Leviathan's Ledger: My First Hackathon at Hack The Future

I had the opportunity to participate in my first ever hackathon, Hack The Future, where I teamed up with Sara-Amelia Bilic for the challenge "Leviathan's Ledger" organized by OnCore. It turned out to be an incredibly engaging and technically rewarding experience.

Our task involved working with 19th-century sailing ledgers that had been digitized into PDFs, but the data inside was completely unstructured, coordinates, dates, weather notes, and handwritten remarks were all mixed together. To extract meaningful information, we used an open API key to process the documents with GPT-5 Mini, which allowed us to structure and clean the entries.

Once the data was organized, we converted everything into GeoJSON, making it easy to parse and visualize. From there, we built an interactive dashboard using Vue.js and Mapbox, displaying each ship's route on a 3D globe along with all relevant historical metadata.

I'm proud to share that we secured 4th place 🎇 in our challenge with a score of 77%, a result we're really happy with, especially for our first hackathon.

A huge thank you to the organizers and mentors for the support and inspiring environment. I'm excited to take part in more hackathons and continue growing through these experiences.