moodring

Completed: February 2020

TechTogether Boston, Facebook Building Community Hack Winner

In February 2020, I attended my first hackathon EVER — TechTogether Boston, Boston’s largest all-female, femme, non-binary hackathon. In the week leading up to the hackathon, I had found via Slack four other Boston-area students to work with. From chatting online, we realized our interests floated around natural language processing, data visualization, and something possibly health-related. And, while we did have a more experienced member on our team, most of us were hackathon / coding newbies.

So, what did we come up with?

After some Google Doc brainstorming, we decided to make moodring: a Flask-based web application that pools together the sentiment of the anonymous thoughts of everyone who uses it—no matter their language—to create a visual representation of the world’s honest emotions over the past twenty-four hours. Its purpose is to create a global sense of community, as an outlet for honesty and emotional well-being in times of stress.

A brief rundown about how it works (edited from our Devpost):

The moodring landing page aggregates all the messages from the past day, displaying both a list of anonymous messages color coded by sentiment, and a “ring” of hourly averages—giving a visual depiction of the ebb and flow of the worlds’ sentiments over the course of a day. Users can also click on “Add your Entry” to enter anything any thoughts —a rant about exams, excitement at landing a new job, a random bit of poetry. Their message is then fed into a machine learning model and scored as either positive or negative. And, the user can use whatever language they wish, with the Google Translate API translating all messages into English.

So… what was most difficult about this project?

Having never extensively made a coding project in such a short span of time — about 2.5 days — I felt that our biggest challenge, and the key to our success, was balancing everyone’s strengths, staying open-minded, and maintaining a smooth workflow. There were many rocky moments, from just getting used to the Github workflow, to setting up Flask and MongoDB on our local machines. However, with all of us eager to just learn something new and create something we were proud of, we were able to wholeheartedly embrace both learning new skills and contributing the knowledge we had: we attended Flask app workshops together, had extensive Googling sessions, and took time aside to explain to others what we were learning.

At the same time, we each contributed our strengths — my other members were strong at training natural language data, Javascript and data visualization. For me, I played the middle-woman (haha), linking the front-end with the back-end with Python routing, database querying and Flask.

At the end…

It was Sunday morning, the day of presentations. And frankly, we were exhausted — I had been taking Lyfts back to the dorm around 3 am the past two nights, coming back around 9 or 10 am the next day. But, one of the most valuable things I learned about tech at the hackathon wasn’t necessarily how to build an app (though that’s important), but also how to express why what you made can matter to the world.

So, throughout the “pitch” morning, we all got practice pitching moodring to hackathon and company representatives, from Google to RedHat. In a proud moment, I helped explain to a Facebook representative about how our deliberate choice to make our site anonymous and straightforward rooted in our desire to be an outlet for anyone across the world to express their emotions, without being constrained by their identity.

And, to all our surprise, we were called up as Facebook’s Building Community Hack Winner, earning each of us an Oculus Go!

As a hackathon newbie, I wanted to attend TechTogether just to dip my toes into the tech world, learn something new, and meet inspiring hackers — all of which I was able to do. So, actually winning an award was icing atop this already Great British Bakeoff-style, multi-layered cake.

Before coming to the hackathon, I was quite intimidated by the seemingly enigmatic world of hackers, and its infinite possibilities are still mysterious. But, with this experience — from the TechTogether hackathon that was SO welcoming of new hackers, chatting with tech company representatives about their experiences, listening to how fellow hackers created amazing apps, to just working together with passionate people — I feel like I’ve made my first step into tech. And I can’t wait to see what other steps I will take in the future.

For more on moodring: