My experience at MLH — Local Hack Day

What is MLH Local Hack Day?

MLH’s Local Hack Day, a global hackathon is a celebration of learning, building, and sharing! It is open to everyone.This was MLH’s 5th year organizing Local Hack Day.

MLH Local Hack Day in Chennai was organised in association with Build2Learn is the brainchild of Dorai Thodla. It is an initiative by a group of volunteers to help people learn programming by building useful micro-products. The motto is — Build to Learn and Learn to Build. It was only apt for them to collaborate with volunteers for Hack to Learn.

Why this hackathon is special to me?

Both my son and i had registered for the Hackathon. This was the first hackathon for my teen son Devesh.Our joy knew no bounds when we got selected for the hackathon out of the 200 registrations. I wanted to work on a Tamil character recognition project using Deep Learning techniques. My son was interested in launching a community for SAT aspirants- SAThub.

At the Hackathon

After a sumptuous breakfast and a brief introduction to MLH by the organisers, we started hacking around 9 AM. I and Madhura started working on our project. The energy was awesome and there were more than 27 teams hacking at the event. The mentors were super helpful providing us the technical assistance and the emotional support. We were on a rollercoaster of emotions-Excited, nervous, passionate, motivated, frustrated(at times when the build failed)or happy throughout the event. The free swag , delicious food and passionate mentors / volunteers made our experience even memorable.

At the end of the hackathon, we had built the model for the Tamil character recognition. Here is the repo in github . We were able to achieve an accuracy of 85% with fastai library ( with no feature extraction) . We were able to create a simple webapp for demo purposes. With feature extraction and fine tuning we will be able to get a better model.

Accomplishments

What did i learn from this event?

1. Things will not always go the way you plan — and you need to buckle up and come up with alternate strategies.
2. Learnt a lot going through the documentation of the Fastai Framework that we used for our project.
3. Met some cool passionate people who loved solving problems with technology.
4. Met a group of students from codezoned — a non profit that encourages students to contribute to opensource.

Thanks to MLH, Build2Learn community and the sponsors for giving us an opportunity to hack and learn something new. A huge shout to the mentors, volunteers, organisers and fellow teammates for making this experience memorable for me.