinational technology companies with fat pockets. Most of the jobs are offshore IT services, which could turn a bright mind into just another drudge. Only a few thousand smart engineers venture out to build a startup. However glamorous it may seem to code, build, and sell a tech product, most engineers settle for the security of an IT services job.

This is the fate that Freshdesk wants to reverse with its “Save the Hacker” initiative launched last year. The second edition of the two-day hackathon is scheduled for May 9 and 10 in Chennai. This time, Google, Twilio, Box, Saavn, and Ola have also joined Freshdesk’s mission to “to give talented programmers a taste of what it feels like to build actual products.” Together, they are offering rewards worth INR 5 million (US$80,500) to the winners.

Vignesh Natarajan was one of the winners of the first edition of Save the Hacker. He, along with three classmates – Hamid Muneerulhudhakalvathi, Parikshith Mechineni, and Srinivas Suresh Kumar – built a location-intelligent, Twitter-based app that matches blood donors with those looking for blood, and sends push notifications to donors in the vicinity of a needy patient. Besides proximity, the app takes into account key parameters like blood type, whether the donor is fit and sober, and so on. These filters could be modified according to requirements.

Though Natarajan and his friends had dabbled in coding before the hackathon, they were “rotting without writing a single line of code to be proud of” during four years of college. At the hackathon, “I wrote code because I was scared of not giving myself a chance to try,” Natarajan recalls. “To me, the hackathon was a starting point, when I realized that coming up with new and exciting problems to solve is as important as coming up with interesting and novel solutions for existing problems. I would not take up a typical IT job as it would stop being fun after a few weeks, maybe even days. Through the hackathon and also reading about new products on the internet, I have seen the fun side of the software development world,” he says.