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Search - "covid-19 global hackathon"
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Story of a first-time hackathon.
So, I took part in the COVID-19 Global Hackathon.
Long story short, I got excited at OCR and just went with the most challenging challenge - digitizing forms with handwritten text and checkboxes, ones which say whether you have been in contact with someone who could have Coronavirus.
And, unsurprisingly, it didn't work within 4 days. I joined up with 2 people, who both left halfway through - one announced, one silently - and another guy joined, said he had something working and then dissapeared.
We never settled on a stack - we started with a local docker running Tesseract, then Google Cloud Vision, then we found Amazon Textract. None worked easily.
Timezone differences were annoying too. There was a 15-hour difference across our zones. I spent hours in the Slack channel waiting.
We didn't manage the deadline, and the people who set the challenge needed the solution withing 10 days, a deadline we also missed. We ended up with a basic-bitch Vue app to take pictures with mock Amazon S3 functionality, empty TDD in Python and also some OCR work.
tbh, that stuff would've worked if we had 4 weeks. I understand why everyone left.
I guess the lesson from this is not to be over-ambitious with hackathons. And not to over-estimate computers' detection abilities.rant covid hackathon slack s3 google cloud vision python tdd aws tesseract textract covid-19 global hackathon2