owengretzinger/mlh-top-hackers-2020-2023 huggingface dataset:
Shruti Das

During Shruti’s first semester of college, she attended her first hackathon, Technica 2017. She recalls it being the first time she found herself at ease in a room full of tech majors. Before Technica, she had suffered from imposter syndrome as many of us do. Joining the community completely reshaped the way in which she views the future of technology, but it also helped her to see her own role within it.

Leaving the event, Shruti felt a surge of inspiration to get more involved in the community and the following semester, she became a part of the Bitcamp organizing team. She wanted to foster a similar environment that she had experienced herself: one that welcomes and supports all beginners and first-time hackers.

As an organizer for Technica, Shruti works to empower diversity of thought. She strives to foster an inclusive atmosphere in which everyone feels they can voice their opinions and reach their full potential. Her first year organizing, she helped introduce the concept of pronoun pins to the event in order to help hackers express themselves and feel respected by the community. In the three years that she has been a part of the organizing team, she has seen the diverse channels of marketing create an unprecedented shift within their hacker population ranging in major and age. Not only are students attending but family units, teachers, and more come to be a part of the community. As an organizer, she is reshaping the way students view hackathon culture and the ways in which we experience technology, which means giving everyone an equal opportunity to pursue it.

Through hackathons, Shruti has met incredible friends, mentors and role models who all help to teach her the importance of community, and constantly motivate her with their creativity and work ethic. At this stage in her life and career, Shruti believes that the people she works with matters far more than the work itself. While she aspires to work on something meaningful, she looks forward to cultivating a healthy team dynamic so that everyone can come together to build technology that has a real impact on the world.

Her favorite hackathon project is one she made with a friend from high school at TechTogether Boston 2019. They were both involved with UNICEF in high school and found an immense amount of public information in the UN’s data archives. Combining their passions for female empowerment and sustainable development, they centered their hack around the UN Global Goals. They built a touch-sensitive map (after experimenting with Bare Conductive paint) to display visual progress updates toward the UN Global Goal for gender equality. They saw the physical map as a fun and interactive way to engage citizens in helping them to understand the UN’s Global Goals. By pressing a finger on a continent, the user could visually see aggregated data for all the countries in any continent within the context of gender equality.
Christopher Lambert

Christopher decided to apply to BigRedHacks 2017 on a whim one afternoon and was surprised to find out he had gotten in. He distinctly remembers sitting alone in the auditorium far from home and feeling terrified that he wouldn’t be able to find a team. He couldn’t imagine someone wanting a freshman who hadn’t taken a single CS class yet.

After attending the opening ceremony, he went to the team building session and was blown away by the excitement and kindness of the people in the room. Chris quickly found a team of three students and spent the weekend programming, cup stacking, meeting people, and learning new things. He has since attended 25 hackathons.

Hackathons were very eye-opening for Chris. Having started college at a school relatively close to where he grew up, he thought he would follow in his brother’s footsteps and major in finance.  During his year at the school, he helped to organize CUhackit and realized that his true passion was computer science.

After his freshman year of college at Clemson University, Chris decided he wanted to transfer schools. He wrote about his hackathon experience in his application essay to transfer to Columbia and he is confident that he would not have been accepted without it.

He has gotten many professional opportunities due to the technical skills he developed at hackathons. Chris has interned at companies such as Tesla, Capital One, and Stripe. This summer, he will be interning at Lyft before starting his sophomore year at Columbia University. There, he will major in computer science and study algorithms, computational complexity, and various areas of theoretical computer science. Chris is interested in working at the intersection between CS and finance.

Chris’s favorite project was at HackTech 2019. The project was called Ride Caring, and it was a service you could use to call an Uber without mobile internet. The intention was to reduce drunk driving incidents in rural areas, where there is oftentimes cellular phone service with no mobile data.
Akash Singh

Shortly before attending Mangohacks, Akash remembers changing his major from biology to computer science. Having felt a bit overwhelmed by the suggested change, he leaned a club on campus called the Society of Competitive Programmers  (SCP) at the University of South Florida. This club was where he had heard of hackathons and was inspired to attend one.

Having started as a cell and molecular biology major who changed their major to computer science purely on instinct and curiosity, Akash credits hackathons with his growth in the CS field. With no prior experience in it, he felt he was not ready for hackathons and might have quit his major early. Hackathons gave him an environment to feel like it was okay not to be the best, not to be ready, not to know something, but it’s never okay not to do something about it.

Hackathons gave Akash an environment not only to learn and have fun but also to make connections with potential recruiters and companies. These connections, sooner or later, pay off when the time comes to find a job or apply for grad schools. Akash says, “Attending hackathons is an experience which, in my opinion, sets you up for the world waiting for you once you graduate.”

Having come a long way since switching his major, Akash now finds himself as the president of SCP. He uses this position to provide comfort and support to those who, like him, felt overwhelmed and are new to the tech field.

He is currently a research assistant working in USF Graphics and Visualization Lab. Akash wants to pursue a PhD in CS after he graduates with a concentration in Data Science and Data Visualization. Hackathons have given him the opportunity to visit various universities and hopefully, he will be pursuing his PhD at one of those schools.

Akash’s favorite hackathon project was the one he worked on during Hack-a-Bull 2019 at USF. The project name was the Bullinator. It was an anti-bullying device primarily focused on detecting cases of bullying through speech recognition and identifying the bully and victim. It was not a perfect design or concept but had a working model and results which the team was proud of. They used Google Speech and voice recognition along with hardware like Qualcomm Snapdragon board kit and a mic. Akash liked the idea, the cause, and the concept they chose to work on. It gave him the inspiration to continue working on technology and come up with devices and solutions to tackle some of the social issues in his community.
Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov

Jamshidbek discovered the hackathon community after friends from the Society of Competitive Programmers decided to apply. He teamed up with a friend to build his first-ever application and after demoing, was overwhelmed by the amount of support and encouragement they received from their fellow hackers and judges.

His biggest takeaway from hackathons is the idea of computing for social good. Coding for good changed him as a programmer because it made him realize the true problems he should be working on. Event after event, his ideas got more impactful and meaningful. Jamshidbek believes this will manifest in what he chooses to do with his professional career in the future.

In 2018, Jamshidbek co-founded a student organization at his school called the Society of Competitive Programmers (SCP) where their goal is to increase awareness about hackathons, mentor students in their journey to learn new skills and provide financial support for students to travel to hackathons. So far, they have helped more than 150 students experience their first hackathons at more than 25 hackathons nationwide. SCP has helped to improve USF attendance and merit rankings in MLH rankings over the years as they jumped from 114th to 44th in overall rankings and from 1568th to 41st in attendance. SCP has been a huge part of Jamshidbek’s college experience as he had the opportunity to serve as its treasurer first and later, as the President. He believes that his story as a hacker would be incomplete without SCP.

Currently, Jamshidbek is a senior at the University of South Florida where he is majoring in computer science. There, he works as a research assistant in the social computing labs and in the neural machine interaction lab. He plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.

His favorite hackathon project was Classroom.ai at KnightHacks 2019. It was special because it addressed a problem that students alike can relate to. Classroom.ai provided a real-time and anonymous feedback system for students without taking their attention away from the lectures. His team and he tried to make sure that it was a usable and complete product that can be easily adopted, which came true as we launched it in a few classes at USF later on. This is his favorite because it impacted the lives of students as they wanted it to.
Sarina Abrishamcar

Sarina wanted to learn how to code to model neural networks of the brain to parallel data analysis of the next general election. A non-CS major, Sarina realized there were few resources to learn about the world of computer science, a field that has become a large aspect of our daily lives. She felt that the resources available to her were male-dominated and riddled with underlying sexism. As Sarina’s intended field of Pharmacology was increasingly dependent on coding, she wanted a safe environment for her to learn. Sarina set out to help create a safe space for women and gender non-conforming people to learn to code.

With little code experience, Sarina never thought she would be accepted to a hackathon and felt deterred by the male-dominated environment. This was the main motivator behind the creation of Womxn/Hacks for Sarina and co-founder, Lia Yeh. This hackathon was different from a traditional hackathon with its focus on inclusion of all genders and those without tech backgrounds.  Many participants emailed her months later to talk about the internships they got from sponsors and how the event opened their eyes to different career paths. Organizing the event taught Sarina that change is possible; the Womxn/Hacks team has made CS resources more accessible and gender-neutral.

Through her very own hackathon, Sarina landed an internship with one of their sponsors,  Evidation Health, a health-tech company. Sarina was brought on as a project management intern where she worked with the data science team to understand how wearable tech ( Apple watch) can help patient outcomes. Sarina plans to apply to medical schools and is excited to mix health and tech in both future hackathons and her career.
Liam Sorta

Liam jokes that he joined the hacker community by accident. Having attended a Local Hack Day in 2015, he ate a slice of pizza with someone from a different university and ended up going to their 24-hour hackathon the following week. During that first event, Liam met someone from yet another university that shared his same interest in running an event. Eight months later they had organised their very own hackathon (without university backing) in order to bring their local tech community closer together. This will always be something Liam looks back on as magical.

Liam’s hackathon, HackTheMidlands, is an independent hackathon run in the West Midlands, hosting 300+ attendees. Intending to inspire the same feeling of learning and excitement that he and his co-founder, Thomas Goodman, once felt, HackTheMidlands focuses on being a beginner-friendly event. They know how important the first hackathon is so they want to make the experience one worth remembering.

Having only previously been involved with game-development communities, the wider hacker community gave Liam a much broader sense of engineering and the tools he could use to create. Perspective aside, the people Liam has met throughout his years of attending and organising hackathons has opened up doors he never thought existed, and has made some of his closest friends.

It's a journey that has led him across multiple continents, working on a plethora of varied projects, and is one of the reasons his own startup has been successful and exists at all. His love for development communities led him to start GameDevNetwork, a community for game developers with over 9000 users, focusing on supporting new and experienced developers alike, in a relaxed, inclusive community. They regularly run online hackathons, jams, and charity events.

Hackathons have also been a place where Liam has learned about various technologies, specifically his discovery of Alexa. He began experimenting and pushing the limits of what voice technology can offer, especially when combined with realtime rendering engines. His work led him to be recognised as an Alexa Champion, and after reaching over 1,000,000 users across all of his apps, being interviewed by Amazon about his startup, MagicVoice.io, and Voice.tv.

After graduating from Birmingham City University in 2018, Liam went on to spend a year at Unity Technologies, giving talks on cross-platform Augmented Reality around the world.

Liam’s favorite hackathon project is from a medical hackathon he had traveled to that aimed to pair up developers with med students. His team created DocChart, an Augmented Reality app for doctors and nurses to use that would overlay patient information by recognising a QR code, instantly highlighting important information without diving through files. This was the most diverse team Liam had ever worked on, with each of its five members coming from completely different countries.
Alexander Prosolkin

Alexander first found himself at a hackathon after his friend (and later on, co-founder) Maksim Diakov brought him to a Local Hack Day event in 2017. Maksim and Alexander had met at the university and quickly became friends. Having attended many hackathons, Maksim encouraged Alexander to browse the internet for them to visit and Maksim told him about Local Hack Day and brought him along.

After the event, the two spent time researching Local Hack Day and decided to organize their own because there weren’t any in Russia. After that, they became addicted to the desire to change their local hack events to European and US quality level hackathons.

Extremely interested in developing products, Alexander jumped on board with the project and worked with Maksim and later, Aleksandr Malyshev, to create the community that has turned into Russian Hackers. Alexander cares deeply about creating something of value for society whether that be a community, software, or events.

Hackathons have made a big difference for Alexander. They have strongly improved his soft skills and interaction with others. According to Alexander, hackathons are like expedited tech careers. You create your product and go through the stages with your business in a weekend. Through this, you learn much faster and can create more effective products.

Alexander loves giving back to the Russian Hackers community and helping to empower hackers across Russia and the world. While he doesn’t code much anymore, he works towards developing the world of fintech and hackathons.

His favorite hackathon project is from Junction 2018 where he and some friends were trying to solve a marketing challenge. They created a robotic arm that would be used at the usual supermarket wall where you can weigh sweets and buy them. The arm would pick sweets up out of their respective lots and deliver them to a pickup point. Sometimes, they used someone’s mouth as the pickup point.
Amy Le

“I honestly don't think I would be where I am today if I hadn't decided to go to that hackathon three years ago.”

Amy joined the hacker community when a friend invited her to an out-of-state hackathon. At the time, Amy didn’t fully understand what they were nor did she have any programming experience. She decided to hop on the flight anyway and never looked back.

In January of 2017, she and her friend co-founded Hacklahoma, University of Oklahoma’s official student hackathon. She spent the year as the creative director where she worked with graphic designers on logo, branding, theme, and documentation as well as managed social media and marketing strategy. She managed to accumulate over 800 followers across the organization’s social media platform. Amy now serves as the executive director of the organization.

Amy is currently a senior studying computer science and minoring in Japanese at the University of Oklahoma. She is interested in front-end web development and UX design. Her experience has led her to work in software development, interning at various companies such as Tinker Air Force Base, The Ronnie K. Irani Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth, and Hobby Lobby.

Amy’s favorite project was a web app that helped build a community between volunteers and organizations & relief centers to provide services and resources to natural disaster victims. It was the most fun project she has worked on because she got to focus more on the design aspect of it which she had never done before a hackathon.
Beowulf Horn

Beowulf attended CUCCHack during his first year of university. During the event, CUCCHack organizers announced another hackathon the following weekend. Already hooked, Beowulf signed up and started attending hackathons as often as possible, amounting to over ten midway through his second term. Not only did CUCCHack make Beowulf excited about hackathons but it was where he met the people he would later start CovHack with.

Coming from Bourne, England, a very rural area lacking a tech community, Beowulf felt as if the university was the community he was waiting for with plenty of events across the country and the world where he could build wacky projects with new friends.

By organizing CovHack in 2019, Beowulf and his friends were able to make a real impact on their local community by bringing a hackathon back to their campus. Without CUCCHack, his school’s computer club hackathon, he probably would not have gotten involved as much as he did.

Beyond the local community, Beowulf has been working with the Hackathon Hackers EU organizers on trying to get more cooperation between the communities, which hopefully will result in more hackathons, better mentorship, and overall more enjoyable events! All the teams have a lot of resources that could easily be shared between the events that would make them cheaper to run.

In addition to CovHack, Beowulf created a wiki for hackathons all over the UK, making sure all first-time and returning hackers are aware of the opportunities nearby and how to prepare themselves for events. He was inspired to make this after a conversation at the Hackathon Hackers EU conference digital watch party to help organize the sharing of resources and to share the platforms that organizers talk on. As a result, he has seen an increase in volunteers at hackathons and communication.

His favorite project was Applause Review which he made at R. U. Hacking? 2019. He made a version of DinoRun built into Chrome which was controlled by applause. It averaged out when to jump based on the sound it picked up by the devices connected to the site. Beowulf said this was his favorite demo because he had everyone clap for the project.
Athul Blesson

Athul used to consider himself a very introverted person. Spending most of his time in front of his computer in his room, Athul thrived in the world of video games and YouTube.

His interest in coding was first sparked after seeing Iron Man 3. Impressed by Tony Stark’s AI assistant, he wanted one of his own. When the internet did not have an AI assistant that met his standards, he decided to build his own. Like Iron Man, through his creation of technology Athul built his own identity.

Athul did what many other aspiring CS students did and found classes online. Once he started coding, he was amazed by all the things he could build using code.

To create even bigger projects, Athul needed to assemble a team. Athul found Hack Club online and started a chapter at his high school in 2017 (which was featured in the New Indian Express). Over time, this club grew from 12 members to over 600+ members.  Athul used a curriculum that was beginner-friendly and lowered the barrier to entry to all who wanted to learn.

As a Hack Club leader, he had access to the international community which welcomed him and was incredibly supportive. He met most of his best friends in the United States through Hack Club. Athul is still amazed that he, a high schooler in India, was working on projects with someone his age on the other side of the world.

It was after this that Athul attended SRiSHTi in 2014. However, he was too nervous to demo and decided to leave the venue. Although he had a blast, he regretted that he did not demo. Since then, he has attended many hackathons and demoed at every one.  Hackathons have helped Athul build an identity as a bold, confident leader.

Over the last five years, Athul has organized over 16 hackathons and now works as Hack Club’s regional director in Asia-Pacific. In this role, he has helped to start 112 high school coding clubs in the Asia Pacific and Africa regions. These coding clubs offer support, resources, and leadership training to over 4,100 students who meet each week to learn how to code by working on self-directed projects.

His favorite project was from Startup Weekend where he and his team built a project that alerts the local government about power outages and sends them information like the location and time of the power failure to make more timely solutions. His project also sensed overloads and broken power lines to prevent accidents and electrocutions which can create more effective use of local government resources.