Robert and I applied to a bunch of hackathons, and recently went to MedHacks which is located in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins. I've had a negative impression of Baltimore because of its bad coverage due to riots, therefore I was pleasantly surprised to find that Baltimore is sort-of a historical location, and many places resembling remarkably like Boston. Nonetheless, when we took a quick stroll through Baltimore's streets in the daytime, we saw a sizable homeless population, which is really unfortunate.
At MedHacks, Robert and I worked really hard to pull off an Android app that lets you take pictures of pill prescriptions and reads its directions to insert them into Google Calendar. It was the first time we ever pulled off a mobile app for a hackathon and we were incredibly proud that it worked, since we had to do some complex shit like using tesseract to grab text from the picture, using nlp to autocorrect the text, and building a websocket to transfer information from the Android client to the server (which included using base64 encoding to transfer pictures as text), not to mention building the Android app itself.
It turns out that MedHacks is a pitching competition without any expectations for a working demo; the winning projects were very disappointing, and we were very disappointed with the way the hackathon was run. For example, MedHacks literally used Google Sheets for their judging system (lol!), and they conveniently forgot to list our project in the spreadsheet for judges. As a result, we only got 1 judge (out of the 3 required). We kept nagging them about this, so in a direct attempt to appease us rather than solve the problem, two MedHacks organizers became our 2nd and 3rd judge.
One corporate sponsor from Elsevier who was a second round judge (didn't qualify for our category) really loved our project. He said our project was his favorite and to quote him, "live blogged the shit" out of it, which you can find here here. A highlight from the conversation was when he asked us if we knew what ScienceDirect was. We said, "no." He then asked us if we knew what Sci-Hub is. We enthusiastically said, "YEAH." Then he was like, "Yeah we sue the shit out of them!" The Elsevier guy was really nice and offered us a job, which Robert and I found incredibly amusing.
Another funny moment was because MedHacks didn't host "hackers", we had to bring sleeping bags or make do with sleeping on the ground. Robert and I found a nice lounge on the 8th story of the building that the hackathon was hosted in, and Robert got the brilliant idea to take the single person couches, and turn them over so that with 6 of them, we could make a bed. The first night we made the bed, we didn't disassemble it. When we came back to sleep in our bed again the next night, we found that another guy had taken refuge in it.
As a result, we went to the 10th story and replicated the bed. Later that night, when we are just able to fall asleep, we heard a bunch of people walk through, complaining that the sleeping room was full, see our bed and exclaim, "Why didn't we think of that?". Robert and I got a kick out of this, commenting that it takes a sprinkle of East Campus irreverence for us to come up with our idea and have such disregard for social norms to actually implement it. Because of our nice makeshift beds, we actually slept pretty well at MedHacks.
To end this post, I guess I'll share some of the nice pictures that I took of Baltimore and Johns Hopkins:
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