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Ashraful Alam
Ashraful Alam

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How I Won Hacktoberfest: Building StudySnap in One Day πŸ†

 I won at Hacktoberfest Hack Day Chittagong β€” and everything, from the idea to the deployed app, happened in a single day at the event.

The idea

When the rulebook landed β€” campus/study problems only, open-weight models only β€” I brainstormed around a simple frustration: studying from handwritten notes is painful. That became StudySnap: snap a photo of your notes, get a summary and a quiz.

What I built in ~4 hours

StudySnap turns a photo of handwritten notes or lecture slides into:

  • A summary in Bangla or English (toggle)
  • An interactive quiz generated strictly from the notes β€” every question cites the exact note line it came from
  • Follow-up Q&A grounded in the same notes

One vision call to Gemma 4 does the heavy lifting: photo in, structured JSON out. Stack: Next.js, Prisma, Supabase, deployed on Vercel. No auth β€” device-based history, because there was no time for login flows.

The win

StudySnap won at Hacktoberfest Hack Day Chittagong (IEEE Computer Society IIUC Γ— IIUC DES Γ— MLH). Certificate below πŸ‘‡

What I learned

  1. Read the rulebook first. Everything flows from the constraints.
  2. Constraints are a feature. "Campus problems only, open models only" shaped a sharper idea.
  3. Speed beats perfection. A shipped quiz with source citations beats a perfect plan that never launches.
  4. Free-tier tools will betray you at the worst moment. Have a fallback ready.

πŸ”— Try it: https://studysnapiiuc.vercel.app

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