Matthew Wong

LEGOs were how Matthew Wong discovered his love for technology and coding. From his days as a little boy in Vancouver playing with the colorful bricks to watching the LEGO movie every day after school to joining the First Lego League at his parent’s request, this world-famous Danish toy brought this young Canadian to find his path.

In grade 7, Matthew started experimenting with LEGO Mindstorms to build and develop programmable robots. His passion for building and coding only grew during high school where he elected to enroll in classes like Introduction to Python and other entry-level coding courses. However, it was during his final year of high school that he joined the FIRST Tech Challenge and accepted a coding and development role on the team, cementing his desire to enter the tech industry.

Matthew graduated from high school in the spring of 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of the shutdowns. He took that time to develop his coding skills and experiment with machine-learning libraries and data science. By the fall, Matthew had joined the Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Computing Science. Despite the challenges of pandemic life and shutdowns, Matthew remained bright and hopeful.

When his mom got in a car accident that September, however, Matthew pitched in to help at home. He pulled back on his course load, but he also started to fall behind in his studies. “I was also losing my love for computer science, technology, and coding,” he recalls.

Matthew wanted to reignite his passion, so he took a data science bootcamp to solidify his understanding of data science and machine learning. His interest restored, he felt ready to pursue his studies once again. It wasn’t long before his friends “dragged” him to Hack The Valley 5 because “I wasn’t as motivated to self-learn as I am now.”

Though nervous at first, Matthew soon found himself interacting with tons of hackers who embraced him. He discovered that he loved joining workshops, focusing on a project for an entire day or two, and meeting lots of people. “I found the hacking community to be constructive, warm, and welcoming,” he says.

With his goal of attending a hackathon every two weeks, not only was he learning, but he was quickly making lots of new friends through the hacker community. With that in mind, he created the Discord server he named “Hack Club”. He intended it to be a place where he could include everyone he met through hackathons and for them to grow as a group. Now with 31 members, his discord is filled with supportive, caring people that are proficient in a variety of skills, including front end, back end, machine learning, design, devops, and presentation. Members can freely invite their friends or anyone who might be a good fit for the server.

Matthew attributes his accomplishments to his supportive friends and hackathon events. Through hackathons, he has been able to network with industry professionals and like-minded individuals; mentor and build a small, supportive hacker community; and land his first job in a full-stack internship role at a local hospital. “That’s something I never would have dreamed of a year ago,” Matthew says. “Hackathons have changed my life in more ways than one.”