Nurturing Innovation: A Hack Day from Code.gov and GW Student Chapter of ACM
At Code.gov we believe in innovation. We believe in what we do, and remain committed in bringing America’s Code to everyone. But you know how some days, the challenges feel insurmountable? You get out of bed when you don’t really want to, the commute to work is particularly challenging, and every step you take feels like you’re tripping over yourself? On the odd days like this, it’s hard to find inspiration, something essential in making innovation happen.
But that’s the funny thing about inspiration. It can happen anywhere and can come from anyone, and when it comes, you can accomplish anything.
Such was the case for Code.gov when George Washington University’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) collaborated with us to host a Hack Day, one day on the GW campus where Computer Science students gathered together to tinker, test, and code with projects indexed on our website.
Led by GW Student Chapter ACM President Patrick Cody and Vice-President Becky Shanley, GW students filled the room early on a Saturday morning. The plan for the day was an easy one: get together, identify an issue, enhance an existing project, or create something new for an existing project, then code. However, with nearly 5000 projects indexed, we did not send these unsuspecting students into the coding abyss blindly. The Code.gov team worked through our inventory to narrow down a handful of projects for the students to choose from. The goal of this Hack Day was to give these students experience, either in working with open source code or simply submitting a pull request in order to see a workflow in action. Within the first half-hour, a pull request was submitted by sophomore Arjun Vijay, and that pull request was quickly addressed and merged. Dietrich Reidenbaugh undertook resolving and removing a styling issue with our Project Details page, his pull request merged and now part of the Code.gov website. Then there were CS students Sam Gassman and Genevieve Flynn, submitting an issue into Code.gov concerning our API. What had initially been believed to be a data issue was actually the API not filtering correctly. It was these two students, attempting to debug the API from the front end, who discovered this bug and then submitted the issue. All of these instances served not only as an education for how open source works in the real world, but offered tremendous help to us at Code.gov as contributions that went well beyond coding.
This first-ever Code.gov/GW ACM Hack Day offered these students a variety of real-world environment tasks, far removed from classroom exercises where you know the end result. Here, it was more like “This is what we would like to happen…” and then it was up to these up-and-coming coders, alongside the Code.gov team, to figure out a solution. Some focused their time and talent on the Code.gov website in particular, undertaking outstanding issues on our own website. The more we worked with the students, the more energized our team grew. It is easy to feel that, when you code, you are working in a vacuum. At this Hack Day, the environment was truly collaborative. For the students, lessons were learned from the Code.gov team members on site. For Code.gov, we became invigorated by the drive and the enthusiasm of the Hack Day participants. It was a win-win, all around.
This Hack Day was a kickoff to a month of numerous events featuring Code.gov, and what a kickoff it was! This was a truly amazing day, and connecting with GW ACM only fanned the fires for us here. We love meeting innovative, imaginative minds and hope you will take some time out of this month to join us at one of our events, or take a look at our Open Tasks to see how you can contribute. We want to hear about what you are doing with America’s Code, or introduce you to the opportunities available at Code.gov. If you have an event you would like to see us appear at or would like to talk to us about appearing at a meetup, visit us on Twitter or LinkedIn. We want to hear of your challenges, answer questions you may have for us, and offer you a chance to make a difference, to innovate, and to create.
Thank you, GW ACM and attending students. Let’s do this again. Soon.
Code on.
Special Thanks to Jason Lowengrub, Ricardo Reyes, and Froilán Irizarry for their contributions to this article.
