So after 8 months of playing around with R and Python and blog post after blog post, I found myself finally hacking away at a problem set from the 17th storey of the Hindustan Times building at Connaught Place. I had entered my first ever data science hackathon conducted by Analytics Vidhya, a pioneer in analytics learning in India. Pizzas and Pepsi were on the house. Like any predictive analysis hackathon, this one accepted unlimited entries till submission time. It was from 2pm to 4:30pm today –  2.5 hours, of which I ended up wasting 1.5 hours trying to make my first submission which encountered submission error after submission error until the problem was fixed finally post lunch. I had 1 hour to try my best. It wasn’t the best performance, but I thought of blogging this experience anyway, as a reminder of the work that awaits me. I want to be the one winning prize money at the end of the day.