Cloudinary API? The first time I heard about that was just before the hackathon at Ashesi University, probably because I’m a newbie in programming, which didn't put me off, however I was intrigued and eager to find out more.

To meet the requirement of the hackathon, I had to register on the Hackathon.io site, created a Cloudinary account and activated my Github account. I then read through the information on the site. Wait a minute! Did I see almost all the programming languages in use on Cloudinary? Yes! PHP, Python, .Net, Ruby—in fact, virtually any language that you can name. That was enough encouragement for me to sign up for the API competition at the hackathon. “My team not win but I’d like to explore ideas anyway and will for sure learn a lot,” I said to myself. And my word, did I ever.

On the day of the competition, the technical guys responsible for setting up the place and ensuring that the WIFI is running got everything in place right on time and boom! Our team, called Pro.View, immediately started hacking away according to the instructions. A distinct advantage we had was that many of our members excelled in exploring the tools on the Cloudinary platform. I took that opportunity to learn about Cloudinary and wow! You not only can upload images and videos from your browser to the cloud but can also seamlessly access them afterwards? With those amazing capabilities, you can seamlessly manipulate your images or videos at will and on the fly. That’s impressive indeed.

Another thing I like about the Cloudinary API is its ability to create images from text—a tremendous help for front-end developers. Cloudinary also offers numerous other capabilities for managing the images and videos that you upload. As far as I can tell, the Cloudinary API is an ideal place in which you can actively manage uploaded digital assets—a virtual home in which those assets are being constantly optimized through integrations and add-ons by Cloudinary.

With all the knowledge in mind,other teams presented their ideas.One of the teams proposed developing an app called “M.T” for which videos and tutorials would be helpful for students. Yet another team advocated the capture of voice speech by Microsoft Word as a document, which you can then edit for upload to the cloud. Isn't that a powerful and useful tool?

In addition, my team “Pro.View” (https://github.com/Khophi-And-Khode) came up with the idea of developing a web app for displaying images of both foreign and locally manufactured food products including soft drinks and food supplements for review and comments by viewers such as certified system authorities including the FDA’s and other related authorities. In this case, viewers can also request for a product review by filling a form on the platform which requires an upload of the product image for review.

Below are the images of the application interface:

The rest of the teams also put forth other creative proposals, all well thought-out and practical.

Finally, a big shout-out to the hackathon organizers, who stormed the event with their love and passion for software development. I can still recall Ore Ogundipe , the Cloudinary Mentor, repeatedly urging us: “Feel free to think out of the box, guys. If you need help, just let me know.” He was truly supportive and friendly. I’d met him before when he was serving as an organizer of forLoop Africa but wasn’t acquainted with his warmth, openness, and congeniality. Ore, thank you so much for your humility, patience, and willingness to coach us hackathon participants with all your resources in crowning the event a success.

Not the least, to @the_wanamaker gentle guy, Eugene (@_musebe ), the ambassador of CodeLn she is one beautiful lady, Wayne
(@wayne_gakuo )the Ashesi icon, and all the others who made the hackathon a win-win, great job well done! This hackathon was truly one of the best hackathon I’ve ever attended. It got everyone talking about it for days on end.