HackTX 2016
A recap of how Freetail Hackers managed to pull off another hackathon
Freetail Hackers is a UT Austin student organization that supports the Texas hacker community. No matter your major or skill level, we will support you in building and creating with tech. We achieve this by hosting hackathons at UT Austin. HackTX is our flagship event, open to all college students over 18 years old.
The long-awaited recap of HackTX 2016 is finally here! Scroll below to see how a group of UT Austin students managed to throw an event for hundreds of people. Charts are made courtesy of KeenIO.
Running on TrackTX:
Planning a 24-hour college hackathon takes up countless hours, demands the sacrifice of sleep, and requires so many meetings that you basically have a part-time job in addition to being a student. Our workload increased even more when we moved HackTX off-campus for the first time. Normally, we host our annual event at the Student Activity Center but ran into a snag with booking. Without a venue, we couldn’t register as an official MLH event. We couldn’t even reach out to potential sponsors. The team halted to a stop. Hard. We’d lost our momentum and were all waiting on our logistics team to find a suitable venue. Luckily they discovered quite the swanky place to host HackTX 2016: the Downtown Austin Omni Hotel.
The Omni had never held an overnight event, much less a hackathon. It took quite a few emails and meetings to effectively explain the magnitude of our hackathon and what we needed from the Omni. HackTX is also a blatantly casual event compared to the usual fare of weddings, conferences, and meetings held at such a fancy hotel. During discussions with the Omni, we actually had to reject proper dishware and request paper plates instead. The Omni even rented out trash cans for us because they weren’t used to so much public waste disposal. Their wi-fi set-up also needed a major upgrade. You can’t hack if you can’t check Facebook every five minutes to procrastinate. We partnered with a local provider to ensure hackers had Wi-Fi throughout the entire event. Luckily for us, the Omni was able to meet our expectations, and helped us host one of the smoothest hackathons we’ve ever had. Food is less of a logistics headache when it’s all provided by one caterer who also happens to provide serving and clean-up as well.
The fifth annual HackTX takes it to the MaxTX:
Unlike other hackathons, Freetail Hackers focuses on bringing in hackers at all experience levels. We use enthusiasm as the only admission criteria, giving the majority of our slots to students who register on a first-come, first- serve basis. We believe that no matter your major or level of skill, you can pursue your interests in programming as a hobby or a career. With this in mind, our outreach team focused on improving diversity and bringing in students from all majors and backgrounds. Here’s a breakdown of our stats for HackTX 2016:
- Around 27% of our hackers were female-identifying hackers and we hope to increase this for 2017!
- Over half of our participants were first-time hackers
- Around 85% of participants hailed from UT Austin. We had strong representation from other Texas colleges such as Texas A&M College Station and other UT branches.
- You don’t need to be a computer science major or electrical engineering major to attend HackTX. We had business, psychology, geophysics, and liberal arts students attend as well. Check out our upcoming series on untraditional paths to hackathons by Joshua Guenther.
- We had over 30% freshman attend. For many of them, HackTX was their first hackathon. We even have several of those freshman now on our organizing team! Feels good, fam.
Whataburger for SnackTX:
For the hackers that powered through the first 12 hours of HackTX, we rewarded them with a sweet and savory treat. It’s the gem of the South, a renowned delicacy somehow available to the masses: the Whataburger Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit aka HBCB aka HubChub. Hackers showed much HubChubLuv.
We got your BackTX:
Since so many of our hackathon attendees had never attended a hackathon before, we held workshops the week before to prep up for the event such as an intro to databases hosted by ISSS, the Information and Systems Security Society. Partnering with other student organizations can help bridge communities and also take some of the stress off of event planning.
We also had a ton of mentors helping hackers throughout the 24-hours, sharing their seasoned knowledge of APIs to debugging in the middle of the night. Mentors were given cowboy hats to separate them from the other hackers.
Our hype squad also did an amazing job at keeping up energy levels, especially during the cup stacking competition.
FullStackTX
We saw some awesome projects which covered everything from augmented reality to security to social good. View our Devpost submissions here! Our winners included:
- First Place — Students built RYUU, a hardware hack that provided a hands-on opportunity for Overwatch players to simulate the character Hanzo’s bow and arrow.
- Second Place — Everyone is learning to code nowadays. These guys are trying to make it easier by teaching computer science through rocket science. It’s called November Sky. The better your code, the longer you last in space.
- Third Place — Aside from winning six other awards, Mosaic also took third place. They created an effortless way for people to learn new languages. Usually, you hear and you forget. Mosaic shows you how to see and remember.
This is not the end.
That’s a wrap on HackTX 2016. Keep an eye out for HackTX 2017. If you are a UT Austin student, apply to be a part of the team in the winter! You can follow our Facebook page, check out our website, and also follow us on Twitter @freetailhackers ❤
This post was made with ❤ in ATX.
