Hackathon report: Hack@Teal 2015

My friend Matt Tinsley and I were both RA's in Teal Resdiential College from Fall 2014 to Spring 2015. We are also both big fans of hackathons. Matt had the idea for and led the organization of a hackathon for Teal residents. I helped him out with logistics, and we worked on a project in the time we weren't doing organizer-y things.

The first two sections of this article relate to organizing the event, and the third is about the project I worked on.

Successes

Lots of things went well.

• Learning -- Many people during demos said something to the effect of, "I've never done anything like this project before today. I learned so much." Our faculty master was impressed with how much people were able to learn, which was good seeing as he funded much of the event. Education was also a huge reason we wanted to have the event, so it was great to see our efforts pay off.
• Team/idea formation -- At the beginning of the event, we had some time for individuals who came to the event to find a team. Matt and I stood in a circle with the individuals, and we all went around and said an idea we had. This format worked well; the four people we had formed two teams. I would recommend that organizers bring some simple ideas for people to work on; both of my ideas ended up getting used.
• Venue -- Teal allowed us to use the media room, which had ample space. We were also able to bring over plenty of tables from a neighboring classroom.
• Google forms -- good choice for our voting needs. I could imagine that for larger hackathons, there would be too many votes to use Google forms, but it was just what we needed for how many participants we had.
• Food -- We had ample food, people seemed to like it well enough.
• Hosting -- We had one team who wanted to do some stuff with web technologies, but didn't have much of an idea what they were doing. I spun up a VPS through Digital Ocean, and Wes Cossick explained a few basic things to them. Like that, they were off!

Hardships

A few things were less than perfect.

• Staying through the night -- I wish more people had chosen to stay through the night. Around 4 or 5 am, the room started to feel dead.
• Judging -- Our faculty master did a great job of judging, but I think it would have been cool to have gotten a panel of judges rather than just one person.

My project

Matt and I worked on Emoji Predictor. If you've ever used a smartphone keyboard that suggests words as you type, you'll understand what it is. Our project suggests relevant emojis for you to use in your text messages.

We started with a database of all Matt's text messages. This would be our "corpus", or the body of text we would use to make inferences about which emojis should be used with which kinds of messages.

While making an iOS keyboard would have been really cool, we wanted to make a proof of concept and focus on the part of the project we found interesting: getting from a string to the emojis most relevant to it. We decided to make a web UI. I whipped up a simple application using Python, Flask, and JavaScript (our code can be found on GitHub).

While I was working on the UI side of things, Matt started working on the recommendation engine using Python Natural Language Toolkit. While he worked on that, I decided to work on a different implementation of a recommendation engine. I loaded all of Matt's sent messages which contained emojis into Elasticsearch and ran a query on that index using user input. This basic implementation ended up working decently enough.

Matt ended up having tons of trouble with Python and unicode, so for demo purposes we went with my implementation. I thought our product was pretty neat.

Because it relied on Matt's personal information, a live demo unfortunately isn't up anywhere.

Conclusion

Despite a few minor problems, Hack@Teal went very well. I was glad to help, and I'd love to take part in organizing more hackathons. Because it was a small event, Matt and I were able to hack on our own project, which was fun and educational.

If you want more information (especially about other people's projects), please see the official website for Hack@Teal 2015, hackteal.me.