ByteForge
co-founded North India's largest student tech community, growing it to 4,500+ builders and hosting Execron 1.0 hackathon.
kanpur is a huge industrial city, but when it comes to tech and building software, it felt like a complete desert. if you're a kid here who wants to code projects or build startups, there was no community. everyone is focused on studying for entrance exams or getting traditional credentials, which is fine, but it gets lonely when you just want to stay up all night building random tools. pavitra and i got tired of waiting for some school or college to build a coding scene, so we decided to build it ourselves. we started byteforge as a small discord server for student builders. it grew incredibly fast. we are now north india's largest independent student tech community with over 4,500 members. we are an official Hack Club partner, we coordinate events across high schools, and we host major hackathons, like our Execron 1.0 BuildFest at IIT Kanpur which brought in 290+ developers. we didn't have any budget, sponsors, or experience when we started. we just had a shared discord server and a bunch of kids who wanted to build cool things. byteforge proved to me that you don't need to live in silicon valley or bangalore to have a vibrant dev culture; you just need a place where builders feel welcome to share their creations.