Skip to main content

My experience at Hack The North 2017


I attended Canada's largest Hackathon, Hack The North, on September 15, 2017. It was an amazing experience, and we had a lot of coffee, no sleep and a decently-functioning project by the end of it.

After signing in and eating dinner the very first day, we head out to Hagey Hall for the opening ceremonies.We had many speakers come out and talk to us, such as Balaji Srinivasan, Michael Gibson, and a Canadian rather popular in the hearts of everyone there- Justin Trudeau. The Prime Minister had a great speech, and this was the place we first came up with the idea for our project, so the opening ceremonies was an overall success.

Hacking started the same night at 12. Our first night was entirely dedicated to research. Is our idea viable? What APIs do we want to use? What do we want to make our backend in?  We eventually planned out and envisioned what our project would look like, after which I started designing the frontend of the login page that was to be implemented. The next 2 nights consisted of all-nighters by my teammates and 5 hours of sleep by me (I need a little sleep from time to time), and we eventually submitted our project on Sunday, 3 min before the deadline.


Our idea? SumNotes. SumNotes is a web application that records, transcribes and summarizes lectures and speeches. The biggest problem most university students face is the pace of lectures: writing notes and understanding content simultaneously can often be a struggle. SumNotes tries to get rid of this problem by doing the note taking for you, so you can focus entirely on understanding your lecture and only jot down key points without having to worry about everything else. SumNotes was created using HTML/CSS and Javascript for the frontend, and python(flask) for the backend. We also used Cockroach DB as our Database to store the login info, recorded lectures and the summary itself.


SumNotes won the Cockroach DB API specific prize for the best use and implementation of Cockroach DB. A demo of it can be found here:





Hack the North was an incredible experience, and winning just made it better. We got a ton of free stuff, and networked with a bunch of tech companies. A huge shout out to  Advait, Leon and Sourav for being the most cooperative and hard working teammates I could ask for. 

If you are considering Hack the North, apply immediately when you get the chance. It was a great Hackathon experience for me, and will sure be for you too. 

The project's devpost can be found here:

https://devpost.com/software/sumnotes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Showcase and how to get started with a Speech Recognition Bot coded in Java

When I first got into coding, I dreamed about creating my own local version of Siri for my desktop; lying back on my chair and doing things with just my voice was what I always wanted. After coding with Java for over a year, I decided that it was time to learn more than just using JFrame and creating classes. "Zero" is a speech recognition bot I coded using the Sphinx4 voice recognition library in Java and the Selenium Webdriver for Chrome. Although no Siri by any means, the bot can open and close windows, create tabs, open sites etc. using just my voice. The demo for the bot and its commands as of now can be found below: 1) Setting up the voice recognition: Luckily, there is already documentation on how to get started with sphinx4. The Jar Files for this library can be downloaded  here . As you can see, each recognizer should have an Acoustic Model Path, a Dictionary Path and a Language Model Path set. After running the code, I figured out that the recogni...
7 comments
Read more

I downloaded and learned how to use Vim (On a basic level)

Having used Atom as my main and only text editor, I never even bothered looking at any other ones. However, a friend of mine-who has way more experience than me in development-showed me a few tests that seemed to suggest that Vim or Sublime Text was the way to go in terms of a text editor. I cant seem to find the tests right now, but the main thing that convinced me to choose a different editor was the data that showed the large amount of memory Atom took up while doing a task. Vim is probably the coolest editor I've seen, hands down. After downloading and launching Vim, I was greeted with this retro, old school screen that I fell in love with immediately. The shortcuts are so weird too! The concept of Vim revolves around never having to touch your mouse to do anything, and that is what makes it stand out the most in my opinion. I've learned how to run code, save files and some other basic commands, but a more detailed blog about Vim will come after I get to play ar...
Post a Comment
Read more