InOut | A walk down memory lane

Hello Hackers!

As we are gearing up for InOut 6.0, India’s biggest community Hackathon + Conference at MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bengaluru on 19–20 October 2019, we look back fondly at the past five editions and how the path paved the way for us here.

If you’re among those few who don’t understand the hype behind InOut and what makes it so special, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re a new community member, we’re here to welcome you with open arms!

InOut is India’s biggest community hackathon. Unlike the few other hackathons at the time which were mainly corporate ventures, InOut has been a 100% community effort from the start and has paved the way for many more community driven events throughout India since its inception. A team of three passionate developers and designers, who understood the value behind building a community, where one can be creative without bounds, started toiling with the idea of a community hackathon in early 2015.

From the start, the vision behind InOut was to give the attending hackers an all-round experience that would stay with them in the long run. A platform where the brightest minds could come together to collaborate on building tools that solve real problems. We wanted a place where budding technology leaders could build lifelong friendships, meet their potential co-founders and where our sponsors could find their next set of talented hires.

Guidance and mentorship makes all the difference early on in your career. Standing true to that, our team has always made their best efforts to bring exceptional mentors, technology leaders as judges, top-notch line up of sponsors who have ranged from multinational technology giants like Google to high-growth fin-tech startups like RazorPay and in this sixth edition, we’re welcoming industry experts as speakers. From the get go, InOut has been a not-for-profit event with no ulterior marketing motives, keeping our focus on gathering resources that our community can benefit from.

Over the span of four and a half year, our biggest strength and the reason for widespread adaptation of InOut across India has been our community of hackers. Carefully curated, our community continues to grow both in quality and quantity every single year. Home to Google Developer Experts in various domains, 30-hour hacks turned into fully funded startups, Y combinator alumni are just a few examples of our community members’ excellence by leaps and bounds.

The one thing that has overwhelmed us over the past few years is when a community member tells us how InOut proved to be the turning point in their career. Anecdotes like these reaffirms our belief that when you truly focus on building a community, provide them with plentiful exhaustive resources and give them a platform to showcase their creativity, the outdated redundant model of gauging talent breaks away to make way for a structure that appreciates out of the box think tanks.

With days counting down faster towards InOut 6.0, its worthwhile to go down the memory lane and see how it all unfolded.

Memoirs and stepping stones

InOut 1.0 was born in the lucid spring days of April’15. Among the frantic runs for permission through the corridors of SVNIT Surat, sleepless but joyful nights doing pre-event prep, curating our very first community members and the moments of pure thrill when we scored yet another sponsor that brought us one step closer in turning this event to reality, our first hackathon taught us a lot about what hackers are looking for and what it means to provide them with quality exposure. Check out these select submissions from this edition to find out what our hackers came up with in the very first edition.

Consistency is the key to mastery, and so we were all set to host our second edition, InOut 2.0! The second edition saw us approach the methodology for organising our hackathon in a more streamlined manner. Dedicated to make this another memorable event for our community and with the best set of helping hands we held the event for a second time at SVNIT Surat amidst the cool winds of October’15. Have a look at the submissions to see the crazy unique ideas our hackers came up with in this edition!

After the overwhelming response we received for the first two editions of InOut, we were more than excited to host our third iteration. We welcomed many of our old friends and brought in new community members to our fold in August’16. We upped our game by bringing in a plethora of swags for our favourite developers. That weekend we saw our hackers shatter the limitations of innovation by building hacks that we were amazed to stand witness to what could be achieved in mere 30 hours. Check out their submissions yourselves to find out more!

Taking affairs to the next state, quite literally in our fourth edition InOut 4.0, we moved camp to the Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru to make our developer celebration accessible to more developers. With a shiny new venue at CoWrks, EcoWorld we held our biggest edition till date in October’17. Participation growing with every edition, with InOut 4.0 we hit 4.5k+ application within just 25 days from 543 institutes across 8 countries. Check out their submissions to know what our hackers were toiling with edition!

Understanding the importance of diversity, our team started with InOut4women this year. The initiative brought technology leaders and our sponsors togethers that helped boost women participation from past 9% to 20% at InOut 4.0.

Held last year, InOut 5.0 was especially close to our team. Born out of experience of hosting hackathons was our startup Devfolio, the best in class hackathon platform, to organize and coordinate hackathons, at scale. From applications to event day registrations and final hack submissions, the only one stop guide was Devfolio. As for this one, I’ll let the testimonials and submissions speak for itself :)

The renaissance

Starting with this year’s edition, InOut 6.0 model is getting a revamp. As we are gearing up for our largest iteration with over 500 participants, we have something new in store! Learning is paramount in any journey. Standing true to that, we are hosting our first conference with InOut 6.0 where we are inviting speakers from all domains to take us on their journey, share knowledge and help us build a thriving community. Sounds interesting? Sign up to be a speaker today!

Keeping true to InOut tradition, the conference is entirely free. There will be a small token amount to register for attending the conference, which will be refunded once participants check-in. It’s only to ensure drop-offs and genuine participation from interested community members.

A creative mind and a serene location can deliver some of the best ever original ideas the world has ever seen. We are super excited about hosting InOut 6.0 at the all-new humongous MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bengaluru.

If you're as excited as we are or even more and if you haven't applied yet, sudo rm -rf procrastination and sign up now!

Originally published at https://medium.com/wmn on April 15, 2019