Code Camp 2013

Several weeks ago, I attended Code Camp. What is code camp, you ask? Well, let me tell you. You arrive at 7am Friday morning, get all set up and settled in, and then at 8am, you begin writing a computer/mobile program, aka coding.  You continue coding for the next 24 hours. You are free to eat, sleep, and if you’re over 18, you can even leave if you need to grab snacks or something, but you have to stop coding at 8am Saturday morning. Hopefully whatever project you were working on is finished because judges then come around, and you show them what you’ve accomplished.  They then choose first place, second place, and third place winners from each division.  There were four divisions: rookie (who are given a kit to help them), novice, collegiate, and professional. My teammate Chaz and I were in the collegiate division. You were allowed to have up to 4 people on your team.

This was both mine and Chaz’s first year at code camp. I had come up with this idea to write an android app that takes pictures of things like fliers and inputs the event information into Google Calendar. We used an open source Optical Character Recognitino (OCR) program called Tesseract, which is run by Google, so we called ourselves the Tesseract Tekkies (the Tesseract is also the powerful cube Lokie steals in the Avengers movie, so we thought we were pretty cool).  Chaz worked mainly on the front end of things: he used Java (the language we were writing in) to call the Tesseract Program and get its output, and he also worked on connecting to the Andriod camera.  I worked on converting the text file Tesseract produced into things that the computer could interpret as dates and times and inserting them into the Google Calendar.

It was definitely an interesting experience.  I had expected to crash sometime in the middle of the night, but I felt alert all night.  I could feel my body getting pretty tired, and I even tried to lie down and take a nap, but my brain would not shut up!  I did crash in the car on the way back, and then I slept for like 5 hours Saturday afternoon (after I showered and ate a little snack, that is).  I got my part working at like 4 in the morning, but then I tried to make a GUI (Graphical User Interface as opposed to using command line), since I had heard the GUI was important if you wanted to win.  And I messed something up.  Once everybody started waking up the next morning, a couple of friends from another team were able to help me go back to what I’d had before, but something still wasn’t working.  We figured out that it was because Tesseract had given me a different format!  We were able to figure that out, too, and I was much happier J

Our presentation went fairly well, and we were hoping to maybe get 3^rd place in the collegiate division for our project.  When they announced the winners in the various divisions, I was in a daze, bordering on a doze.  So, when first place for the collegiate division was announced to be the Tesseract Tekkies, I was surprised, but too out of it to get really hyper and excited about it!  We really did not expect to win, and it makes me feel really good that we did.  Maybe we’ll continue working on the project and develop an app—who knows?  It would be pretty sweet, though, to have an app in Google Play.