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About the project
This is a Python project that uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the web and get the best basketball news delivered to your inbox!
Originality
Has this project been done before at hackathons in the past?
We don’t know. However, this is our first web-scraping project where we used the power of python (as taught in the CapitalOne workshop; and our skill sets to provide a service that is useful to basketball fans.
How creative is their project in solving the problem at hand?
Email Newsletters are one of the best channels for developing a stronger relationship with subscribers; and according to many marketing experts is still useful.. Our aim was to deliver value to basketball fans by entertaining, educating, and engaging them in the form of a newsletter; which I think we achieved.
Adherence to Theme
Does the hack adhere to the event's theme?
For a basketball 🏀 hackathon, I think the project is perfect considering the limited time we had and our amateur level experience.
Does it implement that theme fully or just partially?
It’s up to MLH’s esteemed judges to decide that, but we’d opine that a Basketball news service does adhere to a basketball themed hackathon. :)
Completion
Does the hack work?
Yes. Please check out the demo video and the screenshots for the same.
Did the team achieve everything they wanted?
Well, in the limited time we had with teammates across different timezones, I’d say we did and we are very proud to finish this project and deliver a functional service.
Learning
Did the team stretch themselves?
Yes, as beginners to python we did. Spending hours going through resources and solving the challenges we faced - (multiple errors in our code, not being able to use Twilio or Google (initially) and having a tough time collaborating over the web in different countries.) However, stretching ourselves and stepping out of our comfort zones turned out to be really valuable.
Did they try to learn something new?
Yes, we did learn the different python libraries we used like BeautifulSoup; and Google’s suite of developer tools like Colab and Google Mail.
What kind of projects have they worked on before?
One of our teammates - Kanha - has only done web-dev projects till now while the other is a total beginner to hackathons and python. Hence, doing this project was a great learning experience too.
Design
Did the team put thought into the user experience? Yes, we used a beautiful framework named Bulma to provide basketball fans with neatly designed newsletters in their inbox, instead of the crappy ones you’d want to unsubscribe from.
How well designed is the interface?
There isn’t much to the interface than the newsletter template I talked about earlier, but we did write clean code and made a great template. Perhaps we could have done better if we had more time.
Technology
How technically impressive was the hack?
This is for the judges to decide, but for beginners like us, it was very impressive and we felt a sense of accomplishment after achieving this.
Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components?
Yes, in order to enter the Google Cloud Category, we used Google Colab, Google Cloud, Google Drive and Google Mail and found all of them impressive and flawless.

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