owengretzinger/mlh-top-hackers-2020-2023 huggingface dataset:
Christopher Gu

Contrary to most, Christopher didn’t find himself thinking about joining a hacker community until after attending his first hackathon, GlobalHack 2016. He attended with Luis, his classmate from high school who he had only recently befriended upon going to the same university. It was at GlobalHack that Chris decided he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore. Having always loved the idea of turning ideas into reality, Chris changed his major from Pharmacy to Computer Science.

A few months later, Chris and Luis found out a hackathon would be happening at their campus and were thrilled. After attending, they found out that the previous organizer could not continue and the two of them had been asked to take on the task of organizing. The two decided to rebrand and thus, PickHacks became the first MLH member hackathon to happen at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Even after attending several events outside of their school, the duo still wasn’t sure how to go about planning a hackathon. They were aware of MLH and dove into the community for support. Chris attributes much of his organizer knowledge to the many peer groups he attended, conversations with other organizers, and experiences at other MLH member events. In one summer, Chris and Luis attended over 20 peer groups. With all of the help and their hard work, their event had over 300 students.

Chris has learned that he would like to move into a career in product management as opposed to software engineering. The skills he has gained through programming and organizing have led him to get a product management internship at Microsoft.

Looking back at where he was a couple of years ago, Chris is beyond grateful for all of those who mentored him and helped him to organize PickHacks. So now, as someone who has a bit more experience, Chris takes every opportunity to help other organizers in the community whether it be via messenger, video calls, or in-person meetups. He even goes so far as to share sponsorship contacts too even if it is a bit taboo because he knows what a big difference it can make.

In addition to his work as the co-founder and finance lead for PickHacks, Chris is the co-founder and vice president of his school’s Association for Computer Machinery chapter as well as the founder of Miner Key A Cappella.
Lily Perry

Lily’s computer science journey began in high school. She participated in the Girls Who Code program for several years and various STEM clubs. Lily’s interest in programming grew and led  to her first personal iOS project, Peacemon.

Through her work with the Girl Scouts of Hawaii, Lily attended the 61st Commission on the Status of Women as a United Nations Delegate in 2017. Discussions focused on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number five, Gender Equality. As she discussed the SDGs with global leaders, she realized the importance of involving youth, which led her to work on the app.

Peacemon is a fun game for youth to learn about the SDGs and inspires them to enact change in their communities. With a Hawaiian theme and SDG focus, Peacemon is a series of mini-games, each representing a different SDG. In one game, a taro-inspired character named Kalotar jumps over water in streams, filtering pollutants out of the water as it moves. The inspiration for Kalotar comes from taro, a plant ancient Hawaiians used to filter pollutants as water flowed through their ahupua’a (a unit in the Hawaiian system of land division). This app was the first iOS project Lily worked on. It taught her the basics of iOS app development. The skills she learned from working on Peacemon have proved invaluable to her throughout her hackathon journey thus far.

Lily attended her first hackathon during her freshman year. She looked forward to going because she wanted to create coding projects outside of the classroom with a collaborative team. Having previously worked on an iOS app by herself, she still enjoyed dabbling with Xcode in her free time. She found that hackathons provided an exciting and engaging way for her to continue her interest in app development while meeting interesting new people, networking with tech companies, and learning to use APIs from these companies. She loved her experiences from all six hackathons she attended in her freshman year and eagerly awaited the hackathons for the next year.

Lily’s favorite project from a hackathon is WeMove, an iOS app she co-developed to pair female users to walk over short distances when they would likely not call a Lyft or Uber but felt unsafe walking alone. The app is meant for female college students who feel unsafe walking from a library study session or a party back home at night or even for working women who need to walk a few blocks to a subway or bus stop after a late night at the office.  Her team and she were proud to win the Best Mobile App category sponsored by Zynga at AthenaHacks in Spring 2019 for their hard work on the project. She enjoyed working on WeMove because it allowed her to explore her passion for iOS app development and learn more about app design while creating a product that she could see herself using.

Lily is currently a sophomore at the University of Southern California studying computer science.
Allison Chiang

Allison felt daunted getting started as a computer science student at the University of British Columbia. She reached out to an old classmate from high school who was very involved in the local tech community. Seeking advice on how she could combat imposter syndrome, her friend introduced her to nwPlus, the UBC club behind UBC Local Hack Day, nwHacks, and cmd-f. Through this club, she discovered the hacker community which in turn helped her feel more secure about her technical abilities.

Having found a home within the UBC hacker community, Allison wanted to give back and joined as a coordinator. Ultimately she became the UBC Local Hack Day Director and an organizing team member for the 2020 Canadian Undergraduate Computer Science Conference. As an organizer, she works to bring diversity, inclusion, and accessibility to tech.

Her favorite project was still her first-ever hackathon project, acaMEDia which was named a top finalist. Having always been an organizer, her first time hanking was a memorable experience. This was her first hands-on contact with the hacker experience. She worked alongside two other developers where they took turns working on the project and attending workshops. They succeeded in demoing and were named one of the top six finalists.

Allison is currently working on co-op with one45 Software, a cloud-based solution for medical education management in North America. In all her work, Allison hopes to promote equity and inclusion to help others like she once was to feel comfortable and confident in the tech world.
Qianyun “Aria” Chang

Aria came to the United States by herself as an international student at the age of fifteen. She had to teach herself English and is proud to have completed her education on her own in another country and secured her dream job as a software engineer at MediaMath.

Aria’s exposure to the hacker community stemmed from a fascination in the math behind artificial intelligence, machine learning, and game AI algorithms. However, Aria lacked confidence as she had little experience in coding prior to her sophomore year of college. When she finally decided to take more computer science courses during her junior year, she felt behind compared to her peers. Soon, Aria found that she had nothing to worry about: she won two awards at her first hackathon at UC Berkeley.

Aria’s team worked with Google Cloud’s Speech to Text API and IBM’s Watson’s Sentiment Analysis API. It was a lot of work to get the project to track student’s learning progress, but it was worth it. Their project won the best education hack and CalHacks fellowship award. This gave Aria the validation and recognition she needed to continue pursuing computer science. Addicted to the high of winning, Aria started attending hackathons left and right.

Hackathons inspired Aria to jump into projects in unfamiliar domains. She has taken up multiple research projects with professors and created her own side projects. Hackathons also led her to an internship doing smart grid research. In this internship, she created the prototype for a deep reinforcement learning agent to control power grid settings and fix contingencies. The paper based on the model she created won her colleagues and her the best IEEE paper award. She received an offer from MediaMath for a full-time software engineering position on a data engineering team doing large scale machine learning projects.

Her favorite project came from her team at HackDavis when she worked with the Muse headband which utilizes brainwave detection. Their project Brainalyzer used the headband to record a user’s brain waves in order to detect abnormalities and predict seizures. They found a brainwave dataset and performed feature selection and created an LSTM model to predict brainwaves. This project won the best use of Google Cloud Platform.
Cameron Brill

A great part of college is that almost everything is within walking distance. TAMUhack was only a five-minute walk for Cameron. So naturally, he went to check it out.

TAMUhack changed his perception of software development. Cameron found his computer science classes boring, but at hackathons, software development was something magical that offered an escape from everyday life. Since TAMUhack, Cameron has attended 13 hackathons and has won prizes at five.

So enthralled with hackathons, Cameron joined the organizing team at TAMUhack. As an organizer, he has helped work on their registration system, landing page, and hackathon strategy around company challenges and prizes. He has also spent time mentoring at HowdyHack 2019, the university’s beginner hackathon.

Cameron has gained internships at Statefarm and Microsoft, as well as lifelong friends directly through his involvement with hackathons. As well, they taught him how to architect and build every aspect of the software he needed to start his own company.

His favorite project was the Sustainability Index, the first place winner and winner of multiple company challenges at HackTX. This project provided a stock index aggregator that took into account not only financial factors like traditional stock prices, but also the environmental impact of a company, their treatment of employees, and a company’s stance on certain social issues. As a result, it allows people to invest in public companies who do good.
Rodolfo Ferro

Rodolfo had a lot of doubts about his studies. Majoring in mathematics, a lot of his courses are shared with computer science students. Like many others, he struggled to see where the material he learned in class would translate to the real world and how it would enable him to help others.

Rodolfo’s friend brought him to a hackathon and everything clicked for him. He participated in his first hackathon in April 2016 where he developed a biometric system designed for security in ATMs. With this project, he won his very first hackathon and felt confident in his decision.

It was also through this project that Rodolfo and his friend won a national hackathon. The prize allowed him to pay for an internship at Harvard University for two months, where he was able to improve his Machine Learning skills by applying them to a chemistry project.

Rodolfo has continued to put himself into situations of growth and learning. He won first place at HackBajío FinTech 2016, was one of the finalists in the national Hackathon 2017 for Smart Cities, and won the first IBM national hackathon, Hackapalooza. He was also just named a winner of the TensorFlow online hackathon and will be attending the next TensorFlow Dev Summit in March.

It was through his major and the science workshop program he participated in that helped him to get to where he is today. As a result, Rodolfo has been able to create a career for himself as a data scientist. He spent a year as a public worker for his local government, he worked as a remote developer on automation tasks for an international company and is now part of the organizing teams of the local hackathons in his state. In addition to this, he is a co-organizer of science workshops (Clubes de Ciencia México) which he had once participated in as a student.

Rodolfo is currently working at Codeando México, a company that creates civic technology and uses open data to help citizens and improve their relationship with the government. He is also working on machine learning projects and collaborating on research on Facial Expression Recognition tasks at an HCC lab.

His favorite project that he has ever worked on is a citizen reporting system for smart cities that he worked on with his best friend. They designed a whole system, with its own dashboard, to assist citizens in reporting of public services. The idea was to take advantage of the existing infrastructure provided by different companies, instead of developing a new app with the risk of no one downloading it. So, they designed social network bots (starting with Twitter and Facebook) so users did not have to download new apps or unknown functionalities. Instead, they just had to follow or text the users on social media to report their issues.
Elena Lape

Elena always had a knack for coding. She started with Runescape and other various games where she found a hack that got her unlimited coins which she could spend within the game. She went on to sell these on PayPal. It wasn’t until Elena left Lithuania and moved to the United Kingdom for university that she found the hacker community.

She was looking for something to do over the weekend and stumbled upon a Facebook event for a hackathon in Glasgow, Do you have the GUTS. While her programming skills weren’t far developed past video game hacks, she decided to attend. At the event, a group of locals took her onto their team and 36 hours later, they presented their winning hack (an Alexa skill) on stage.

Elena feels her life has largely been shaped by Facebook groups such as Hackathon Hackers. These are hubs for hackathon goers. It was through these groups that Elena learned about events all over the globe, discovering interesting research and getting to interact with wildly intelligent people whom she later befriended. She even found her current residence at a hacker house in Panama on Hackathon Hackers.

Elena interrupted her education at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. During her time at school, she studied computer science and organized Hack the Burgh. One of her favorite memories was organizing with her team a made-to-order waffle van for participants to have at breakfast and they gave out seconds. She says, “I dare argue these waffles were some of the best in the country.”

In her third year of university, Elena was working for a local software company. She was getting a lot of practical experience but felt herself being driven across the Atlantic for the summer. She was interviewing with various companies. After attending Hackcon, Elena was reminded of the internships GitHub was offering and she ended up getting an internship working in partnerships on their Student Developer Pack in San Francisco.

After her internship ended, Elena was offered a remote contracting job for GitHub. Because she was remote, she realized she could live anywhere in the world. Elena lived in Panama for several months and recently settled in London for the near future. In Panama, she volunteered at a non-profit, Espacio Explora, where she taught teenagers how to code with HTML and CSS to build websites.

Elena claims that her favorite project was all of the friends she has made along the way. If not that, she says it would have to be a hackathon simulator she worked on at Hack Cambridge with Justin Gilbert. Her team-based it on GTA San Andreas (Multitheft Auto) and completely replicated the hackathon venue, branding, swag, organizers’ faces and recorded some typical sound bites. The goal of the game was to keep the hackers happy by constantly sourcing pizza and cleaning up the trash.
Gabriel Ting

Born and raised in small-town Missouri, Gabriel had never done any programming prior to starting college at Vanderbilt University. His freshman year, he went in thinking he’d be a physics major and took a CS course just for fun. It was during this course that he fell in love with the problem-solving nature of CS.

One fateful day, Gabriel’s neighbor convinced him to go to HackGT, a hackathon at Georgia Tech University. Even though he lacked confidence in his coding ability, going to this hackathon changed his life. Seeing crystallizations of creativity and skill at the final expo got him hooked on both hackathons and CS as a potential career.

After his experience at HackGT, just two years ago, Gabriel started organizing VandyHacks. He wanted to bring the energy he felt from hackathons to the Vanderbilt community, not only through the main hackathon but through smaller workshops and events throughout the year.

According to Gabriel, hackathons have been the highlight of his college experience. In his words, hackathons are a manifestation of creativity that he finds inspiring amidst the deluge of homework, tests, and coursework. It’s a time for people to learn what they want to, and utilize their skills to make something they’re proud of. Gabriel believes hackathons are especially important to people that are minorities in the field and to people just getting started. This setting feeds a passion for creation and provides a chance for anybody to start coding.

He currently is the co-president of VandyHacks where his role is to make sure that  LGBTQ+ people feel included in the CS space. Diversity and inclusion are more important than just a statistic. His goal is to give support through visibility and create a genuine, inclusive environment. He works towards this goal by hosting conversations around authenticity in the workplace, acceptance of ourselves and others, how to parse identities, and more. He wants to create a place where people could share what was on their minds, especially as many are coming from different schools with different sets of norms.

His favorite hackathon project is from HackIllinois last year. There were open-source mentors from all over the industry. He started talking to a mentor from NPM, the Node.js package manager company. Even though he lacked any real JavaScript background, his team decided to work on a lightweight source mapping package to help programmers understand debugging messages in minified or transpiled files.

Gabriel is currently a junior at Vanderbilt and triple majoring in computer science, Asian studies, and applied mathematics. This summer, he will be working on surface simulation tools on the 2020 Mars Rover at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to his work at VandyHacks, he is heavily involved in Juni Learning where he helps to make the CS community more accessible by teaching computer science to students and developing curricula.