HackCU IV - I Saw a Mountain
Man, before we get into the chat about HackCU IV went for me, can we just take a moment to appreciate mountains. Like, wow, woooooooooow, that’s a big rock.
Mountains. Such a cool concept. Wow.
Anyway, onto HackCU IV, HackCU was held in Boulder, Colorado from February 24-25 a cool 24 hours. I flew out the day before (because apparently it takes a while to bop from Nova Scotia to Colorado) and bunked up in an AirBnb with a girl from Arizona who’d never seen snow before. And of course, Colorado treated us to about 10 cm that night as we were trying to find somewhere to eat. So needless to say, my freaking out about giant rocks was in good company with her freaking out about cold sand. I opted to work solo again, mostly because it seemed like most people had come with pre-arranged teams and I honestly prefer to go solo (in environments like hackathons that promote quick design/code decisions).
TwemeSong
http://www.twemesong.com/
Ever wondered what the theme song for your Twitter account should be? Wonder no longer, TwemeSong is here! TwemeSong gets a submitted user's last 50 tweets, runs them through a sentiment analysis to determine how positive/energetic they are, and then displays a song recommended from those values. More energetic tweets result in more fast paced songs, and more positive tweets result in more positive songs!
This is a much sillier project than what I usually work on but hey, I got some good tech experience from it. TwemeSong was built using .Net (woo C#) and connects Spotify’s API, Twitter’s API, and Google Cloud's Natural Language Processing API (which I now was basically an expert on, thanks PearlHacks!). TwemeSong also used AWS Elastic Beanstalk to host the site, the free domain name from Domain.com, and connecting them together with cloudflare.
My only real issues with TwemeSong were related to authorizing and authenticating the above API’s. Thankfully there were a lot of resources online about to do that but I imagine if I was using a more obscure API or programming language it would’ve been an absolute nightmare. The other big issue I had, which was a nightmare, was connecting my domain address with AWS. I eventually decided that a redirection with Cloudflare (which is what I do for my portfolio) would be the best bet but even with that I wasn’t able to get the connection to work until I got home a few days later. Sigh. A more minor issue, that I hadn’t even thought of until some judges tried it (#rip) was if a private twitter account was entered in, and the answer is a super spooky error page pops up and it looks like my site crashed. :| Also I slept on the floor. No comfy chairs. The literal floor.
Regardless I had a great time, my website got some good laughs and I got some really great experience working with web technologies which is something I am really sorely lacking in. I also got a mini vacation to Colorado, which was pretty sweet ;)
Currently I have nothing on the immediate horizon in terms of hackathons/travel, just exams in April, BUT I’ll be submitting my work visa this week (waiting on some school paperwork) so California I’m getting closer!
Everyone wore their hats everywhere so I tried to be cool too
Even the school looks like a ski lodge
HMU @ that 47th table
This was in Denver but it’s so cool and artsy and deserves to be appreciated