#hackmit

Look at that, almost 2 months later and I’m finally getting around to posting about HackMIT. Life’s been too busy lately, like, you should see my calendar. But anyway, onto the insanity that HackMIT was.

So HackMIT took place September 15 & 16. I flew out for Boston at 5:15am on September 14 and spent the rest of that day hanging out with my roommates. Now if you’ve followed along with any of my other hackathon post-mortems before (or just know about hackathons) you may be curious why I had a roommate, I mean it’s a hackathon, you slept on the floor under a table right? Wrong! HackMIT has the best feature of any hackathon I’ve been too and that is you tell them in advance “hey I’m not local, I need accommodations” and they match you up with someone (in my case, three someones) who lives in residence at MIT and you can stay with them. How amazing is that, I got to sleep in a room on a (blow up) mattress with full access to a shower. Amazing. But anyway, so I spent the 14th hanging out with my roomies, attended an MIT lecture, explored campus, watched a hackathon sponsored movie (Rogue One), and went to a thrift store. A pretty great day.

So that’s some background on the day before the hack, I’ll roll into the usual format of positives/negatives and what my groups project actually was but I did want to draw attention to the weirdest thing (for me) about MIT. Everyone, everywhere, was doing homework, talking about homework, helping each homework, it was crazy. ALSO everyone (literally everyone) was wearing something on them that said MIT. Weird right?

Take Me Away

https://devpost.com/software/take-me-away-wfk15s

Using the Amadeus Travel API Catalogue we're able to find the most popular and cheapest flights anywhere in the world that are within the budget you set yourself. We’ll then find hotels in that area that are also within your budget and let you pick one. 

Positives

Guess who finally has a semblance of an idea of how Javascript works? It’s me friends. I finally, finally, finally got a chance and the time to actually do what was going to be an almost fully web app. I guess I’ve hit the stage in my knowledge of programming where the language being used is becoming just syntax instead of feeling like I was learning something entirely brand new.

Negative

I was randomly assigned a group of first years. Like, “I’ve only been programming for six months” first years. Eek. Thankfully we chose to do our project in the format the group was most comfortable in and I was the least comfortable in but I still felt held back. Additionally it was my groups first time ever at a hackathon so they were struggling to understand how they worked, how not to burn out, and how to present to the judges when the time came (pro tip: don’t go through a list of everything broken and show off all the bugs. Like why).

Conclusion

Overall even though our project was a cobbled together mess I’m glad I got the opportunity to attend (plus, everyone I work with were like “omg you were at MIT” which was cool af) and I hope to be able to attend again next September. I also am very glad I got the opportunity to work a bit more in Javascript and maybe, hopefully will find the time to work on those skill more in the future.

THIS IS MITS LIBRARY WTF

#HackerGirl

Too cute for this photo wall featuring Emily

Bae caught me posing

A couple weekends ago I competed at HackMIT. I am really proud of what I did in the 24 hour window and hope to improve on it when I get back to SF or even before then if I can find the time. I originally went there with the intent of working on a team with someone I met from the a16z hackathon but he ended up having to leave halfway through so I decided to work alone. This was my first time going at it by myself with no one else to help me build a product, so even though I was sleep deprived (I stayed up for 43 hours that weekend and ~30 the day before with 8 hours sleep in between) I was excited to see what I could accomplish.

The idea I had was simple, a manager of a location where employees interact with customers needs a way of getting customer feedback without being there to watch the employees. The specific use case I had in mind was a restaurant (yeah I know it's the second restaurant themed idea this month...) where people are constantly checking in and leaving reviews, and these reviews are usually at the time of checking in so we have a timestamp. With this I wanted to have an app where managers can go on and put in there employees shifts and then the app would match up the checkin/review timestamp to those employee's who were on shift at the time. These reviews would undergo sentiment analysis using the AlchemyAPI to determine whether or not the review was positive, negative, or neutral. Additionally AlchemyAPI returns a list of keywords that have been isolated with an associated sentiment based on the context of the surrounding words, I stored these but did nothing with them during the time that I was there(more on this after).

The first problem I had was sleep deprivation. I had been up all night thursday before my flight (30 hours), and only had scattered sleep on the flight from San Francisco to Boston. That night I found myself at Harvard for a getogether my friend invited me to. I got back and didn't sleep until about 2am and had to be up and ready by 8:30am. That was the start of a 43 hour spree of being awake, working by myself (somehow I managed to stay up the entire night!). This led to a lot of slow progress on things I should've figured out or remembered much sooner.

One fatal mistake I made was two hours before submission. I had only then just remembered that Foursquare only responds to requests from https, and my computer could not do it (my environment has wierd issues with ssl certificates), I had no time to learn to use Iron.io (the solution to our last project that used Foursquare), and I figured that since I had other issues to deal with that I did know how to fix I decided to sacrifice live functionality. One thing that did not help me to remember was that using Foursquare's test keys you dont need https and I only moved to my own keys those few hours before submission.

A huge bonus to using AlchemyAPI was that there was someone there to represent the company as they were a partner for HackMIT. Whenever I had questions about how things were returned from the API or I was having some kind of problem at all interacting with it, I would run right up the bleachers to the guy and he was more than happy to help.

Aside from AlchemyAPI, a cool tool I had previously not used before but decided to incorporate into my project was D3.js. I have been meaning to work on my javascript skills and thought that this would be a good chance. I had one chance to use this before at the NASA SpaceApps Challenge last spring but one of the two people on my team was really good with R so we built a webapp using R/Shiny which made D3.js uneccessary for us. I didn't get around to implementing it until near the end of the competition so I did a little bit of copy/pasting from an example directly into the template view (not my proudest moment...) and worked around that to get the data to show correctly and nicely for each employee (I used colorful donut pie charts).

Arduino Uno...Raspberry Pi...@Pinkberry and @Lyft Energy Drinks...this is how a Queen spends her Saturday. (#HackMIT) pic.twitter.com/yJXLVpdvYu

— Netia McCray (@netiamccray)