A Quickstart Guide to Hackathons

Web Development

This is the most common way to create apps, using centralized data and computation and convenient graphical user interfaces.

The web technologies that were originally developed for the creation of Geocities pages and mailing list address forms eventually broke containment and infiltrated every single facet of the modern graphical user interface-based world.

Generally, to use them, you need to create a backend server application that can store data, make itself available on a network, and usually do most of the actual work that the thing you're making needs to do. When a web browser (aka a client) connects to it, the backend server will send client-side code to the browser that will tell the browser what to display to the user. The server application is known as the backend; the client-side code is called the frontend.

Popular backend/frontend combos:

Follow-up points:

• Yes, there are several zillion web development frameworks. We'll come up with one that leaves your sanity intact eventually.
• Note that you need to download Node.js to run JavaScript outside of the browser just like you need to download Python to run Python.
• Backend code can be written in any language that has a library that lets you communicate over a network. Even C++! But usually not C++.
• You don't need backend code if you just stick frontend code in HTML files and open them with your web browser, but that does make it pretty much impossible to do things like persist data or communicate with an API over the Internet.
• Frontend code must be written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript because those are the languages web browsers understand.

APIs

API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is a very broad term that can refer to any agreed-upon system for enabling two computer programs or libraries to interact in a constructive way.

A lot of the time, though, an API is going to turn out to be a service that provides structured data over the Internet. A classic example is the OpenWeather API. You can create an API call, which in this case requires you to identify yourself using a unique API key that you got by making an account with the service, and your program will get back data in some specified format like JSON or XML that informs it what the weather is, was, or is predicted to be in a certain area.

This is essentially a backend web server that responds to network requests with raw data, instead of with client-side code that creates a graphical user interface.

Often, libraries exist that provide pre-programmed ways to request data from any given API, like this Python library that lets you get weather data with simple function calls.

Here is a big list I found that encompasses many web APIs.

Artificial Intelligence

This term typically refers to technology that can make sense out of the ambiguities involved in natural phenomena like language or images in a probabilistic way.

Training brand new models

Although getting new machine learning models working takes quite a bit of ambition and patience, it is interesting to see how computers can turn data into the appearance of intelligence.

• TensorFlow: Google's ML library.
• PyTorch: Popular in academia and industry.

Note that Google Colab and Kaggle both provide Jupyter Notebook-based Python environments.

Apps!

Native, installable apps can benefit in speed, look, and feel from being built to run on a specific kind of device.