It’s Guelph day! I got to Guelph in the early afternoon, around 1:30pm and met up with David and Claire at their house near the University of Guelph, where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom.
After hanging out for a bit as a group, Claire had a few meetings to do, so David suggested he and I go climbing. He’s big into climbing (bouldering, mostly) and so was happy to show me the ropes at his local climbing gym. Because he didn’t have a guest pass to use, I did have to pay my way in which with shoes ended up being about $30. After a safety introduction by one of the staff members, we climbed for about an hour and a half with David walking me through the process and giving me feedback along the way. Despite not feeling like I was doing very well, he was insistent that I was which was good for my motivation.
After climbing, we headed home around 4:30pm, where we picked up Claire and walked across the road to Montana’s for dinner. David and Claire got wings since it was half price wing night, and I got chicken strips because I’m boring like that. Fun fact, Montana’s is seemingly a Canadian exclusive restaurant! We looked it up and there doesn’t seem to be any in the place you’d expect, Montana!
Claire had earlier had the idea to do a hackathon, basically an event where you set a time limit (6 hours, a day, whatever you want), then come up with an idea and make that idea a reality within that time frame. It’s mostly for programming projects, but the concept could work for anything really. During dinner we came up with our idea, broke it down into smaller tasks, and tried to think of any challenges we might face along the way, and set ourselves a time limit of 2am to get a basic working example of our idea.
While I don’t want to write the full idea here given it’s a potentially marketable product, I’ll say it involves a custom trained machine learning model analyzing something to aid in the creation of something else. It’s not like AI generated imagery that makes something for you, but rather a tool to help aide in the creation of something.
After dinner we got home and wrote down all our thoughts on a whiteboard that Claire and I had found near a dumpster earlier in the day, and then we got to work. David and I each took a programming task while Claire worked on the marketing side and getting an interest form set up, along with helping us prioritize tasks and split the project into smaller chunks to work on. We worked all together for about 8 hours until we were all basically falling asleep around 2am, and while we didn’t get a finalized “MVP” (minimum viable product), we got all the components done separately and ready to be combined into one thing later.
All the while we were anxiously watching the CBC Election tracker as the Conservatives and the Liberals held a tight race to see who will lead the country for the next, well, unknown amount of time.
Deciding that was enough work for the day, we set up the air mattress I’d be sleeping on and called it a night.