Dare to Dream: Our Experience at the CARBON Hackathon
After a morning of some hearty breakfast and an inspiring speech from CTO Rob Alexander, all the interns were psyched to begin working on their hackathon ideas. I gathered with my team members and we decided on a name: The Richmond Girl Squad. We are four female tech interns currently working in different areas across the Capital One West Creek campus.
We all came to the team with different backgrounds and skillsets. Alice SeongYeon Park, a Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon, worked with our Django backend. Ann Chen, an undergraduate also from CMU, used Materialize to spruce up our frontend. Elaine Lee and myself (from Cornell and Brandeis, respectively) worked closely with Capital One’s DevExchange Rewards API. In the end, we all contributed hours of work and lost sleep to create something awesome.
However, our twenty-odd hours weren’t all smooth-sailing. After registering our team, we ran into the age-old hackathon problem: What should we make? We knew we wanted to utilize DevExchange and develop a web application. We also wanted to create something that could be enjoyed by Capital One associates and customers alike. After some thinking, we had our team mentor, Sam Ostoich, help us out. We finally found an idea that we were all passionate about and began hacking.
There were so many support systems in place to help us make the best working product in an incredibly short amount of time. When I had a problem, I just had to talk to one of the many available mentors. There was always at least one expert for each of our questions (thanks Rick!). We took breaks in the hotel arcade and even flew drones in the parking lot, almost running them into some cars. The dining room was always stocked with beverages and snacks, completing the authentic hackathon experience.
As we played music on the big TV screen in our hotel room, we programmed in style. Most of us were very unfamiliar with the Django framework and Python, as well as Materialize. All of us were brand new to DevExchange, but in the spirit of a hackathon, we gave it a go. And so we coded our application deep into the night.
When it came to the round of judging, we practiced our pitch a thousand times over. Our application, named Giftr, would crowdsource gift ideas from its users. The user’s account can be connected to Capital One to refer to their rewards balance when picking out a present. The site features included search functions that sorted by tags and price, among other things. Between judges, we made time to explore other interns’ projects and were surprised by the sheer amount of talent and creativity all across the teams.
As the winning teams were about to be announced, we joked to each other about being so great that we were past ranking. In reality, we weren’t expecting our name to be called. We knew we had done a great job, and so did the other interns — and that was enough. We were satisfied to have tried the best we could.
When all is said and done, I’m proud of my team. I’m proud we took a risk to learn exciting new frameworks. I’m proud we were equally passionate about our idea. I’m proud we had such great teamwork. It’s so important to create spaces where engineers from different backgrounds could join up and be creative without restraint. We grew so much as engineers and as individuals in just these two days. Future interns pay attention: Never underestimate the power of caring about something. Even if it’s “just” a hackathon, there is so much to be learned.
For more on APIs, open source, community events, and developer culture at Capital One, visit DevExchange, our one-stop developer portal. https://developer.capitalone.com/
