That's good news. To be frank I'm not into this hackathon bullshit. To me it's just a food party where 20-somethings pretend to move their fingers on the keyboard in deft motion and think that they are building shit, when in reality they don't know what the fuck they're doing. It's funny. The things people do for food and a brightly lit fart house full of fat fucks. Lean fucks too. This whole "coding" and "learn to code" shit is overhyped. Fuck that shit. Every clueless bedwetter next door wants to start a company and become a billionaire. It's all about the money for some. Rackmounted servers, their tiny blinking LEDs, slick fancy gadgets, and Mountain Dew on the fridge. Cyberpunk fetishes like these. Making useless shit like an app that would record my toilet visits. I did my masters in Renewable Energy Engineering. But, I gotta tell you something. I was raised in an upper middle-class family in Maharajgunj, Kathmandu. My father was in politics, one of the big shots in the Nepali Congress in those days. I got my first computer when I was 12. It was the golden age of FPS, man. CS: Source, COD, Half Life 2, Doom 3, Halo, Far Cry. Golden, man. So one day my father and this guy unload these white boxes-like thing from the jeep. It was my computer. The technician guy had come along to set this whole thing up. I sat in that swivel chair staring at this computer booting up. It was fascinating, man. XP was a totally different beast. The Welcome screen sound is still nostalgic for sure. I then played Roadrash immediately, which was in the E: drive. I couldn't understand that Soltaire shit until later, because it seemed like an adult's game to me, because cards. I wrote stuff in Notepad to impress my father. Letting him know I'm "utilizing" this shit. "My name is KP. I am a rich little prick. I live in Maharajgunj. My school name is blah blah blah. My father name is sth sth." My father, he made a fortune in those times. And I made a chat program. Qbasic was fairly easy and the concept of AI, while not fully known to me, thrilled me. The program asked you simple GK questions and called you a monkey when you gave the wrong answer. It was inspired by ELIZA. I've got the hacker spirit, man. Stereotypes aside, I'm cool with these hackathons and similar events. It offers a platform for nerds to network and share ideas. It's a totally different game for us Nepalis. Even to meet the opposite sex, you know; collaborating with them, enjoying the free flow of thoughts between each other on varying topics without having to think about it as a formal meeting arranged by your parents, that sexual tension between you two when you are sitting beside each other on table, sketching ideas, your elbows brushing against each other. Looking each other in the eyes, disagreeing with them on a certain idea or a piece of code, discussing the kind of apps that would monetize better. Lending books, using encryption to chat with each other. Living the cutting edge tech life. Socially awkward nerds are on a roll, man. In a sexually conservative society like ours, these events act as icebreakers. I hope more women flock to these events, so the "only males go to hackathons" kinda mindset fail to persist here, from the start. Women empowerment in tech is the next best thing for women in Nepal, because the male domination shit and other social barriers fade away quickly when the industry is compelled to value skills, not gender or academic degrees. So keep the pizza warm, daddy's coming.