How to f**k up a registration form ?

First and foremost, I want to extend my sincerest apologies to everyone who experienced any inconvenience while registering for the SIH form. Some of you might be thinking this isn't a big enough deal for a whole blog post, but for a club like Point Blank, it absolutely is. We hold ourselves to a higher standard, and mistakes like this are simply not acceptable.

So, let's dive into the "why." Why a new portal, a new website? The burning question: WHY NOT A GOOGLE FORM??

Point Blank has been proudly conducting the internal hackathon for quite a few years now, and the organizational and data-related challenges we faced were the driving force behind this new website. Here are just a few of those challenges:

• Lack of proper information for candidates: Many juniors, and even some of my batchmates, were unaware of the SIH rules and guidelines. We learned that a lot of students tried to register directly on the official SIH portal, completely missing the crucial internal round requirement.
• Data validation for crucial rules: Rules like a compulsory female member and a 6-member team with a designated leader require data validation. In previous years, we've seen multiple form submissions without a female member or with fewer team members, leading to our seniors having to personally chase them down for edits.
• Internal team restructuring: Team member changes were a very frequent request, which became a cumbersome task for our seniors who are already juggling their personal commitments.
• Selected PS announcement and enforcement: Point Blank puts a tremendous amount of research into all the Problem Statements, carefully selecting those with the highest chances of making it to the finals and people come up with request of adding their choice of PS which would lead to reduction of their chances in most cases.
• Future contact and task assignment: The biggest goal of this portal is to improve convenience for our super seniors, like Ashutosh bhaiya (who is a SIH evaluator himself!). They dedicate their valuable time to the proper conduction of this hackathon, and selecting teams and contacting them for further details and small tasks was a massive time sink. We aim to solve this with the new portal.

These, and a few other challenges, led us to the vision of a dedicated SIH portal for the internal hackathon, rather than simply relying on a Google Form.

So, how does this portal add value?

For the participants:

It's designed to be a single source of truth for all SIH-related information. All future tasks, like uploading your PPT, result announcements, and any required documents before the final submission, will be handled through this platform.

For the admin side (the truly important part):

It allows for bulk upload of all Problem Statements, tracking the number of submissions for each PS, and even restricting the number of submissions per PS (which you might have already noticed this year). Going slightly off-topic, this restriction is to ensure we don't end up competing with each other, as in most cases, they won't select more than one team for a particular PS from the same college.

Coming back, the portal will enable bulk email sending, bulk task assignment, form creation, and much more, all of which should ideally save our seniors a lot of time.

The Technical Part: Why the heck did it mess up?

Two weeks is more than enough time to complete a project. At least, that's what I told myself when this one kicked off. After a strong two-day start building a complex registration form, I hit the wall that every developer dreads: manual testing. Filling out details for six team members, again and again, was painfully tedious, so I confess I put it off.

In a moment of what I thought was foresight, I realized some of our participating club members would also need admin access. My "simple" solution was to extend our Firebase authentication to them. This, it turns out, was a critical mistake. It created a fundamental conflict where a user couldn't be both a 'team leader' and an 'admin'.

The first proper test happened in the worst possible way: live, in front of Ashutosh bhaiya at 10 PM, right as our social media posts were scheduled to go live. It failed, miserably.

By the time I got back to my desk, the damage was done. It's a classic developer lesson: a feature is only as good as its testing, and a "simple fix" can sometimes be the thing that brings it all crashing down.

A crucial lesson for me and my juniors here: Testing is incredibly important. It might be the most irritating part, but we have to do it no matter what.

After a night of hacking and testing, the site is now live at sih.dsce.in. If you face any issue, you can tag me in the Point Blank Community (@~Yash Agarwal). See you at the internal round. Happy hacking!