TextFlex

Inspiration

"Weird flex, but okay." Our university's CareerLab provides a list of buzzwords for use in our resumes. Many of them sound downright ridiculous, and we were inspired to write a program that would make our writing similarly buzz. While we love our CareerLab, we wanted to point out the shortcomings of jamming in "utilize" at all possible moments.

What it does

Takes in text to be flexed upon. Parses the text and uses an API to find synonyms for the words. Compares the synonym to our own pre-determined list of 'flexy' words. We chose these words based on the suggestions of Brown University's Career Lab and our own favourite histrionic synonyms for some of the most commonly used words in the English Language.

How we built it

Python, WordsAPI, HTML, CSS

Challenges we ran into

We wrote our code in Python 3, but Google Cloud works with Python 2.7. We had to change app.yaml to make Google Cloud Platform compatible with Python 3. Additionally, the word API we used only includes present-tense verbs. So, we had trouble changing verbs in other tenses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon, so we are proud that we accomplished our goal and made it through the weekend.

What we learned

We learned a lot because of this project. Some of us had never used Python before, so were were happy to get experience in that language. Additionally, we got experience using HTML, CSS, and web hosting using Google Cloud Platform, which was also new for some of us.

What's next for TextFlex

We want to fix the verb tenses, increase the number of flex words, and optimize the run-time. Ideally, we would eventually use machine learning to improve TextFlex.