Frequently Asked Question (FAQs) 🤔

HnCC, Hackathon and Coding Club is the Official Coding Club of BIT Sindri, Dhanbad. It works as an open-source organization. Members here learn and collaborate to make their ideas into a solution/product. It also organizes national level hackathons driven by the idea of making proof of concepts of great ideas using software.

The Professor-In-Charge of HnCC is Prof. Md. Akram Khan Sir from the Dept. of Information Technology, BIT Sindri.

In college, HnCC operates from IT Building, BIT Sindri, Dhanbad, Jharkhand-828123, now it is in operation via remote only

To join HnCC you have to:-

• Prove that you understand Computer Science and the IT industry
• Showcase your technical skills in programming by either making cool projects or being good at competitive programming.
• Be versatile. You have to be good at social skills as well such as communication and leadership.
• Be patient. You have to prove your willingness to join HnCC. We will test this quality by rejecting you if you fall short in your domain. You have to improve and apply again. We want genuine people who show interest as well as do some actual work to get inducted.
• Think objectively. We will set up multiple hurdles for you.
• Have a Hacker mentality. Hacker mentality means that you have to possess a thought process to solve problems you haven’t heard about or have experienced before.

For the design team :-

• Have an interest in art and craft and willingness to go digital.
• Prove that you have a good taste in design principles.
• Ability to take criticism over your work.
• Learn digital art from the guidance of current HnCC members and submit your work for evaluation.

The domains of HnCC are:-

• Competitive Programming
• Android App Development
• Web Development
• Game Development
• Systems Programming (Currently on Linux)
• Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Culture.
• Graphics Design
• Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks
• API’s, backend and Cloud Computing
• Blockchain

Do at least one of the following:-

• Get in touch with a member of HnCC and ask him/her to refer you. He/she will refer you only if they feel you are skilled.
• At least 4 stars on HackerRank in any domain such as language or problem solving, etc.
• Should know basic algorithms such as Bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, Binary Search, ‘Tower of Hanoi’.
• Can solve at least 2 questions from CodeChef Codechef Monthly Long Challenge 8 months from joining College or 4 questions, after 1.5 years from joining college
• You are confident enough to explain to us any concept from your previous experience in programming from your class 10 or 12.
• Make a very simple and basic App and should be able to explain basics from your own project.
• Make a very simple and basic Website and should be able to explain basics from your own project.
• Make a very simple and basic Game and should be able to explain basics from your own project.
• Make a very simple and basic Machine Learning Project and should be able to explain basics from your own project.
• Make an attractive Design and should be able to explain the basics of the platform you have used.
• You have experience with Linux Operating systems before and you can use and explain basic UNIX commands.
• You can explain DBMS or SQL concepts and can perform basic SQL queries.
• Make a 3D design from software such as Blender and can explain the basics of their project.
• Make a promotional video from scratch in any of the following software like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Filmora, etc.
• You have displayed management skills before and you have (Management + basic programming skills) or (Management + any skill in any domain of HnCC). In such a scenario Management has more weightage.
• Have any prior experience with Robots or Arduino.
• Miscellaneous i.e. Show us any skill that you might think HnCC might be interested in.

Once you have completed any of the points, contact your immediate seniors.

There is nothing to be worried about if you got rejected. You can try again after sharpening your skills. All that matters is skill and interest to join HnCC.

Hey, you can get a list of all our members at HnCC Team Page. Keep in touch with your Seniors and Alumni, It is a very good culture. You will gain a lot.

Just start with any Object-Oriented Programming Language like(Python, Java, C++, etc).
For now, you should focus on our “INTRO TO PYTHON BOOTCAMP” session. Also, you can pick a language of your own and search for a top-rated playlist on YouTube. Knowledge is free on the Internet. Don’t pay.

There is “NO BRANCH RESTRICTION”, we have more than 60% of members, who are from non-CS/IT branch, If you are interested in any one of our segments, then definitely you should apply.

No. It takes a lot of time and dedication for what we do. To achieve our goals we need full time members. Be it hard skills like coding or soft skills like event management, product management, etc. , HnCC got you covered.
There are some organizations/clubs you can be in along with HnCC are:-

• Arts Club
• Sports Club
• Prayaas India
• Sarjana
• Light Sindri

If your club is not in the list and you feel it should be here. Please contact and ask us for a review.

No issues, if you have no prior knowledge of coding you just need a strong will to master programming. First of all, pick a programming language (C++, Java, Python -recommended) learn its syntax and then dive into learning DSA (Data Structure and Algorithm) using that language and practice your skills on various platforms such as HackerRank , HackerEarth.

The induction process has no starting and ending point. It is LIVE always. However, there is a good chance the earliest you join the more you get to learn fast and become Industry ready. If for any reason, you don’t understand what to do or how to get inducted, just make a project of your own and show us the project by sending a message on our Fb page or follow HnCC Learn.

HnCC is working towards making the community diverse and strong. We are going to come up with this idea very soon. Right now we are working towards the structure of HnCC when Non-Bitian can join.

First of all you should be clear to your learning goals like how to step one by one from basics to advance and for that one should follow a roadmap as it is the best way to get ahead in a proper manner and will help you to be a pro in this field.
Follow the steps listed below :-

• Learn Basics of Java
• Find a beginner course on YT or any Online learning platform
• Make simple projects like Calculator, Tic Tac Toe, TO DO, Reminder App, Alarm App to get started.

You can find resources on YouTube such as slidenerd YouTube channel. You can find intermediate free resources by Google at Udemy and Coursera. There are a lot of very good free courses at Coursera and edx.

Web Development basically involves the development of front-end and back-end.

In front-end development, we develop the user-end of the website. For front-end you should learn HTML, CSS and Javascript. You should first start with front-end development. After having a good command on HTML and CSS, you should learn Javascript basics(For simple front-end development basics of JS is enough).

After the front-end, comes the backend. In the backend you should first learn about servers, databases and how the internet works? After that pick up a language (any one) such as Python (Django/Flask) preferable if you want to increase your tech-stack, You can also prefer Node.js as you have already learnt about JS in the front-end, you don’t have to learn something new. Learn Database languages like SQL and MongoDB (learn both). After that, you should learn any javascript framework which is in great demand like ReactJS.

Also, keep in mind that each year, lots of new things come in this field, so be prepared with old technologies. The new ones are basically the modified forms of the old ones.
For learning all these, you can refer to W3Schools, MDN WebDocs, Udemy, YouTube or the official documentation of the language.

Graphic Design is a broad field with various niches. You will need to figure out your niche and proceed, which will ultimately come along with experience.

First of all grab a decent level laptop and try installing Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, and look for some courses for Graphic Design on Udemy (Although they are paid but you can get them for free on torrent).
Complete the course and parallelly keep exploring about Graphic Design on the internet, particularly on YouTube. (Some recommended channels: The Futur, GFX Mentor).

Follow the above steps, you'll gradually get to know how to proceed further in the world of Media and Graphics. Hope it helps!
PS: You can feel free to contact any of your seniors if you face issue in any of the above mentioned steps.

You can start game development using any language but a game engine is preferred as it make everything easy and manageable, Unity (C#), Godot (C++, GDScript, C#) or Unreal Engine (C++) .

In HnCC we use Unity as it is good for beginners and small developers. YouTube has tons of tutorials regarding Unity Game Development and Unity itself has Demo Games and Tutorials for learning for free on their website.

A mid or high core cpu is recommended and if you are thinking of creating a high graphics intensive game you must have a dedicated graphic card.

AI or artificial intelligence simply means human intelligence exhibited by machines.

Machine Learning is a subset of AI,it is an algorithm that has the capability to learn from its previous experiences and for that we don’t have to program it separately.
First thing is to get familiar with the terms that we use in ML like features,training etc, secondly we have to understand the use of tools like jupyter notebook,pandas,numpy etc.then learn about the common ML models like linear regression,decision trees etc and the maths behind them.’

You can start your journey with the youtube channel “Code with Harry”.
In short , ML is one small step towards data science. Start your journey with this small initiative.

Competitive programming is solving well-defined problems by writing computer programs under specified limits.

Follow these steps to start your Competitive Programming journey:-

• Choose a Programming Language
• Understand the Concept of Time and Space Complexity.
• Learn the Fundamentals of Data Structures and Algorithms.
• Start solving problems on online judges (i.e. HackerRank and HackerEarth for beginners and CodeChef and CodeForces for intermediates)
• Practice and do it regularly.

There are some mandatory characteristics of a good Silicon Engineer :-

• They have a strong approach in Data Structure and Algorithms.
• They understand what Open-Source is.
• They are very active in community activities and learn even from simple things.
• They use the Internet like a PRO.
• Internet is more important for them i.e. they have a higher priority for paying Internet bills than Restaurant bills.

How would you sort a list that has a billion names on it in minimum time?
How would you find the shortest route between two towns in a dense city?
How would scientists find a bad gene in the DNA strand of billions of genes?

These are some problems that have a huge data set to work on.
So to solve these in a reasonable amount of time, one has to come with creative ideas to minimize the time and resources required to solve this on a computer.
Data Structures and Algorithms is the study of these common problems. You’ll learn how to solve these kinds of huge problems.

To prove your interest you don’t need a laptop definitely but we recommend that you buy a laptop within six months after joining BIT. Yes, you need a laptop to survive in HnCC or else you will not be able to take the benefit of the community that HnCC offers.

It depends upon your work. But it's preferable for general use to have a high-end laptop with an intel i5 processor or above or Ryzen 5 or above along with 8GB RAM and 1TB Hard Disk or, 256GB SSD. Graphics card up to 4GB 1050Ti if you want to do graphic designing, video editing, and game development.
For Web Development : i5 or Ryzen 5 with 8GB RAM recommended Android Development: i5 or Ryzen 5 with 8GB RAM recommended Graphics Design, Video Editing, 3D Rendering: i5 or Ryzen 5 with 8GB RAM, with 2-4 GB Graphics Memory recommended.
Notes:-
Try going for an SSD first. SSD increases productivity many fold times.
If a laptop is costly for you to buy directly, try No-Cost EMI, it is a great way to ease the financial pressure.

You won’t need the laptop right now as you’ll be learning about the basics and you can do that using your phones.
If a laptop is costly for you to buy directly, try No-Cost EMI, it is a great way to ease the financial pressure.

HnCC Team Page
Of course. Find a mentor in the domain you are interested in and contact them.
You have to prove to them that your interest is genuine so that they won’t be wasting time on you.

A lot of our members and friends have bought laptops online. Please buy from a trustable source with trustable sellers only.

4 letters big!!! Just kidding.
In terms of a team, we are being led by our Prof-in-Charge Dr. Dinesh Prabhakar Sir along with students from all the years.
The final year members bepost-bearersors and the third year are the post bearers of the club. Generally, each year consists of 15-20 members, it can be more or less.
So we have a great family of developers and coders proficient in various fields.

• We organized the first-ever national-level hackathon, Hackatron, ever in BIT Sindri.
• Ruma Karn from our team has landed a Software Engineering internship at Microsoft—a proud achievement for us!
• Soumik Kumar Ghosal from our team has secured a research internship at Mitacs Globalink, Canada
• Team SIGMA from our club, consisting of five team members conquered at SIH Grand Finale'23
• Team Programmarix from our club, consisting of five members, emerged as the runner-up at the SIH Grand Finale'22
• We have a record high of 20.5k downloads on Play Store

This are some of the recent achievements.

From Wikipedia, Open-Source software is a type of computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
For us, it is a great chance to work in real work experience from great project maintainers in the world and contribute to software that you use in your daily life or it improves the experience of thousands of people.

Short Answer:- Linux is the best operating system for developers or programmers.

Long Answer:- HnCC Members will always suggest you go for the open-source operating system Linux. Linux powers the internet, system administrators, Supercomputers etc.
For most apps or websites that you use, there is a high probability that it might have been powered by a Linux system.
For a student, learning is the most important.
Closed systems like Windows and Mac don't provide that degree of open environment and hackable features like you get on a Linux system which is most important for learning and experimenting.
You can read more about the experience of having Linux OS, on the blog written by one of our 2nd-year member, Zeeshan Ashraf (ECE) at Developer Docs

Android Apps

• Simple Paint : App Link
• Algorithm Visualizer : App Link
• Open Chat in WhatsApp ~ 20kb : App Link

Websites

• HnCC Club Site
• HnCC Contest Page
• HnCC Learn Website
• Hackatron Website (National Level Hackathon held last year)

Games

• A Plane-A Space Voyage

Apart from this HnCC has made a lot of Projects. The projects above mentioned were robust and scalable enough to be used by the public.

Email us at hnccbits@gmail.com or drop a message at our facebook page.