Birth of Magistics: a founder's story

Nobody at my college knew what a hackathon was

In my college, the word "hackathon" mostly got blank looks. A few people had heard it somewhere, but nobody could actually tell you what it meant or why it mattered. I was curious enough not to let that sit. I asked my seniors and got nothing useful back, so I researched it on my own, slowly, until I understood what these events were, how teams formed, and why anyone would give up a weekend to build something from nothing.

That small gap, a word nobody around me could explain, is where Magistics started. Not as a brand. Not as a plan. Just curiosity with nowhere to put it yet.

The team that couldn't compete

In 2024 I pulled together a few friends from college to enter the Smart India Hackathon. We were excited, we had a team, we were ready to go. Then I read the rules properly. Every team needed at least one female member, and all members had to be from the same college. I study at an all-boys college. There was no honest way to satisfy both of those at once.

So I disbanded the team. That one stung, because the problem had nothing to do with our ideas or our effort. It was a checkbox I couldn't tick. But the idea behind it didn't die there.

A while later, one of my seniors called me out of nowhere and told me to build the team again, properly this time, and to go talk to our professor and make it real. So I did. Six of us, a genuine conversation with our professor, and on that day Magistics was officially born and I became its lead.

Then the college's own process let us down, and we couldn't register for the Smart India Hackathon after all. After all of that, everything went quiet for months.

The first time Magistics stepped on the field

In 2025 another hackathon came around, and I rebuilt the team. Of the original six, three of us were left, and one new person joined for that event. It doesn't sound like much, but that was the first time Magistics existed on the field as a name, not just as an idea I was carrying around in my head.

Around the same time I started working with Hack4Bengal. I wanted to learn the part I still didn't know: not how to enter a hackathon, but how you actually run one. How a community gets organized, how an event holds together, how all the invisible logistics work. From the operations side you see a hackathon from a different angle than you ever do as a participant, and that angle is where the real lessons are.

From a team to something bigger

Then a real opportunity landed. The Kolkata zonal rounds of IIT Bombay's Techfest needed organizing, and I ran it alongside other co-organizers. I brought Magistics in as a partner of the event, not as a competing team this time, but as a community.

That was the turn. Magistics stopped being a hackathon team and started becoming a community, and a little bit of a brand. By the last quarter of 2025 I decided to stop borrowing other people's events and build our own. I went back to old connections, pulled a team together, and from that point Magistics was properly established, with something of its own to ship.

HackInverse, and where it stands now

In January 2026 we ran HackInverse 0.5, my first online hackathon under the Magistics banner. Watching something that started from a disbanded Smart India Hackathon team actually go live, with real participants writing real code, is a strange, good feeling.

Today Magistics is a community of 350+ members, and the HackInverse core team alone is 40+ people. From "nobody here knows what a hackathon is" to organizing one of my own. I don't say that to show off. I say it because the distance between those two sentences is the entire point of this story.

What building it taught me

A few things I didn't have before all this.

Determination outlasts people. Plenty of people came and went over these two years, most of them for completely fair reasons. The one constant was that I kept going. A community isn't the crowd that's loudest at the launch. It's whoever is still there when the work is boring and the wins are far apart.

Constraints aren't always walls. The eligibility rule that killed my first team felt like the end of the whole thing. It wasn't. It pushed me toward building something that didn't live or die by one competition's checklist. The block became the reason the brand exists.

You learn the most on the organizing side. Entering a hackathon teaches you to build a project. Running one teaches you to build the thing the project happens inside. I needed both, and the second one I only ever got by doing it, badly at first, then better.

Why I wrote this down

This isn't a pitch, and it isn't a highlight reel. It's a record, written while the details are still sharp, of how a student built something real starting from a single unanswered question. If you want the shorter, present-tense version of who I am and what I do now, that lives on my about page. This is the part that never fits in a bio: the disbanded team, the quiet months, the senior's phone call, and the slow turn from four people at a hackathon into a 350-person community.

It's not just another story. It actually happened.