Bailey Luu

Bailey Luu credits the MLH hacker community for her growth and evolution. It’s safe to say the feeling is mutual. The number of hacks she participates in, the amount of leadership and mentoring she does, and her selfless dedication have led to her success.

In 2016, during her 10th-grade year, she found her passion for coding, by teaching herself. Learning HTML without taking a class is complicated, but she mastered it quickly and created her first HTML website on her own. The site combined her newfound curiosity about coding with her affection for movies, showing her the potential of computer science. She recalls, “Being able to apply what I learn and build what I love is a great feeling.”

Since then, Bailey has not slowed down at all. She devoted the next two years of high school to learning Arduino and Java, creating projects like a Morse Code Translator.

By the time she enrolled at York University, she was ready to jump into coding head first. She discovered Major League Hacking (MLH) through her first hackathon: ElleHacks, in the winter of 2020. At ElleHacks, she and her teammates developed GreenGrocery, an app that allows users to manage their food supplies, alerts them of upcoming expiration dates, and delivers customized recipes based on their foods. The app used Figma as its tech stack, giving Bailey another notch in her technology belt.

Once she had completed her first hackathon, the floodgates opened. Through the MLH newsletter, she learned about the upcoming Local Hack Day 2021, which she attended and where she met members of the guild BLAHAJGang, founded by Jacklyn Biggin and Adam Drummond, a global community connected by a shared love of technology and coding, and it was an instant source of knowledge and excitement for her and remains so today.

At LHD, she dove into artificial intelligence, data visualization, and frameworks like React. As she became more proficient in these technologies, her involvement in MLH grew stronger. Soon after, she joined yuHacks, PennApps XXII, Neighborhood Hacks, and Hack This Fall. As she attended more hackathons, she came to consider the technical knowledge she developed a prize of its own. The things she learned at hackathons weren’t covered in school.

In the fall of 2021, Bailey’s approach to hackathons shifted. She saw these hackathons’ immense impact on her technological and social development, and she wanted to give back. She says, “Since MLH provides me great joy in the hacker community, I love to spread the joy to other folks who haven’t known about MLH or want to explore Computer Science.” As an ambassador, volunteer, and eventually a hackathon organizer, she could provide that joy to newer hackers. Besides offering support and guidance to hackers of all experience levels, she saw the draw of the organizer community. She appreciates the communication between organizers, technical knowledge gained from running the event, and the tight-knit feeling of being on a team.

As an ambassador and hacker at Hack This Fall, she met ambitious and brilliant individuals who would guide her towards organizing and progressing in the MLH world. This ambition rubbed off as she jumped into subsequent roles as Logistics Executive at ElleHacks and Technical Lead at yuHacks/GDSC YorkU.

Bailey has shown nothing but an intense desire to help others enjoy the same experiences she had, and she continues to rise to the top of the MLH community. Throughout her journey, Bailey has been inspired by the ways other hackers use technology, and by the impact that technology can have on social change. Seeing their projects has motivated her to learn more. As she says, “I couldn’t [have] become who I am today without MLH, BLAHAJGang, friends, and family. Thank you, hacker community, for nurturing my passion.”