Application Developer’s Club joins the Hack revolution

Imagine being inside of a large building with hundreds of strangers for 24 hours straight. Some people have their headphones wired in while intensely staring at their computer screen, others are participating in a nerf-gun war and many are scattered around sleeping on the floor. 

Welcome to a “hackathon,” a competition where programmers come together in teams to build the most innovative application in hopes of winning prize money.

This spring, the Application Developer’s Club plans to attend these hackathons, which usually include 20-30 teams, for the first time. The club hopes to go to around five hackathons and wants to launch several teams, which usually consist of three to four members, for this year’s first hackathon, Go-pilot, which is held at the SAP center in Palo Alto. 

The Oct. 12 event, funded by big name companies such as Facebook and Palantir, is a high-school only competition, which has led the club members to think they have believes they have a fair shot of placing first in the competition.

However, by coming together as a team and competing at hackathons, Yen said the Developer’s Club will have much better chances of winning.

According to sophomore Aakash Thumaty, also a member of the team, the club’s biggest competition is Monta Vista. This September, Thumaty was one of the 1,000 attendees at a hackathon hosted by the tech blog TechCrunch. Monta Vista, with a team of just four high students, created an app that ended up winning the entire contest, earning them $5,000.

“It’s very unusual for [high school students] to go [to hackathons], and it’s even more unusual for them to win because there’s so many higher experienced programmers there,” Thumaty said.

Hackathons also provide a stage for talented developers to catch the attention of venture capitalists and angel investors. 

The club plans to send teams of three developers picked based on their skills and experience. There will be Web, Android and iOS teams, and each team will be led by the respective officer of that category. 

By competing in hackathons, members hope to strengthen their team chemistry, according to Yen.

“We can also recruit more members, because I know that there are some freshmen who are pretty well versed,” Yen said. “I believe the more hackathons we go to as a club, the more experienced we’ll get.” 

Thumaty also believes that hackathons are more than just about winning first place.

“If you build something really cool at a hackathon and the judges really like it, you can win money,” said Thumaty. “But it’s also a really good work environment if you want to just get something done by coding for 24-hours straight without sleeping.”