App Dev alumni invites SHS members to LA Hacks

Class of 2015 alum Anshul Aggarwal, now a sophomore at UCLA, is one of three students from the school organizing one of the largest college hackathons in the world: LA Hacks. The invitation-only event will pit 1,000 programmers against each other for prizes combining to a whopping $100,000.

The 48-hour event, in which entrepreneurs, programmers and designers team up to create any sort of software or hardware project, is taking over the weekend of March 31.

However, organizing a hackathon of this caliber does not come without challenges — in fact, Aggarwal said that planning this year’s hackathon has been extremely challenging in terms of applying for and receiving grants from sponsors, especially since the total amount of money needed such a large size is $160,000. Complicating this year’s event is that a major sponsor pulled out., by re-organizing and re-allocating the budget as  well as reaching out to other sponsors, Aggarwal said that he and the LA Hacks team have been able to reach their fundraising goals.

“The entire year after the large company pulled out we had been reaching out to potential sponsors,” Aggarwal said. “We found that a large number of companies, both tech and non-tech, were willing to pitch into the efforts to make the hackathon a success.”

This year, LA Hacks has shifted its focus from a purely tech hackathon to a more open event to welcome fields such as design, business and the humanities. This change, Aggarwal said, was partially prompted by the need to find other sponsors for the event.

“After analyzing our options, we realized that we would have to change our core message for companies to be interested,” Aggarwal said. “Thus, we introduced beginner workshops and really focused on making our message one of education and learning rather one of a pure competitive nature.”

Furthermore, Aggarwal believes that a viable product must must be coupled with an “intense focus” on design and appeal to user. Aggarwal and the rest of the team found it necessary to encourage designers and other non-programmers to attend the event, as they are “very important to any kind of development.”

This year, only 1,000 participants were chosen from the thousands of potential attendees — eight of whom are SHS App Dev Club members. Freshmen Ujjwal Krishnamurthi and Dhruv Shah, sophomore officers Daniel Bessonov, Patrick Li and Bassil Shama and juniors Clifford Yin, Nguyen Do and Roland Shen are among the few chosen to participate.

Aggarwal, who served as App Dev’s vice president during his time at the school, said that he made an effort to accept all SHS students, as he wanted to give back to the club that gave him so much invaluable experience.

“App Dev gave me a solid foundation in both the fundamentals of computer science and design,” Aggarwal said. “So in a way, accepting the App Dev members was my way of saying thank you to the club and Saratoga in general.”