Story of a first-time hackathon.

So, I took part in the COVID-19 Global Hackathon.

Long story short, I got excited at OCR and just went with the most challenging challenge - digitizing forms with handwritten text and checkboxes, ones which say whether you have been in contact with someone who could have Coronavirus.

And, unsurprisingly, it didn't work within 4 days. I joined up with 2 people, who both left halfway through - one announced, one silently - and another guy joined, said he had something working and then dissapeared.

We never settled on a stack - we started with a local docker running Tesseract, then Google Cloud Vision, then we found Amazon Textract. None worked easily.

Timezone differences were annoying too. There was a 15-hour difference across our zones. I spent hours in the Slack channel waiting.

We didn't manage the deadline, and the people who set the challenge needed the solution withing 10 days, a deadline we also missed. We ended up with a basic-bitch Vue app to take pictures with mock Amazon S3 functionality, empty TDD in Python and also some OCR work.

tbh, that stuff would've worked if we had 4 weeks. I understand why everyone left.

I guess the lesson from this is not to be over-ambitious with hackathons. And not to over-estimate computers' detection abilities.

Today is a sad day. I wanted to do some experimenting with the Google Cloud Vision API, but apparently EU users can use it only as Business user (which sadly I'm not). Why Google, why are you betraying me? 😭

any one tried google cloud vision api?

good afternoon, of casuality someone know some alternative for google cloud vision for free? or how to use google cloud vision without credit card?