My First Hackathon!

My First Ever Hackathon!

Today on April 6th, 2025, I worked with some undergrads on a programming project! It was my first ever hackathon and it turns out It would be a wild and interest ride. I was faced with some unfortunate and novel challenges that I hadn't come across before, or even considered.

My Personal Plan

Okay so we need to use the Canvas API some how

Issues

• endpoints are authenticated with access tokens
• OAuth2 utilization requires Canvas Admins to register the apps
  • this means we can't actually use this behavior in any application afaik
  • i guess there is potentially some way to get developer registration access? I need to contact the IT department...?
• Another option is to create a cli application and have the user specify their access tokens via an environment variable. This is honest probably our best option. Someone groups might make the mistake of creating a website utilizing the API, but this isn't best practices and it's not practical.
• However, I don't think the judges are savey enough to care about that.

Plan

• create grade planner command line application for USF students.
• tech
  • bubbletea
  • go langchain
    • This will be use to for structured input using the Ollama and Docker
    • structured into will be used to create different plans for

What we actual went with

We decided to use the Canvas API -- mainly because nobody else really had any idea. However, we really struggled on committing to a project at first. Nobody was exactly happy with my vague notions of an application. This was a very stressful moment for me because I really wanted to get started, but I knew I wasn't communicating my ideas fully. During lunch, we decided to split up and regroup afterward. I took the time to formulate a plan during the intermission. My plan was received positively from my teammates which was a relief -- I was on the verge of saying, "beggars can't be choosers!".