owengretzinger/mlh-top-hackers-2020-2023 huggingface dataset:
Drew Emery

During Drew’s freshman year in engineering, he absolutely despised coding in MATLAB. He didn’t do well in the class, he didn’t understand the point of what they were doing, and he swore off coding midway through the semester under the guise of “This information is simply not useful.”

He didn't understand what could be usefully accomplished through coding. It was at this point that he posed the following question to his roommate, Alex (a computer science major): “how do I order a pizza with code?” Neither of them knew the answer. The question stuck with him and he would look over Alex’s shoulder and ask him about his homework the duration of their freshman year. Coding kept him questioning everything that was happening behind the scenes from ordering coffee online to Alexa telling him a joke.

For his birthday, Alex got Drew a freshman textbook in Python. He immediately started working through the textbook. After becoming relatively comfortable with the syntax of Python, he still didn't understand how to do anything useful with code.

In the fall of his sophomore year, he got an email about an event that was taking place for the first time on campus: CUhackit. He talked Alex into going with him since he was a computer science major and he figured, worst-case scenario, he could just piggyback off of Alex’s abilities if he became hopelessly lost. They made a side-scroller video game using pygame. While their project was simple, he saw all of the other amazing projects that came out of the weekend and fell in love.

After seeing all of the incredible projects that were made under the same time constraint,  Drew was inspired to continue learning more after the event. Alex and Drew had so much fun at the event that the organizers asked them to join the organizing team and he has loved working with the hacker community ever since.

As an organizer, Drew’s main goal is to help others discover the same excitement for learning that he found through hackathons. He loves walking around the events and checking in on groups, offering support in any way he can. Whether that means providing suggestions or pointing them towards resources, he will do everything he can to make sure that attendees are having fun and getting something out of the event.

At VandyHacks in the Fall of 2018, Drew made his favorite project, Hip Empathy Friend. His friends from the organizing team and him made a Twitter bot that would try to empathize with other Twitter users. The program would ingest tweets and perform sentiment analysis on the text. They would then find a sentence that had a similar sentiment and respond to their tweet with it. It was a really fun project because they ended up making a couple of their own API in order to get the project to fetch information. VandyHacks has a special place in his heart because it was the first time he felt powerful enough in Python that he could contribute and was able to work with his team in order to make their scripts work together seamlessly.
Harrison Luo

Harrison attended his first hackathon during his freshman year at University of Kansas when his mentor Ashley, the hackathon director, suggested he attend. There, he and a couple of friends created a game using the programming language, Lua. His team was completely surprised when they found out they finished second at the HackKU.

His sophomore year, Harrison ended up attending more and more hackathons and happily worked on the organizing team for HackKU. When the event wrapped, he was disappointed to find that there had been a drop off in attendance. The previous year, there were 170 hackers and now, there were only 50. Motivated to give back to the hacker community, Harrison was elected as director of HackKU 2018.

When he started organizing, he quickly learned that the reason there had been a drop off in attendance was because many of the experienced organizers had graduated, leaving the current organizers without adequate mentorship. In an effort to learn more about the planning process, he traveled to Hack K-State to learn from Mary Siebert, an organizer, about best practices and how she went organized her event.

As a result, he and his team were able to raise attendance from 50 to 240 hackers! An incredible improvement from the previous year. The University of Kansas went from an unranked school to 25th in the League. Harrison was able to give a talk at Hackcon VII on how to market a hackathon in the Midwest.

To this day, Harrison feels that organizing a hackathon was the most rewarding experience in his life. It was incredible for him to put in hours of work and see it culminate in an event and the direct impact it had on the attendees. Following the hackathon, several hackers emailed Harrison sharing the happy news that they had received internships from sponsors at his event.

With all of his experience from hackathons, Harrison has been able to land internships and co-ops at companies such as Dell working with RSA security, Garmin International, and Spreetail. In addition to these, he is in the Self Engineering Leadership Fellowship (SELF), a program where engineering students and business students develop their leadership skills through visiting speakers and courses.

His favorite project is from Hack K-State 2019 where he and his friends created their startup, Applican.ai, a platform that matches technical students with internship opportunities based on cultural and technical fits. After working on it at a hackathon, his team decided to make it more than just a “project.” They are currently in the development stage and working towards a full launch in the spring of 2020.
Justin Glibert

Justin had just moved from Belgium to the United Kingdom to start university when he came in contact with the hacker community. An exciting new world was ahead of him and he really wanted to build something. Great tales of success from biographies like "Masters of Doom" were still bumping in his head after his last high school summer. When a new college friend told him about a "Hackathon" in Glasgow, just next to Edinburgh, he found himself intrigued. He went there and won first prize for his product and since then, he has been addicted to the hackathon experience.

Hackathons brought so much amazing color to his life from new friends to new skills to internships. In the summer of 2018, Justin went to San Francisco to be a research intern at an AI startup. He had stepped outside of his comfort zone and was the only European on the team. As far as he knew, he also was the only person without a paper published in his name or a degree from MIT. What he did have that made him stand out was his experiences at hackathons and a determination to work hard and learn.

After a lot of hustling, he received an invite to interview with one of the founders. He was the director of BattleCode at MIT and he had great respect for the hacker ethos and culture. They had a great conversation and a few technical interviews later, Justin was offered the job.

Two months into the internship, the other intern, who had worked at OpenAI before and lots of research experience under his belt, asked why they had hired Justin during a dinner. The founder’s response was, “I could feel that Justin was a hacker. I could feel it in my bones.”

At his internship, Justin was able to attend conventions such as the Anime Expo and show off the experiment that he and his co-intern had been working on. The company built an AI that generated characters for video games and board games.

As a senior at the University of Edinburgh, Justin is working on many projects. He is currently developing a new project related to differentiable programming and robotics, growing his SaaS platform for notaries in Belgium, and working on the AI platform, Clearcall, with his friends.

His favorite hackathon project was from the second year of his hacking career, after gathering a lot of experience. He decided he wanted to finally build something people would use after the hack. He went to a hackathon in Manchester during the winter and he built a werewolf/mafia game online that was sleek and fun. He won first prize and the entire hacking team (15+ people) from Edinburgh played for the entirety of their three-hour train ride home.
Juraj Mičko

In the spring of 2017, Juraj came across the opportunity to attend a hackathon called HackPrague. His friends and he stayed up late working to make sure their applications were impeccable and they were thrilled when they found out they had been accepted. He had learned a lot of exciting things about hackathons from the exciting projects, cool swag from sponsors, and to learn new things.

The project their team invented and worked on is called SummApp. It's an Android app that records spoken words during calls, transcribes them into text, processes the content, and suggests a list of contextual actions after the call. For example, if two people agree to meet at a specific time, it automatically adds the event to the calendar. This app was awarded 2nd place overall and won the "most innovative UX for mobile event discovery" prize by LondonTheatreDirect company for suggesting events related to the content of phone calls. Their team was so motivated that they continued working on it over the summer and released the app to Play Store for beta testers. They also started a collaboration with LondonTheatreDirect and presented them with future plans. Even though the project has finished, their team learned lots about teamwork, problem-solving, and time management.

Juraj was energized by his experience at HackPrague and spent time searching for other hackathons to attend. After the summer of 2017, Juraj attended numerous hackathons in different EU countries, many of them being MLH Member Events. Inspired by other hackers, he decided to start Hack Kosice, the first MLH Member Event in Slovakia. While a small organizing team at first, they eventually grew into a caring family of ~25 organizers whose mission is to build out a hacker community in Central Europe. In its first year, they were able to grow the club and empower 160 hackers!

Even though Juraj is not sure what he will do once he completes his master’s degree and graduates, he still wants to be connected to technology, working with people, and being a part of a passionate team. Attending hackathons and leading Hack Kosice has shown him what he wants to do with his life.
Andy Du Ly

Andy’s interest in a career in computer science was sparked in his sophomore year of high school. Having had a passion for computers since he was little, he was excited to have time free up in high school for CS courses. After this, he started researching ways to advance his tech skills and encountered the term 'hackathon' countless times. His interest sparked, Andy and his friend Stephen decided to put themselves out there and try attending one.

After getting cold feet a few times when looking at hackathons they would need to travel to, they heard about Local Hack Day nearby and no longer had an excuse not to go. Despite their first hackathon being 12 hours instead of 24+, they loved every minute of the experience and ended up coming in third place with their app idea.

In many ways, Andy believes you can look at hackathons like previews into an industry career. You're working in a fast-paced environment under heavy time constraints with a team. You're ultimately put in a situation where what you put in is what you get out without high stakes. He comments on the vast amount of hackers he has met who were not computer science or engineering discipline majors, and he believes there is value in attending events such as hackathons simply because there is no sufficient reason not to.

Andy is currently a sophomore at Western University where he is pursuing a degree in computer science. He has interned at companies working as a software intern and project manager. Andy currently serves as a full stack developer at benchMarked Studios.

His favorite project is from BostonHacks 2018 where his team and he developed (then called) ParknGo, a full-stack web application platform that they pitched as the 'Airbnb of Parking Spots.' Their passion for the project never died once it sparked in the initial hours of the weekend, and they ended up winning several awards, most significantly, the Boston University Spark! Fellowship. ParknGo became Parkaze, and under the Spark Fellowship, the platform was further researched, developed, and eventually shipped to market, where it continues to be improved and expanded to this day. Aside from the tremendous growth and potential in the project, Parkaze was his favorite project thus far as it helped him to see how real the potential to turn ideas into realities become at events such as hackathons. Had he never boarded the sponsored bus from Canada all the way to Boston, Massachusetts for 10+ hours, and met his team, the platform and app’s ability to crowdsource their parking solutions might not exist today.
Lia Yeh

Lia attended her first hackathon at Tino Local Hack Day in 2014 while in high school. It was there that she noticed that she was the only girl from her high school in attendance which terrified her. She continued to see a lack of women in her 250+ hours of class and ~500 hours of lab research at her university. This feeling that had once been fear turned into determination to bring more women into the field.

During her time at UC Santa Barbara, Lia made active strides to make computer science a more gender-inclusive place. She worked to educate her local community by teaching workshops to middle school and high school girls. This is where she met Sarina Abrishamcar, another volunteer, who shared her feelings of intimidation when it came to attending hackathons. Together, they decided to start a hackathon for women called WomxnHacks. It was then that she felt she truly joined the hacker community.

WomxnHacks aims to create a welcoming place for female-identifying and non-gender conforming college students. Lia emphasizes that when they started WomxnHacks, “it was the first time I got to hear a female software engineer share her story, organize two technical workshops run by queer students, and see around 200 female-identifying and non-gender-conforming college students coding in the same room.” They work to make the content beginner-friendly as they are aware that the male majority intimidates many into entering the field.

Having spent much of her time in a male-dominated environment, Lia was on the receiving end of many odd looks when she said she wanted to be a quantum computer scientist. While familiar with such scrutiny, she channeled her frustrations into a comic which she shared out on her UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Research blog. It is through WomxnHacks that she feels most empowered and gets to raise up those around her. At WomxnHacks 2020, she will be running a Qiskit workshop which will also prepare her for the 2-unit full-stack quantum computation seminar she will be leading in the Spring.

Her favorite project comes from when she attended AthenaHacks 2019 and worked on a Ruby on Rails app. The app helps friends keep track of their and others’ blood alcohol content. This project is meaningful to Lia because it is a relevant topic for all college students to consider as college partying continues to be a problem seen on many campuses. While this project challenged her in various ways, it ended up winning the best Ruby on Rails hack. This was humbling to receive as she appreciated how hard her team worked to put together a project in such a short turnaround time, despite still having tons of bugs with the actual hack.
Muntaser Syed

Muntaser first found out about hackathons by showing up for free food at a Local Hack Day, something many of us are guilty of. There, he found the concept fascinating and he attended the next hackathon, KnightHacks, which got him hooked. The following semester, he helped organize a couple of small local hackathons and hosted impromptu workshops as a mentor.

Muntaser feels like hackathons and the hacker community have helped him grow tremendously as a person, as a student and most importantly, as a team player.

Muntaser has accomplished quite a lot since starting his hacker journey. Receiving his Bachelor of Science in Information Technology at the University of Miami, Muntaser went on to get a Master of Science in Computer Science from Abu Dhabi University, his Postgraduate Diploma in Software Engineering at University of Bradford, and his Masters of Science in Computer Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology.

He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology and works as an Autonomous Systems Architect at Aeronyde Corporation.

When asked what his favorite hackathon project was, he compared it to asking a parent which child is their favorite. In his last semester, one of his favorite projects was built at Pitt Challenge 2019. He showed up alone with no expectations. Within 24 hours, five complete strangers (four of whom were first-time hackers) got together around a great idea that addressed the issue of dental hygiene among the general population. They built a smart brush, floss holder, and data aggregator that analyzed and recommended better brushing and flossing habits. The solution worked after a lot of hard work and sleep deprivation. Part of what made their team work so well is they all had different backgrounds. Their team was comprised of a dental student, a business major, a CS major, a CE major and Muntaser. Together, they were able to use their combined knowledge to build a unique product which resulted in them winning first place.
Zoe Fox

Zoe entered the world of hackathons as a volunteer for nwHacks during her first year at university. As anyone who has attended nwHacks can all attest to, the energy is quite infectious. After just one, she was hooked and applied to be on the organizing team for the next year.

She hit the ground running and organized three more nwHacks, working in various roles including director. She went on to become president of nwPlus, the organization and club that facilitates events for tech enthusiasts. During her presidency, she rebranded the club which was previously known as StartupStorm and helped to make it the go-to organization for all things hacker related.

It was then that she worked to expand the amount of coding opportunities nwPlus offered to students. She worked with the UBC Local Hack Day organizers to learn how she could better support their efforts, promoted hackathons where students could get travel reimbursements on social platforms, and worked on helping to expose more people to hackathons.

This is what led to the creation of cmd-f, Vancouver’s first all-female* (*and non-gender-conforming) hackathon. It was founded with three core values in mind: Women* helping women*, building confidence and positive STEM identities, and learning. Putting it together in a little over a month, the event had over 150+ hackers and was a success.

Zoe has never completed a hackathon project but hopes that cmd-f counts. Zoe explains, “I founded cmd-f in the hopes that this event could help women* find a community, find their confidence and passion in the tech industry, and really, just find a place that helps them learn.” Through hackathons, Zoe has found a passion for education and building communities.
Nigel Brown

Nigel saw that access was a problem for many of his classmates. It was taxing for a student to keep up with coursework, apply, and travel to far off competitions. This realization inspired Nigel to put together one of his own local events.

With the help of a few of his friends, they started a club at their school and got to work planning their own event, Local Hack Day. Nigel brought in speakers from their network and brought together tech enthusiasts from his community.  He was given the opportunity to speak about those experiences at Hackcon and even offered a role as GitHub Campus Expert.

Nigel has since hosted a Local Hack Day, spoke at Hackcon, and has become a GitHub Campus Expert. He won an award from IBM that led to an internship and eventually, turned into a co-op. Nigel was asked to intern at one of their upcoming hackathons on his campus. He stayed afterward to mentor other hackers. This excitement about teaching others inspired him to leave the University of California, San Diego, to work as a Developer Advocate at IBM which he had been referred to by one of the mentors that day.

His favorite project that he has worked on was Safety Net. This idea was meant to help people, like Nigel, that had struggled with mental health, to better monitor their mood using IBM Watson’s Speech to Text and Sentiment Analysis APIs. If audio detected that a person’s mood was continually low it would send a notification to the streamer that it appeared they were in crisis and give them access to resources.
Lisa Vu

Lisa joined the hacker community during her first semester in college. As a person with some competitive programming experience but without having built any projects yet, she was looking to go outside of her comfort zone. So, she packed her bag, booked a train to Maryland, and joined her first hackathon ever at UMBC. Lisa made her favorite hackathon project there. She arrived at the event having no teammates and only one project idea: a historical stock visualizer. Although it probably was an idea that had been tackled multiple times, freshman year Lisa was very confident pitching it to a bunch of strangers in order to form a team to build it.  They formed and ended up using Java and JavaFX to bring her idea to life.

After UMBC, she realized that hackathons allowed her to learn a lot over a short period of time. She found herself going to HackWITus and SheHacks in the 2018 season and falling in love with the experience all over again.

In the spring of 2018, Lisa applied to become an organizer. She worked as an organizer for BostonHacks and TechTogether Boston and had the opportunity to cater to the hackathon experience to two different groups of hackers.

Lisa credits the hacker community with helping to give her a common ground between herself and other students. As an international student, hackathons provided an immediate connection with her peers.

Having graduated from college in December 2019 after 2.5 years in school, a lot of her growth in college came from being an organizer. She learned a lot of soft skills that she wouldn't otherwise have learned in a traditional CS classroom, especially around how to be more confident in communicating with others. She also gained an incredible network of friends and supporters across the US that she can always rely on.