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Planning of the Event:

We had just one month to prepare for the entire event. That one month was very intense, evenings filled with ideas and plans, afternoons filled with designs and colour schemes, and mornings with technical issues. As the vice-president of the STEM club, Technical team lead, sponsorship co-lead, outreach volunteer, and logistics head of the event, I was constantly juggling between pitching the event to sponsors and writing code for the event-day site. I was also sending different designs, like posters and certificates, to print. I had a hand in most of the things in the planning of the event.

During the Event:

Day 1

On the event day, I was working only as the Technical-Team Lead, as we had other STEM members handling other responsibilities as the lead on the event day. Therefore, I was constantly running across rooms, verifying setups, fixing last-minute server-side issues, keeping the mentors updated about the projects, updating the event-day website, fixing fatal issues in the self-made project submission portal, and making sure every technical piece stayed alive.

Day 2

This day was not as smooth as expected. As we were preparing for the first round of judging, a team faced some technical difficulties, and in the process of evaluating the issue, we discovered that the team was involved in foul play and had been writing code four days before the hackathon. Upon discovering that, we immediately disqualified the team after discussion with the judges. After this incident, we evaluated every other participating team. After carefully indexing the code base of other teams, we found another team involved in foul play. A total of 2 teams were disqualified for unfair practices.

Shortcomings We Faced:

Miscommunication: Some plans didn’t reach everyone on time, leading to small chaos moments.

Less Time: One month felt like one week. Everything needed to happen fast.

Colour Theme Changes (5+ times!): Every time we finalised a theme, someone had a better idea.

Last-Minute Name Changes: Posters, slides, announcements; all had to be updated again and again.

Highlights:

The Event Was a Massive Success: Seeing the energy, teamwork, and creativity in every room felt surreal.

A Huge Learning Experience: Not just for participants, but for us as organisers too. We learned to adapt, troubleshoot, communicate better, and stay calm under pressure.

On the event day, watching participants brainstorm, code, fail, try again, and finally present, it hit us hard: we actually built this. Despite the miscommunication, last-minute changes, rushing, and stress, Dearhack 2025 came alive.

Conclusion:

The most significant takeaway from DeerHack 2025 was the crucial importance of proactive communication and time management. We learnt that rushing a complex, multi-faceted event in just one month leads inevitably to preventable miscommunication and frustrating, last-minute changes, from colour schemes to posters. Furthermore, we discovered the necessity of implementing a robust, pre-event code audit or integrity check to maintain the fairness of the competition and prevent instances of foul play and subsequent disqualifications. Ultimately, the pressure taught us to be adaptable, troubleshoot under extreme stress, and appreciate the power of a committed team to turn chaos into a successful community build.