owengretzinger/mlh-top-hackers-2020-2023 huggingface dataset:
Geetanjali Purohit

Geetanjali Purohit has forged an exciting path, combining technical skills, logic, and exceptional creativity in her coding. She uses novel approaches and innovative ideas to create great things, finding solutions in unorthodox ways.

Based in India, she is currently enrolled at university and heavily involved in Major League Hacking (MLH) hackathons, but has been interested in technology since she was a little girl. Whether it was creating Photoshop projects, wondering how people design websites, or analyzing how developers make games, she was always thinking about the creative side of technology. Her mother would work late, giving Geetanjali lots of time to work and play in the computer lab at school while she waited for her mom to pick her up.

In high school and college, her passion for technology combined with her love of the stage. She is outgoing and social and brings these parts of herself into her approach to coding. Before she participated in her first hackathon, she worked to build a culture of inclusivity. The role of engagement director in the hacker community was a natural fit, and she quickly focused on supporting women and non-binary hackers. Not only was she on the organizing team of gender-focused hackathons like Codetivate and Hydra Hacks, but she supported 30+ hackathons by mentoring newer hackers, hosting technical workshops, and running logistics behind the scenes. She was well aware of how hackathons work before she jumped into one.

Hack Girl Summer 2.0 was the ideal first hackathon. She created a solo project that allowed her to mesh her creativity with her technical expertise. It was called “Gender Bias Comment Detector,” and used sentimental analysis on tweets to screen out gender bias and negativity. She won the best hardware hack in the hackathon. She recalls, “Hackathons found a special place in my heart as I got addicted to them over time, and I decided this is how I want to be learning for the rest of my life.”

This initial success became a springboard for committing to hackathons almost every weekend as a hacker and a mentor. Her engagement blossomed then and continues today, and she dedicates her time and energy to working with hackers of all backgrounds for mutual success. One friend she made through the TechTogether Boston Discord, for example, opened her eyes to different experiences. She recalls, “it gave me a different perspective of the individuals in the queer space and hearing stories of how far individuals have come.”

Gender disparity is a significant issue in technology, and Geetanjali is doing her part to close the gap. She became a guild leader for an MLH Local Hack Day that aimed to bridge the gender divide and built an inclusive group for high school girls to thrive in technology. Known as Command Tech, this initiative mentors young women from across the globe.

Geetanjali has a natural gift for creativity and tech knowledge. Instead of using it only for personal gain, she shares her expertise and innovation with the hacker community, making her a truly valuable leader.
Jay Patel

Jay Patel has an impressive resume, having attended more than 65 events as a hacker and mentor and organized more than 50 events, many as the founder of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Technology’s hacking club, Hack Club SVIT. While he only competed in his first hackathon, Smart Gujarat Hackathon (SSIP) just over two years ago, Jay has since grown tremendously as a programmer and given back to the hacker community in many ways. He recently organized Hack SVIT, the first in-person Major League Hacking (MLH) event held in India since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also organized a Flutter bootcamp for fellow SVIT students, aimed at giving students a deeper understanding than they would get from course instruction.

Breaking into the hacker community wasn’t always smooth sailing for Jay. Growing up in the city of Vadodara in Gujarat, India, Jay believes “only 10-15% of students” in the area are familiar with hackathons and the hacker community. After just a few months of learning web development and coding, Jay made his first foray into the hacker community by attending a local Google Developer Group. He was surprised to find he was the only undergraduate student in attendance, with the other group members all belonging to various businesses. Nevertheless, the other members and the group’s organizers encouraged Jay to join. The experience inspired Jay, and he says, “I wanted to join a campus-based or student community.”

While there was not a hacker community in place at SVIT when Jay arrived, he was dedicated to creating one. Jay says his biggest goal in founding Hack Club SVIT was to “provide a platform to the students.” He saw the untapped potential of his fellow students first-hand at his Flutter bootcamp. When the guest speaker asked the attendees to raise their hands if they had completed their first app using Flutter, then if they were a first year student, Jay says he got “goosebumps.” Despite none of the first year students who attended having taken any formal coding classes, the vast majority of the fifteen to twenty students who completed their Flutter project were first years.

Seeing this inspired Jay to help students get an early start on their tech careers. Today, Jay says his club has “25 active developers from their first-year who work with blockchain, MERN, Django, and other stacks.” Continuing to grow, his club now takes on project assignments from both the university and local industry leaders, which Jay believes is a “dramatic” change for his university. “After completing two years of my college, I achieved my dream to make a tech environment in my college,” Jay says. Sharing the hacker community with so many others is Jay’s way of giving back to the community from which he has learned so much. Jay has met hackers from across the globe, grown his professional career in programming, and even learned stronger English by participating in hackathons.
Juan Almanza

Juan Almanza has started a nonprofit, accepted a job as a developer, and won second place in a competition he only started preparing for three days prior. And he’s only 14 years old. He is a high school student in Colombia and has already compiled an astonishing list of accomplishments, learning various programming languages, creating social good, and moving through life with one goal: raising up others.

He started programming in late 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns. He stumbled upon it, recalling, “I had nothing else to do besides school.” Once he found out about this world, though, he didn’t look back. He joined a Gamejam, a hackathon-like event centered around making games, prompting him to want to learn technologies like Python and git over the next several months.

Juan has a competitive spirit that drives him. In August of 2021, he decided to enter a national event with zero knowledge of one of the critical requirements: programming in C. He bought a book from the local bookstore just three days prior to the competition and read as much as he could about C before diving headfirst into the contest. His effort got him second place in the entire country.

The competitions, technology, and hacking changed his life trajectory. Before he discovered MLH and other hacker communities, he navigated through school and life like a ship without a rudder. He says, “I am autistic, and…programming opened the door to an activity that I didn’t get bored of and that I enjoyed so much.”

His first hackathon was HackMTY 2021, and his experiences through MLH opened his eyes. His learning style, he says, “is very different from other people’s.” New concepts are difficult for him to comprehend, but hackathons have framed them in a way he understands. He has grasped entire technologies exceptionally fast at hackathons, learning Svelte in just an hour at one of them. Other accomplishments in his long list of hackathon successes include learning React, Next.js, continuous integration, and blockchains as well as databases like Deta, CockroachDB, and MongoDB. One of his hackathon projects, CollegeLoans, directly led a company to hire him as a developer. He was also the Operations Executive at FreyHacks, a hackathon organized by high school students and is part of the MLH season.

One of the most critical ways technology impacted him was the connections and networks he built as a result. He has made friends from around the world with people who share his beliefs and have a drive to help others. His goal has been to help those struggling or underrepresented in his country through technology. So far, he has made quite an impact. He has channeled his talents into action by starting a nonprofit called ASOFI (Women's Association of Innovation for Rural Development). His organization helps find solutions through technology, allowing women of vulnerable populations to break the cycle of poverty and giving them tools to rise through and improve their situations.

All of these achievements would be impressive for a seasoned adult hacker, but Juan has done all this by 14, and his resume will only build from here.
Christos Bisias

Christos Bisias almost turned away from programming, but once he realized how he could create software to impact people’s lives, he found the passion to create project after project.

He discovered coding in his first year of college at the University of Peloponnese in Greece. He studied computer science and telecommunications but found that side of tech a bit boring. The data structures and algorithms didn’t engage him. In his third year, that all changed. Christos got into web and desktop development and realized he had found his calling. As he says, “I was able to create something that the average user could use; that's what got me really passionate.” He saw the potential for how his code could help others. That was a revelation that would change his direction.

As he began creating apps and software for public use, he saw how the community helped everyone involved. Through blogs, like dev.to and Medium, or sites, like StackOverflow and GeekforGeeks, he could stay in the heart of the community and contribute. One of the ways he uses his tech skills is to identify problems and develop solutions. He says, “Most of the [time] when a company provides us with a product, there is nothing we can do if we don't like what they are doing with it. When it comes to software, you can create your own equivalent just for your personal use, or for your friends, or even everyone. That's the power that the hacker community has given me.”

Christos’s first hackathon experience was during the Major League Hacking (MLH) Fellowship at the Orientation Hackathon, Spring 2022. He saw the power of teamwork and the commitment toward a common goal, and his team was one of the hackathon winners.

As a Fellow, he contributed to the Apache Ozone project, becoming an exceptional contributor. MLH set him up with G-Research, to contribute to Apache Ozone. At the start, he observed their operations and tried to understand the objectives. After a few weeks, he was working autonomously within the group. His main goal was to make it easier for new people to contribute to the project. His work led to G-Research offering him a full-time job as a software developer. He is expanding Apache Ozone today, improving the software and enhancing the tech community.

Christos credits Major League Hacking with much of his success. Without the Fellowship he received from MLH, he wonders how his trajectory may have been different. He recalls, “MLH did an amazing job matching me with G-Research and Apache Ozone. It was exactly what I wanted and what I was hoping to get out of this fellowship during my application.”

Though his time in the hacker community has been short, he has had promising contributions. His rise to Fellow has helped him professionally as well as the wider community. His focus is still on assisting others in accessing tech, and his work on Apache Ozone shows his commitment.
Toby McDonald

Toby McDonald caught the coding bug as early as 2nd grade. After teaching himself how to set up a Minecraft server on his dad’s laptop, Toby wanted to share the experience with his friends. Learning to mod the server on the laptop and setting up port forwarding on the router was just the beginning of what has turned into a lifelong journey. By junior high, Toby was already creating functional websites using JavaScript and had been designated by his Boy Scouts troop as the in-house webmaster. After Toby taught himself to set up DNS, he decided to learn PHP to grow his web development skills further.

Having already found his niche at an early age, Toby applied for his local STEM magnet school seeking to gain practical experience in technology before beginning his career. The summer before he started high school, he discovered his other passion: teaching programming to others and sharing his passion for coding. Throughout the course of an eight-week summer camp, he taught Boy Scouts Java and Python, helping them earn their programming merit badge along the way. This skill would eventually prove useful at hackathons where Toby has often found himself bringing many friends and classmates new to hackathons, organizing teams of people new to coding and using the opportunity to teach them. Toby says it is “incredible to have an opportunity to learn” from veterans at hackathons but also “to share my own knowledge and ideas with others.”

Discovering the hacker community helped Toby tremendously with both of his passions. His freshman year of high school, his school hosted its first ever hackathon. Toby was unable to go, but hearing stories from his friends about how incredible the experience was motivated him to go to his first hackathon. Shortly thereafter, despite the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down in-person events for two years, Toby competed in the University of Virginia’s virtual HooHacks 2021. The next year, Toby competed at Purdue’s BoilerMake, Virginia Tech’s VTHacks, the College of William and Mary’s Cypher Hacks, and a second run at HooHacks, this time taking the gold with his team of rookie hackers. Growing his skillset by participating in dozens of Major League Hacking events, Toby has demonstrated his passion for hackathons.

Toby says technology has given him a “whole different path to follow in life… and hackathons have helped a lot with that.” Recently, as an incoming university Freshman, Toby was selected for an internship, and he says “it was actually hackathons that made me stand out as an applicant, because effectively everyone applying had the same good grades.” He will be heading to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the fall to pursue a degree in computer science, and he plans to stay involved through the club that organizes HackRPI. Toby loves helping others at hackathons, teaching them to code and sharing his passion for technology, and he will no doubt continue leading the way as a mentor to young hackers just getting started.
Ivanna Gomez Quiroz

Ivanna Gomez Quiroz has followed her dreams and turned them into reality. Her tech journey is only beginning, and she is well on her way to enhancing the hacker community.

When Ivanna was a child, she loved watching Star Wars. Spaceships flying across the galaxy and robots acting like people inspired her, leading her to jump into an Introduction to Aerospace class in her first year of college. However, she realized this was not her path: her path was coding. Her Star Wars inspiration had changed, not disappeared. She says, “Initially I got sad at the realization that I would not be the one to design starships [but] I also realized that starships still need code!”

This new motivation to pursue coding led Ivanna to hackathons. She discovered them in her first year of college but found them intimidating. In her second year, she found the courage to attend one. She was surprised by how welcoming everyone was at her first hackathon, HackGT, in Fall 2019, and she immediately assimilated into the community. She went from not completing a project in HackGT to winning the overall best project at the 2021 HackHer event.

Ivanna learned many lessons from her hackathon experience. She made mistakes, and she saw the support and camaraderie of the hacker community that helped her instead of discouraging her. She also saw how technology could influence all kinds of change and that tech can bring ideas to life.

This realization that her coding abilities could make an impact motivated Ivanna to do more. Her first move was to apply to TechTogether to join their team, and they selected her as Technical Director of TechTogether Atlanta. She was surprised but helped organize it flawlessly and saw the reward of putting on a successful hackathon, especially in the faces of the participants. She says, “It was truly heartwarming to see everyone having fun and attending the events that everyone worked so hard to organize.”

Ivanna went on to apply to the MLH Fellowship, and in her brief time so far as a Fellow, she has thrived. She has found the fellowship supportive and is looking forward to working with the community in this new role.

With all these achievements, perhaps Ivanna’s most impactful actions have been to support underserved hackers. She says, “As a first-generation student from a low-income household, a person of color, and a woman, I have struggled to find representation and find people I can relate to.” As a result, her role in the community shifted from hacker to organizer with a goal to influence as many unsure hackers as she could to pursue a future in coding. She says, “I hope that my story serves to inspire other people that will come after me and remind them that while it is not easy, it can be done.”
Catherine Rasgaitis

Catherine grew up having multiple interests related to creative arts. At age 10, her parents enrolled her in several summer camps in her hometown of Tacoma, WA. Catherine found herself playing basketball and learning storytelling, but she felt most excited when she discovered Clubhouse 253, a computer science summer camp teaching Kodu Game Lab and Scratch.

Catherine left the camp excited to keep building with Scratch, continuing her work on “choose your own adventure” games and custom platformers until her games received the ultimate recognition: being featured in a curated collection on the official Scratch website. Finding her passion, Catherine continued coding, eventually enrolling in her high school’s Web Design class. There she found herself one of two girls in a class of twenty. Inspired by the demographic gap in her class, she says, “I quickly made it my mission to debunk misconceptions about technology being a ‘man’s industry.’”

This realization led Catherine to start her high school’s first Girls Who Code Club. There she works to encourage and empower the club’s members and help them pursue their interests, often devoting herself to learning in-demand coding skills first so she can teach them to the entire club.

As she was watching tutorials on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to expand her coding skill set, one of the videos recommended coders attend a hackathon to test their skills and help others. So, in the summer of 2020, Catherine participated in her first hackathon: TaroHacks. She quickly realized how welcoming, fun, and supportive this community is.  She joined forces with another hacker to build her first project, a website named School Tools meant to help its users find educational resources and record to-do lists. Her journey grew from there; today, she’s participated in over sixty hackathons.

Wanting to share the knowledge and experience she gained at these events with other coders, she now volunteers as a mentor at the student-operated computer-science non-profit CodefyCS.

She’s also used hackathons to address challenges in her own life. When her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Catherine said: “I was devastated. I knew I had a small window of time before the disease would strip her of her bright personality and our shared, cherished memories. I knew I had to do something to help.”

Determined to find a solution, she turned to technology. Catherine collaborated with her MLH teammates to participate in Tech Takes on Mental Health, a hackathon that focuses on cognitive science. She and her team created NeuroBoost, an app that is simple to use but effectively designed to help patients living with Alzheimer's improve their cognitive skills and continue to recognize faces. While most hacks don’t continue past the hackathon, her grandma’s caregiver started using NeuroBoost with great results. Catherine recalls, “I was overjoyed when my grandma could recognize me more consistently."

For Catherine, she says, “participating in hackathons has not only improved my technical skill set, but it has given me the ability to give back, share my passions, and build projects that truly help people.”
Adam Drummond

If you've been to an MLH digital event, you probably know Adam from his discord handle: Adam Drummond 🇮🇲. Adam’s love for technology began in the spring of 2014, when he was first introduced to it through the Isle of Man Code Club. Through the club, Adam learned to program in Scratch, Python, HTML/CSS, PHP, Java and JavaScript, and even taught a course himself in Visual Basic. The club empowered Adam and hundreds of other students to learn by doing. This steadily increased his love for technology until one day, seven years later, he became a team leader for a competition that he had competed in for six years.

Adam’s Local Hack Day, and indeed MLH, journey began in January of 2021. The Isle of Man had just entered a second lockdown after being COVID-free for six months. As a result, he was looking for a way to fill his time. Randomly, he received an MLH Hacker Newsletter suggesting he "Ring In The New Year with Local Hack Day: Build.” In Adam’s words, he “was intrigued.” He was one of the most invested hackers at LHD: Build 2021 (now Global Hack Week: Build), coming second by just two points, and was “quite possibly the most active hacker in the Discord server.” Adam took part in numerous events hosted by MLH after that, won a few prizes, and was thoroughly addicted.

Local Hack Day: Share came along, and Adam created the guild MELONsquad, competing directly with Jacklyn Biggin’s BLAHAJgang. Eventually, the two communities merged after “an all-out melon vs. blahaj emoji [battle].” What started as a Global Hack Week guild blossomed into a larger, long-term group with a Discord. The BLAHAJgang community’s focus is on how they can make the experience of being in technology as fun as possible, exemplified by how they turned an IKEA shark into a meme and a movement. BLAHAJgang encourages teamwork and participation in hackathons and events like MLH Global Hack Week.

As an islander, Adam knows that working on the Isle of Man can sometimes be as difficult as it is amazing. Community events can be few and far between. As a member of Code Club, Adam looks to change this by organizing events and bringing people together. Adam is attempting to use his positions in MLH and BLAHAJgang to be an instrumental part of his local community. He still attends MLH events year round, and more recently, has been observing how these events run in hopes of one day running hackathons on-island as part of the Code Club. To this day, Adam loves to experiment with new technologies and ultimately have a fun time, while also empowering people of all ages to use digital skills and equipment to enrich their lives. He promotes this through Code Club by doing everything “[from] using 3D printers, to programming on laptops, to creating electronics circuits that have a real purpose.”

From leading BLAHAJgang and organizing events, to hosting sessions at the Isle of Man Code Club, to empowering individuals and helping them learn, Adam’s technology journey has certainly been one for the books.