GitHub Copilot 1-Day Challenge: Ode - an application to generate a poem (with a twist)

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This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot Challenge : Transitions and Transformations

What I Built

For this challenge, I wanted to explore the space of sentiment analysis. Knowing full well that I only had one day, I opted for generating feelings instead of parsing through large data sets. Ode is an application that takes in a small set of inputs and outputs a small creative writing piece to meditate and reflect on. One fun twist is that if you switch to dark mode, you can generate a negative sentiment poem instead :)

What you think and how you think is critical to the output (in poems and life), so I wanted to make a toy project to externalize positive and negative sentiments in the form of little poems. Enjoy!

Demo

https://odeapp.netlify.app/
Demo video: https://youtu.be/jMySscrpRbM

Sample poem generated (can generate and export image):

Repo

Backend: https://github.com/MelisaIm/Ode_backend
Frontend: https://github.com/MelisaIm/ode_app

Copilot Experience

I used Copilot to explore what tools I could use to quickly deploy, for autocompletion, for quick debugging ideas, to learn about libraries I hadn't used in the past, to remember how to run specific commands, and to simply ask how to do something I hadn't done recently or ever. Most of the backend development felt awkward and confusing at first, but Copilot made re-discovery easy, especially cors related issues.

GitHub Models

I used Github Models to compare versions of ChatGPT/OpeanAI for similar queries. I opted for the smaller/cheaper model because the output wasn't that much better.

Conclusion

The last time I did a 24hr hackathon was over 5 years ago and I distinctly remember feeling overwhelmed (and we had a team of ~5). I built a fullstack application by myself (despite working primarily on the frontend and forgetting lots of backend concepts) without ever feeling rushed or worried because I was unblocked so quickly from any issue I ran into. This was thoroughly a wonderful experience and I'm glad I decided to try it out. Now I will keep building on the side, to play with ideas or technical concepts without fear of it swallowing my life!