Hackathon experience
This week, I participated in Hackathon for the first time in Microsoft. Though it's been happening for past few years now, for some reason or another, I prioritized work over that. But this year, I decided to participate in a Hack for Good project which means, we are coming up with technical solutions to solve some of the problems face by non-profits. So basically doing something new, different, fun and exciting all at the same time, along with doing good and challenging yourself while doing so.
I had picked this project called Agaram foundation which funds college education for the under-privileged in India. It is based on Chennai and started by a celebrity called Surya. They had 4 components, and 4 sub-groups were assigned to solve each of those. Knowledge sharing/searching for resources in their knowledge database, discussion forums, scanning application forms of students, and video translation. Out of all of them, the video translation part seemed like it would involve some coding and since I wanted some challenge, I picked that up. The task was to translate an English video into Tamil text so we display Tamil text as captions instead of English.
The first day I attended, I realized what an archaic world I was living in, while the world moved on to whole another world. I did not know ABCs of cognitive services, that Microsoft offered, or the MVC Web apps. The first MVC app I built years ago was based on ASP.NET and it was way different from the C# web app architecture our team decided to use. I even had challenges accessing my dev machine from my laptop, so no access to any resources that I may need, and couldn't even open anything as I didn't have VS 2017 installed. So the first day was all setup. So by the end of the day, all I got to, was to install VS, download some cognitive services samples and play with them to see how it works.
Next day (yesterday) was about creating an MVC web app and creating a page with a simple video and adding code to call the API to send the audio and render the translated text that is returned. But for some reason, it was recording the video but not playing the text. Today, with a few tweaks, and adding some async/await calls, it started working. However, it still had some lag and was not recognizing English to so well from audio. So we decided to skip the demo and go with screenshots. But I did learn a lot during this experience. That I have not been challenging myself enough and I am not having fun at work and just doing work for the sake of work. I need to make a change happen so I get to work on some challenging stuff.
I had picked this project called Agaram foundation which funds college education for the under-privileged in India. It is based on Chennai and started by a celebrity called Surya. They had 4 components, and 4 sub-groups were assigned to solve each of those. Knowledge sharing/searching for resources in their knowledge database, discussion forums, scanning application forms of students, and video translation. Out of all of them, the video translation part seemed like it would involve some coding and since I wanted some challenge, I picked that up. The task was to translate an English video into Tamil text so we display Tamil text as captions instead of English.
The first day I attended, I realized what an archaic world I was living in, while the world moved on to whole another world. I did not know ABCs of cognitive services, that Microsoft offered, or the MVC Web apps. The first MVC app I built years ago was based on ASP.NET and it was way different from the C# web app architecture our team decided to use. I even had challenges accessing my dev machine from my laptop, so no access to any resources that I may need, and couldn't even open anything as I didn't have VS 2017 installed. So the first day was all setup. So by the end of the day, all I got to, was to install VS, download some cognitive services samples and play with them to see how it works.
Next day (yesterday) was about creating an MVC web app and creating a page with a simple video and adding code to call the API to send the audio and render the translated text that is returned. But for some reason, it was recording the video but not playing the text. Today, with a few tweaks, and adding some async/await calls, it started working. However, it still had some lag and was not recognizing English to so well from audio. So we decided to skip the demo and go with screenshots. But I did learn a lot during this experience. That I have not been challenging myself enough and I am not having fun at work and just doing work for the sake of work. I need to make a change happen so I get to work on some challenging stuff.
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