Conner Pinson

Conner is from Huntingdon, Tennessee, a rural community with a total population of around 3000 people. With no programming classes or CS educational opportunities in general, Conner found himself stuck in his small town without resources readily available to him. However, he knew it was something he wanted to explore and sought out coding camps in Nashville and other "nearby" (4+ hour drives) metropolitan areas. He fell in love with it and decided to major in computer science when he started college at Vanderbilt. Conner attended his first hackathon in Fall 2016 and joined the organizer team for VandyHacks the very next year.

As an organizer, Conner was responsible for designing and delivering workshops and hackpacks for year-round events. He is also in charge of the flagship event, VandyHacks, in the fall. At the main event, he was able to deliver a beginner-focused Unity 3D workshop and mentor several groups, giving them advice on design methodologies and implementation steps.

Conner considers himself very privileged for the opportunity to learn computer science and programming considering his upbringing. This is what drew him to the hacker community. It's full of people who are just as passionate as him about spreading CS education to both beginners and veterans. He got involved with VandyHacks to teach workshops and mentor beginner hackers. He was in their shoes not too long ago and wanted to make sure that their first hackathon experience would be as welcoming as possible.

Through hackathons, Conner has learned how to be more collaborative. According to him, Vanderbilt’s CS education is very focused on individual projects and there aren’t many opportunities to work with others until your senior project course. He welcomed this change of pace found at hackathons and learned the collaborative Git workflow, how to brainstorm and storyboard application ideas, and, most importantly, how to divide and conquer the implementation of their application. Conner feels that in this regard, hackathons have prepared him for the workplace.

When Conner makes projects at hackathons, he tries to solve real-world problems, since that is what inspired him to go into the field in the first place. His favorite hackathon project is from CrimsonHacks 2019 where he and three other organizers from VandyHacks created TerraForm, a better viewer for Google Form responses. TerraForm was inspired by a need for a free, intuitive way to manage and evaluate candidates for college theater auditions. Conner had directed a musical for a student organization in Fall 2018 and the current solution of simply using Google Forms and Google Sheets to collect audition forms and comment on each member within the sheet led to large, cluttered, and simply unmanageable masses of data for their casting team. TerraForm organizes all of the audition forms in easy to see cards and allows multiple people to make comments that can be reviewed later and in real-time.

Working on this project was his first exposure to web development which he has since fallen in love with. His team was very patient with him adjusting to the React learning curve on the fly. TerraForm was actually used by his theater organization to manage auditions the next semester, which was very exciting for him.

A big milestone for Conner was speaking at MLH Hackcon VII where he discussed attracting non-STEM majors to hackathons, a topic he is fascinated by. Conner works to lower the barrier to entry for hackers so that anyone can attend VandyHacks and enjoy themselves, no matter their experience level.

Conner is currently a senior computer science student at Vanderbilt. He will be joining Capital One as a software developer in August after graduating.