5th annual SD Hacks draws hundreds of student participants

By Daniel Li

More than 750 students participated in the 5th annual SD Hacks.
Photo credit: Shirley Guo, Triton Engineering Student Council

For 36 hours straight, 143 student teams crammed together at UC San Diego’s RIMAC Arena to participate in the fifth annual SD Hacks hackathon. 

Held from Oct. 25-27, SD Hacks is an intercollegiate hackathon in which students come together to tackle a given problem by developing technical solutions. The event, organized by the Triton Engineering Student Council, was also sponsored by ten companies and organizations, including the Naval Information Warfare Center, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and Activbody. A total of 435 students participated this year.

Hackers were asked to develop projects that fell into one of the three main tracks: Sustainability, Education, and Health and Wellness. Attendees were also encouraged to participate in various challenges set by SD Hacks sponsors. 

After two hours of judging on the last day, a trio of students from Harvey Mudd College-- Matthew Krager, Alfredo Gomez, and Alice Chi-- emerged as the overall winners of the hackathon. The team developed a tool called EverGreen, which aims to analyze and reduce the carbon emissions of code. 

“Given an expected amount of traffic and set of computer specs, EverGreen is able to capture the environmental impact that a programmer's code will have by using various metrics such as the carbon emitted in the average lifespan of a car,” the EverGreen project submission states. “Since many of today's large computations are done on the cloud, we have provided users with various industry standard AWS instance type-based architectures.”

They received Apple iPads, Bose SoundLink wireless headphones and an Amazon giftcard for their 1st place prize. 

For some students, it was their first time participating in a hackathon. Second-year UC San Diego students Vincent Tran, Steven Liu, Isabel Suizo and Vasundhara Sengupta developed a live-streaming app called Live.ly. 

Steven Liu, Vasundhara Sengupta, Vincent Tran, Isabel Suizo
Photo by Daniel Li

“The concept behind Live.ly is that you're walking around on the street late at night and things could be a little dangerous,” Tran said. “You don't want to call 911 but you might want to let a friend know, and currently your options are to call or text them.  But that might hinder your ability to get out of a dangerous. If something does happen, you're not gonna be able to whip out your phone and draft up this text. So that's the issue we're trying to solve.” 

Despite having to start over on their project 12 hours into the event, Liu appreciates his team’s positive attitude and how he was able to learn new programming languages. 

“I would describe this weekend as a roller coaster,” Liu said. “Coming in, we were all super ambitious and ready to build something. And as it turns out, development is not always so easy.”

Third-year UC San Diego computer science students William Vuong, Howard Lin, Jack Song and fourth-year student Kevin Vildosola teamed up to create Stutter, an interview prep service that analyzes and provides feedback on how people perform during interviews. 

Jack Song, Howard Lin, William Vuong, Kevin Vidosola
Photo by Daniel Li

 “Ultimately, as college students, we always interview for internships or jobs, but never receive feedback,” Vuong said. “We wanted to give people a way to better prep for interviews so that we can all crush future interviews.”

Vildosola is grateful that he was able to learn from other students who had more experience and knowledge in development. 

“My experience at SD Hacks was honestly amazing,” Vildosola said. “It’s so rewarding because I never imagined I’d be at a stage right now where I could be talking about an app that I helped create.”

According to SD Hacks director and computer science student Jimmy Dang, preparations for SD Hacks started in June 2019, after the HackXX hackathon. The organizing team comprised of 20 members from the HackXX team and Triton Engineering Student Council. Dang explained that the hardest parts of the planning process were attracting sponsors and finalizing day-of event logistics. 

“There were a lot of moving parts in a lot of different areas of the hacking venue, especially moving people from RIMAC arena to Mandeville,” Dang said. “We also had a lot of rebranding to do, given it was our 5th anniversary and we wanted to make sure it was the best hackathon we’ve ever held.”

His favorite part about SD hacks: interacting with both sponsors and hackers during the event. Dang emphasized that the hackathon would not be possible without the collaboration among companies, student organizations, volunteers, judges and mentors. 

“Being able to interact with the attendees at our event made me feel like all of the effort that was put in, completely worth it,” Dang said. “Seeing people satisfied and enjoyed with our event made me feel satisfied with the work that I, as well as the entire team, put in over the course of four to five months.”

Winners: 

First Place Overall: EverGreen (Matthew Krager, Alfredo, and Alice Chi)

Second Place Overall: Corssary (Jacob Rothman, Jonathan McGowan, Roderick Nappier, and Dhanush Karthikeyan)

Third Place Overall: Ribbit (Sarah Ekaireb, Spencer Congero, Sarah Jung, and Alex Yu)

Health & Wellness Category: Recipe 101 (Xiaolan Huang, Yitian Wang, Moon Jiao, Duolan Ouyang)

Sustainability Category: EcoEat (Spencer Churchill, Moses Lee, Sophia Song)

Education Category: Virtus (Sabeel Mansuri, Subhash Ramesh, Nikhil Pathak, Ayush Shukla)

A full list of winners can be found at https://sd-hacks-2019.devpost.com/submissions.