#pearlhacks

[onegirlsomegames]

Pearl Hacks - Ladies 4 Tech

This year’s iteration of PearlHacks, an annual hackathon held exclusively for women at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina, took place from February 10-11 and I was lucky enough to have been able to attend. I flew out the morning before, explored downtown Raleigh for a bit, and then went over to UNC around 6pm. The organizers of PearlHacks graciously provided those of us who flew/bussed in air mattresses so we could (try) and get a good night's rest (unfortunately I didn’t, the room was freezing) and bond with the other participants. Hacking started the next day at 11am and went until 11am the day after, so 24 hours.

I opted to work by myself and unfortunately I don’t actually have any pictures (because I couldn’t figure out how to get pictures off the phone I was using, rip).

Safe Word

Have you ever walked home, dark, alone, probably late at night and although you know you're fine you kinda wish there was an easy way to make an emergency call (if you ever needed too) without pulling out your phone, dialing the number... Well great, Apple/Android releases that, just press a button 5 time and, oh wait, an obnoxiously loud siren plays. Subtle right? Safe Word does exactly what you want it to do. It allows you to say something, a safe word, and immediately call 911, a friend, family member, whomever.

Positives

It works! It looks like hot garbage (I promise, it looks like garbage) but it works! It only took me from 11am to 4am the next day to get the speech recognition working (casual 16 hours of me staring at errors) and then I made literally the rest of the app from 8am to 11am. But I did get to sleep in a sweet chair/crib thing (see below) that was super lit.

Negatives

Google Cloud API, for as powerful it is, was an incredibly hard API to get working (until I gave up and just decided to use their Rest API). Like, I literally don’t know what I was doing wrong I just could not get it to work at all.

Conclusion

The only other “downside” was Toronto decided to have some great weather and my flight home got cancelled. Rip. But, because PearlHacks is AMAZING one of the directors let me sleep over in her dorm AND drove me back to the airport the next day at 4am. It was great and I felt so cared for, seriously, it was so unnecessary but so great. Otherwise, North Carolina was really nice, being in a hackathon with just women was really cool (I made some pretty good friends <3), and I hope I can come back next year!

PearlHack Day 0 was basically a giant sleepover

Dat sweet sponsor fair life

The phone I borrowed was dead, same

My little work table (I finished with 7 diet cokes, ;’D)

My sweet sleeping chair/crib

[omiiii]

I’m going to my first hackathon next weekend.

I don’t know where I’m sleeping yet.

I guess on the floor.

[rossgrady]

March 21-25, 2015

I spent a big chunk of the weekend at UNC for PearlHacks, a hackathon aimed specifically at high school & college women, regardless of previous programming experience.

It was really amazing. There was just so much exuberance coming from the (4-500) young women there, such a sense of open inquisitiveness. I love the idea that there may have been as many as 2-300 girls nudged more in the direction of careers in computing, thanks to one amazing weekend experience.

(Of course, if we don’t fix the culture problem in the tech industry, they’ll all be really disappointed when they finally graduate & get jobs -- but on the other hand, the more gung-ho young women who enter the industry, fully unwilling to put up with any shit, the faster the culture will change. I hope.)

I’m normally pretty negative about hackathons. The basic premise is that teams of students get together, come up with ideas, and then spend 18-36 consecutive hours building quick [semi] working prototypes, which they demo at the end of the weekend. Prizes are generally awarded.

And then, near as I can tell, never touch again. Whenever I interview a student, if they have hackathons on their resume, I ask whether they’ve continued working on their hackathon projects. The answer is pretty much universally no.

So in a nutshell, then, hackathons are an opportunity to stay up all night slapping together half-working code, potentially win some sort of prize, and then immediately abandon the project. This tweet sums it up perfectly:

"Hackathons are LARPing the worst part of startups for a weekend." --@_danilo

— Nicole Sanchez (@nmsanchez) March 8, 2015

But PearlHacks was different, in part because it was aimed partially at non-programmers, so there were a lot of structured activities for students who didn’t feel up to hacking on a project.

I still wish I could believe that even one or two of the 63 projects were going to persist past the weekend, though.

But it was rewarding enough to see a team of high school girls win a prize for a side-scrolling game in which an intrepid young woman has to leap over Chlamydia cells and grab flying condoms to earn points.

Sunday night we watched Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. What an amazing exhausting experience. I had never seen it before, although I read the Autobiography in high school, and it made enough of an impression on me that I was able to tell that the movie stuck pretty close to the story as told in the book.

The cinematography, staging, costume design -- the dance numbers -- just the overall dizzying sensation of the first hour was the perfect destabilizing setup for all that followed in the second and third hours. What an epic story. Highly recommended. 

The rest of this week thus far has just been the typical late-March stress rollercoaster of extending offers to students and then waiting to see whether they accept or not. Oh, and most of a day wasted at the Honda dealership waiting for them to install a part that should have only taken 10 minutes. Spoiler alert: They didn’t actually install it, so I get to go back.

[hackathonstickers]

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