HackUSU - My first hackathon overview

 Recently, I participated in HackUSU, Utah State University's annual hackathon. Although my project was not security related, I gained valuable hands-on experience with data pipelines and APIs.

 It was my first hackathon, and ended up working alone in the hack-the-planet category. My prompt was to tackle a social challenge or wicked problem by creatively using technology to foster positive change, improve communities, or address global issues through innovative solutions.

Getting in way over my head as someone without much experience in development and API usage, Canary was born. My submission was an attempt at an early detection service for natural disasters, harnessing the genius of the crowd. I used a small language model to analyze tweets, looking for an indicator of disaster, and if a hit was registered, then a pin would drop on my map interface using the geodata from the tweet itself. It almost worked, but then I met the limit of data from the free tier of the Twitter API and ended up hard coding all of my coordinates into a separate location to simulate a data pull from the API. I also tried to add a report form on-screen with a spot to input an address, where the Google Maps API would turn the address into coordinates for my program to use, but after hours of attempting I ended up needing to scrap it to meet the 24-hour deadline. 

It was hard! I'm glad I was able to get some experience working with APIs, as well as moving data around. Through the process, I increased my familiarity with JSON, Javascript, Python, and data management. In the future, I'll make sure to find a team, because I would have loved to both get further in the project and have someone to lean on, helping each other where the other falls short.

I'm looking forward to the next one!