Student hackers cracked the code in Coates Hall this weekend for Louisiana’s first student hackathon, GeauxHack.
The event opened with a presentation from GeauxHack organizers Howard Wang and Samantha Fadrigalan, students were asked to raise their hands if they were participating in their first hackathon.
Nearly every hand in the room shot up.
Wang and Fadrigalan are in the College of Engineering’s Society of Peer Mentors, and members of this organization were present to serve as resources for novice hackers. Wang said mentors made sure hackers succeeded and learned something from the experience.
Fadrigalan said highly competitive computer programming competitions have been popular in Louisiana for a long time, and computer science students are challenged to solve as many problems as they can as fast as they can using code.
“Teams don’t really mingle that much with other teams, but here, even though we do have prizes, and we do have awards, they don’t really think about that,” Fadrigalan said. “They think more about the experience.”
Wang said GeauxHack is the first opportunity many Louisiana student computer programmers have had to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in a creative environment.
“We want to transform all of these students from competent students to developers, to actual coders, people who go into the industry and maybe even start their own company,” Wang said.
Wang and Fadrigalan also introduced GeauxHack’s sponsors. Several sponsor representatives took the stage and explained the various application programming interfaces available for hackers to integrate into their hacks.
In addition to the cash prizes and Dell tablets being awarded by Major League Hacking to first, second and third place winners, many sponsors offered prizes for the hack that best integrated their application programming interface. These prizes ranged from mini drones offered by SendGrid to a 10,188 piece Death Star Lego set offered by PayPal.
Major League Hacking co-founder Jonathan Gottfried described hackathon judging as a subjective process and said judges take into account that hackers are attempting to accomplish major programming feats in a limited amount of time.
“Basically, you’re looking for something that’s compelling and creative,” Gottfried said. “You want to see something that is technically complex, is outside of the box, that is potentially really useful and really fun.”
Other sponsors took the stage with presentations that offered hackers a different kind of incentive — internships.
“Even though hackathons are not essential, and they’re not mandatory, it’s recently becoming the best way for companies to find their new employees,” Fadrigalan said. “It’s very, very efficient because the people that come here, they’re the driven folks, the ones that actually want to make something, not just As.”
These sponsors also play an important role in the overall quality of the hackathon. Experienced hacker Rafael Moreno, computer science junior from Texas A&M University and organizer of TAMUHack, has attended hackathons with as many as 1,200 hackers and said larger hackathons often drop in quality.
“When you come to a smaller one, the food is a lot better because, you know, budget just kind of allows for that because you’re buying it for less people, and companies sometimes just can’t cater to the massive amounts of people that they try to get,” Moreno said.
Wang said the culture was one of the most important hackathon elements he wanted to bring with him to the South after attending his first hackathon, HackMIT.
“What I saw was that hackathon as a programming competition was not about competition,” Wang said. “It’s very community oriented as you can probably see from the opening ceremony.”
Gottfried, the final presenter, demonstrated this sentiment when he gathered sponsors and hackers in the center of the room to film a FIFA-inspired “I believe that we will we hack” video.
Students took to their assigned rooms with their game faces on as the clock struck noon to begin the 24 hour coding marathon.
Within the first few hours, novice hacker Anthony Morales, business administration sophomore from Delgado Community College, said the experience was challenging as his team worked to set up a foundation for their project.
Hackers from Southern Methodist University included Gavin Pham, a computer science sophomore, and Conrad Appel, a computer engineering sophomore, who described a hackathon as a competition that no one really understands, but everyone is working together to figure out.
“I mean, we can like get help from these people that like know the product inside out, so we can learn how to use it and make something cool in 24 hours and win some money,” said University hacker Brian Stutzman an electrical engineering sophomore.
Wang said hackathons are an interdisciplinary learning experience that brings the hardware and the software together.
“The computer science department recently, or a couple years ago, moved from the College of Science to the College of Engineering, so you see there is this shift in focus from research to industry, and we think this is a great way to bridge that gap,” Wang said.
College of Engineering peer mentor and electrical engineering senior Jacob Cook said the electrical engineering and computer science departments have been aware of each other, but they have recently begun merging into a single organization.
Cook is the president of the University’s student branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He said efforts are being made to encourage electrical engineering students to attend computer science organizational meetings to learn about coding and, in turn, teach computer science students about the electrical engineering department.
“This hackathon, we actually have about 12 members of the IEEE who came today who are trying to learn more programming stuff,” Cook said.