owengretzinger/mlh-top-hackers-2020-2023 huggingface dataset:
Stefan Aleksic

Longtime Major League Hacking community members will recognize Stefan Aleksic. He took home MLH’s Rookie of the Year in 2014 for his accomplishments creating the Cosmos Browser with fellow hackers Rohith Varanasi and Justice Suh. The revolutionary browser was the first of its kind to offer consumers the ability to browse the web without mobile data service, providing massive benefits in areas without widespread mobile broadband.

Stefan first discovered programming in junior high, and, like many, his passion stemmed from gaming. While playing Age of Empires 2, Stefan discovered the game’s scripting language and unpacked it for himself, creating his own AIs within the game engine. He continued to develop his own games, and when he completed his first game, The Lost Mouse, Stefan says he realized he was “completely obsessed with programming” and had found his life’s passion.

Following his passion with a fervent dedication and a thirst for knowledge, Stefan continued coding into high school, developing Android apps to help students calculate molar mass or prank each other with photos of Nicolas Cage. But finding a dedicated community of hackers wasn’t easy, and Stefan attributes being introduced to CodeDay Chicago by u/zachlatta, the Executive Director of Hack Club, as one of his life’s “pivotal moments.” Asked how hackathons and the hacker community have changed his life, Stefan attested that they have provided him with “an overwhelming amount of agency.” He even has a specific routine for how he spends the last night of hackathons, he says, going around “introducing himself and asking people what they worked on.” It’s in those moments, exhausted from a long day’s work in the dead of night at 5 a.m., that Stefan has met some of his closest, lifelong friends.

Stefan has made his mark on the tech industry in the last few years since winning MLH’s Rookie of the Year, working at top companies including Twilio, Uber, and Facebook. Since graduating, Stefan has founded his own company, Plasmo, that makes it easy for developers to make browser extensions, a passion of his from his hacking days. Stefan prides himself on taking initiative, and he says one of his favorite things about hackathons is that they “are all about building. They’re not about pitching, ideating, or dreaming. You actually build that idea you dreamed of.”

Unsurprisingly, Stefan sees tremendous value in hackathons, which have helped him grow both personally and professionally, and provided him a community and resources with which to launch a successful career. Stefan has contributed wholeheartedly back to this community, helping to provide opportunities for others to find a passion in hacking as well. While making hackathons possible is nothing new for Stefan, who in 2014 helped found BrickHack at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he is looking forward to helping more hackers begin their journey in the fall. He plans to sponsor upcoming hackathons with his rapidly growing company, Plasmo, and aims to inspire the next generation of hackers the way he was inspired through hackathons earlier on in his career.
Michelle Kim

Michelle Yeojin Kim says her oldest passion is bringing her imagination into reality. In kindergarten, she liked to draw; in elementary school, she liked to freestyle her own LEGO creations; in high school, she liked to play music. Today she is an experienced hackathon organizer pursuing a career in game development.

First finding her way to coding in high school, Michelle attended a weekly game development club, collaborating with other students to design a simple RPG. Motivated by that first experience with coding, she signed up for multiple computer science courses her freshman year at the University of British Columbia.

When she was convinced by her friends to participate in nwHacks 2019, Michelle was initially nervous, and decided to volunteer at nwHacks that first year rather than participate. While there, Michelle felt inspired seeing more than 800 hackers all learning, building, and connecting. From that experience, one of her goals within the hacker community has been to “cultivate a healthy hackathon culture.” She joined nwPlus shortly after, wanting to make an impact on some of the largest hackathons in northwestern Canada. In addition to memorable experiences she wants to share with others, the hacker community to Michelle has meant “ever-lasting friendships, leadership skills, and organizing and public speaking skills.” Having initially been nervous herself to attend nwHacks, she saw an opportunity to help others overcome their fears of attending hackathons.

With nwPlus, she has served as logistics coordinator, logistics director, and co-president. She organized both nwHacks 2021 and 2022, supporting more than 2,500 hackers worldwide to “unleash their imagination and potential.” Michelle, with her team, attempted multiple initiatives that would enhance hacker, sponsor, and mentor engagement in online hackathons. These initiatives included a new format for sponsor Q&As and booths, a hacker information package, and increased mentor awards and mentor-specific events.

Between the 2021 and 2022 hackathons, Michelle’s favorite memory with the organization has been nwHacks 2022, where she says she “adored…hearing from the hackers and mentors who came back from last year’s hackathon.” Several hackers had become best friends and were hacking on the same team this second time around. Others had hacked with friends the year before but had decided to step out of their comfort zones and hack with strangers at the 2022 event. She continues to serve as co-president of nwPlus while working as a front-end developer at Later.

While Michelle is better known for her contributions to the hacker community as a hackathon organizer, she has participated in hackathons as a hacker as well. Seeking to understand what a “good hackathon experience” would feel like from the other side, Michelle began competing as a hacker after volunteering at nwHacks 2019 and cmd-f 2019. Entering senior year of her computer science undergraduate program and excelling academically, Michelle continues to give back to the hacker community as both a hacker and an organizer.
Galaxia Wu

While she is now a seasoned product designer, Galaxia Wu says “as a kid, I wanted to be a computer programmer before I even knew what it meant. I loved video games and spent every waking minute on the family computer.” However, while in high school, she “switched gears and decided [her] calling was in fine arts.” Dedicating her high school years to working towards an illustration program, she saw herself going into a career of animating movies for Pixar or illustrating books. While it was disappointing when the program she had worked so hard for rejected her application, she says she is now thankful for the rejection because it led her to apply for an Interaction Design program that completely changed her career trajectory. Now, three years later, she says “I’ve managed to mix my passion for art and computers to find myself a career in product design.”

It’s an impressive career at that, already including internships at Intuit and Meta. And while product designers aren’t the largest major at hackathons, Galaxia says “the hacker community has changed my life in so many ways: it’s shaped both my professional career and personal life in more ways than I can articulate.” Despite describing herself as simply a designer who doesn’t know how to code, Galaxia has built herself an impressive resume at hackathons. She’s competed at several, such as DeltaHacks,SheHacks, and Hack the North, and, to top it off, she’s helped organize four hackathons herself, including Sheridan College’s, her own institution, flagship hackathon, Hackville.

Now an MLH Coach, Galaxia didn’t know much about hackathons in the months leading up to college. The first time she heard the word from a friend, she had mixed emotions, adding that, at the time, hacking to her “evoked images of something you might see in Mr. Robot: guys in black hoodies in a grungy basement doing illegal stuff.” However, after doing some research and finding out her school had a club that organized the college’s hackathon, she decided to reach out to join. After all, it was “new, relatively small, and definitely didn’t look illegal.” When she competed at her first hackathon, she was welcomed in by two software engineering students. Not only did they teach her the basics of hackathons, but Galaxia says “their support made the hackathon incredibly memorable for me, and I remember feeling so empowered and like I belonged.”

As someone with an arts background, Galaxia understands what it’s like to attend a hackathon as an outsider. However, she has used her own experience to give back to the hacker community significantly: her college has a high population of underrepresented students, so Galaxia has gone out of her way to make the hacker community more inclusive. Helping to run the Hackademics club at her college as well as organizing Hackville, she has given voices on her organizing team to international students and older students and has even held panels and events to give students the confidence to attend hackathons. In her new role as an MLH Coach, she hopes to have an even bigger impact on the community in the future.
Omar Ali

Omar Ali, from Cairo, Egypt, did not get into programming until sophomore year of his electrical engineering program at Ain Shams University, but he has quickly made a name for himself within the hacker community. In the last year, he has completed the MLH Fellowship, contributed to several open-source projects, and has since gone on to work as an Admissions Specialist with Major League Hacking (MLH), helping to both interview and select the best candidates for the MLH Fellowship from the thousands of applications the program receives. Dedicating his free time to researching programming and computer-science-related subjects, as well as completing multiple online certifications, by his junior year, Omar had decided programming was his calling.

Omar discovered programming later in his academic career, and in his first programming course where he learned C++, he says “immediately fell in love with the idea that I can create something meaningful by just typing on my keyboard.” Continuing to develop his skills in C++, as well as learning front-end web development and Python, the ability to creatively solve problems using technology is something that appealed to Omar as both an electrical engineer and a programmer. Unsurprisingly, the hacker community seemed a perfect fit for someone as dedicated to programming as Omar.

He is active in a number of communities, participating in the Ain Shams University’s Energy Sustainability Team and STP, for instance, as well as being active in the hacker community. Stumbling upon the MLH community while browsing a Facebook group for computer science and engineering enthusiasts, Omar was immediately hooked. Through the MLH Fellowship, he has been able to grow as a programmer enough that he is planning on pursuing a career in computer science instead of the path he had initially been set on of electrical engineering. Omar says, “the Fellowship and the hacker community provided me with a platform full of guidance, mentorship, and companionship.” His experience in the fellowship allowed him to collaborate with fellow hackers from Brazil, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Italy, the UK, and Moldova, and Omar says he still keeps in touch with all of them.

His experience in the hacker community has prepared him well for his post-college career. “The fellowship didn’t just turn me into a better engineer, but into a better human being as well.” As one of the first Egyptians to join the MLH community, Omar has inspired other Egyptian students to pursue a career in tech and join the MLH community; Omar’s own little brother, Mahmoud, was inspired to apply for the MLH Fellowship, and has actually become a Pod Leader, helping students as they complete their own Fellowships! Omar is proud to say that he has helped “other aspiring students to join the hacker community and to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience” that he’s had. In addition to his time in the MLH Fellowship, he has secured his first full-time position as a back-end engineer. Omar looks to stay involved in the hacker community after graduating college, continuing to help newer hackers find their way.
Damir Temir

Damir Temir grew up in the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan where he seized the chance to enroll in his high school’s sole computer science class—a rare offering. In that program, he developed a project in PHP,  MySQL, and HTML. He was instantly hooked. Damir quickly set his sights on coming to the U.S. and majoring in computer science. “My love for the field has been growing ever since,” he says.

This was easier said than done, however. Damir experienced a great deal of social pressure to stay on a career path that was predetermined for him by his elders. “My grandfather, who is my role model and a true mentor in life, wanted me to pursue finance. He saw me becoming a banker one day,” he explains. Armed with courage, passion, and self-belief, Damir eventually made the move to Chicago and enrolled at the University of Illinois Springfield.

One cold and snowy Midwestern morning, Damir opened the MLH newsletter and saw an invitation to join a Local Hack Day. He wasn’t quite sure what a hackathon really was or if he’d enjoy it, but he was open to finding out more. He joined a Discord community to find a guild and some mentorship. “Joining that guild was the best introduction to the MLH community I could ever wish for,” he recalls, adding that the people were kind, helpful, and welcoming to beginners.

That first hackathon helped Damir realize that he was moving forward. “Coming to the U.S. was a big shock for me, and it took me a very long time to adapt to the college environment,” he admits. However, he has no doubt that following his own interests have been to his benefit. “It is not a bad idea to go against the grain of a cultural mindset and do something that you want,” he says.

Having fallen in love with hackathons, Damir decided to apply for the MLH Fellowship. Initially he was rejected from the full program but jumped on the chance to participate in the Fellowship’s prep program when it began last summer. He feels like the experience—particularly the daily standups—was “absolutely amazing.” He was accepted to the full MLH Fellowship shortly after. Since being accepted once, he’s since been a part of three batches of the MLH Fellowship.

Nine hackathons in (and counting), Damir says that his favorites were the MLH Fellowship Orientation Hackathons. “They are a super cool way of onboarding fellows to what MLH is all about: having fun developing as one big community.” Through the fellowship, he learned new technologies, met more people, and accepted more responsibilities. However, Damir admits that he kept returning to the fellowship because of the people. “I did not want to leave an amazing community of which I grew fond of.”

As a three-time MLH Fellowship Alumni, Damir began wondering what drove the machine from the inside and decided to join the ranks of those who made his experience so enjoyable. Now he serves as an admissions specialist and as a Pod Leader for the summer fellowship, working with two fellows who are contributing to open-source projects run by a cancer research hospital. He also contributes to the production engineering track hosted this summer in collaboration with Meta.
Sarah Fluck

While Sarah Fluck only recently burst into the hacking scene, she is already a force to be reckoned with. Initially earning her degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Southampton, it is clear she has always had an inquisitive mind. Getting into hacking wasn’t easy at first, especially while working a full-time job in general administration and with no formal educational background in coding. However, she says she “has always been technically minded” and always had a desire to understand the ins-and-outs of software development. So when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and Sarah found herself with significantly more time on her hands to dedicate to learning, she hit the ground running.

First teaching herself HTML and CSS using online resources such as W3Schools and Sololearn, she quickly moved on to JavaScript. Sarah admits it “felt like quite a big jump, and initially I didn’t think much of it as I found the syntax confusing and couldn’t understand how it would be genuinely useful.” But she persevered, dedicating countless hours to developing her skill set. To further improve her coding abilities, she signed up for an online computer science class, CS50: Introduction to Computer Science, offered through Harvard University. During this course, Sarah spent much of her time learning C, which gave her solid fundamentals with which to build projects in C++.

An expert at solo learning, Sarah soon discovered that one of the best ways to break into the programming community was “to make contributions to open-source projects.” Still new to the world of programming, Sarah wasn’t sure where to begin, but she found a great start when she accidentally “stumbled upon the MLH Fellowship from a random blog post which listed different ways to get into open-source”. Though she had low hopes of making it to the interview stage, she was pleasantly surprised when she not only made it to the interview stage but was accepted into the program itself. Sarah says finding that not “everyone in my pod was a CS student, some had different majors and some were also self-taught like myself,” reassured her that she had earned her place in the hacker community.

At her first hackathon, an orientation hackathon organized by MLH in the first week of her Fellowship, she and her team developed Owlhub, an app geared specifically for fellow coders to share their code. As part of the MLH Fellowship, she has contributed to Hermes, an open-source engine optimized for React Native, even further growing her skills in C++. Despite her self-described non-traditional background, Sarah has grown into her own in the hacker community. She has taken initiative at every opportunity, having informal Q&A sessions “with professional developers at major tech companies” and even forming a “study group with fellow students to practice leet code questions.” She earned her first professional role in software engineering in London earlier this year. “Had I not realized my passion for technology and to always be learning new things,” she says, “I might still be working in administration.”
Deblina Chattopadhyay

Deblina Chattopadhyay is a seasoned hackathon veteran and a prolific hacker who describes herself as an embedded electronics and hardware enthusiast. Currently an Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering student at Netaji Subhash Engineering College, she is also a regular in the Major League Hacking (MLH) community, competing in numerous hackathons and winning several. Her projects have included everything from a firefighting robot control unit to a modulated laser trip wire that prevents trespassing to automated street lights that save on energy consumption. For having attended her first MLH hackathon, Bitcamp 2021, just over a year ago, she’s already amassed an impressive reputation as an active community member.

Deblina grew up with a passion for hardware electronics, which drove her to pursue a career in technology. While she has always had a passion for creating, she says “my love for technology increased as my confidence in working with different hardware components kept increasing.” Growing up in Kolkata, West Bengal in India, Deblina says she knows well the art of Jugaad: being crafty and innovating an often out-of-the-box solution to the problem at hand. For many of her hardware hacks, she says “we mostly made do with the items we had with us already.” This skill certainly came in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic. To Deblina, “building hardware projects from scratch has a very unique sense of delight and satisfaction when completed.”

Hackathons have been an important part of Deblina’s continued growth as a hacker. “Hackathons gave me the platform where I could showcase my creations,” Deblina says, adding “hackathons are a great place for gaining experience and getting exposure.” One critical moment for Deblina was joining the MLH Community Discord, which helped her continue to grow in her career as an electronics and hardware enthusiast. She says that, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it was “because of MLH that…unlike many others, I actually had something to look forward to every week.” Deblina has made meaningful relationships with other hackers through MLH and over Discord, such as her friends in BLAHAJGang, where she says “it feels like a family.”

She has also participated in a number of Local Hack Days (now Global Hack Week), which she likens to a “breeze of fresh air on a hot sunny day.” Deblina says her favorite part of Global Hack Weeks is getting to focus on learning and experimenting during those weeks instead of competing. To her, the experiences with Global Hack Weeks have functioned as a “much-needed break for competitive hackers like myself who don’t really understand their own limits and tend to overwork themselves.” Deblina has worked on several projects addressing issues she is passionate about and is very proud of “working towards things that help the Earth along with humankind.” She plans to stay involved in the hacker community by becoming a mentor and eventually organizing hackathons. And, of course, she plans to continue “contributing to open source and inspiring others to gain hands-on experience by building projects.”