Five Carleton University students competed at the University of Waterloo at the first annual Hack the North event Sept. 19-21—the largest international hack-a-thon of its kind in Canada.
The event was organized by Techyon, a group of University of Waterloo undergraduate students. One thousand applicants from over 100 schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and University of California Los Angeles as well as schools in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Brazil, Korea, and China traveled to compete.
“I worked on [a] geo-localized Reddit,” Mitch Cail, a fourth-year software engineering student, said. “When you make a post, it only sends it out to people within a 50-mile radius. As more people like it, the radius grows. This way you have a visual way to see how [posts] go viral.”
For Laura Alhoury, a third-year computer science student, it was her first experience at a hack-a-thon. Like most Carleton students, she said she was only there for fun.
“Our project was an app called StoreFront, which uses Bluetooth enabled beacons that you can attach to anything,” she said. “Our idea was to place a beacon outside somewhere like a pub or campus building, and the app would be able to tell which buildings are within range and display relevant information such as menus or schedules of events.”
Organizer Liam Horne said they looked at many different aspects of each Hack the North application, and that they only accepted 1,000 out of over 2,500 applicants.
“The general rule was to find people that would contribute most to the environment around them and that want to have an impact at the event,” he said in an email.
“That means that we had some of the best hackers in the world at the event but we also had some students for which Hack the North is their first ever hack-a-thon . . . This means that all attendees collaborate together and help each other out to foster the culture among people that want to make a difference using technology.”
Techyon met every week for a year leading up to the event. The event was a part of Major League Hacking, an official student hacking league from the United States.
“We had people dedicated to food, travel, internet, marketing, sponsorship, and much more,” Horne said. “Planning this event took an extreme amount of care to detail as well as the flare of dedication to plan it to be as big as it was.”
Ryan Seys, who worked on various mobile apps during Hack the North, said skills in computer programming is becoming increasingly important in our society.
“Computer programming is becoming a fundamental skill that everyone should know how to do,” he said.
“To advance society faster, we need more skilled computer programmers. Computers allow us to solve problems that were once impossible, especially in the field of medical science. This has a major benefit on society as a whole, even those people that may rarely use a computer such as those in developing countries,” Seys said.
