Community Spotlights: cmd-f 2023
Meet members of our community at cmd-f 2023!
cmd-f is a hackathon focused on addressing gender inequality in technology. Through cmd-f, nwPlus hopes to create a safe, dedicated space for people who face gender inequalities to hack together. While hacking was only open to individuals that identify as an underrepresented gender in technology at cmd-f 2023, allies were welcome to join us in celebrating underrepresented genders via other roles. Our Community Spotlights aims to show the diverse stories of hackers, mentors, volunteers, and all who join us at our hackathons!
This article is a collection of community spotlights from cmd-f. We hope these stories inspire you like they inspired us, and encourage you to think about how you can help make tech more equitable for underrepresented genders!
Note: The responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Hackers: Zela & Tiffany
Hi! Please introduce yourselves!
Zela: Hi! My name is Zelalem but I go by Zela for short. I’m in my third-year of Integrated Sciences at UBC, studying Ecology and Statistics.
Tiffany: My name is Tiffany. I’m a UBC alumnus. I recently completed a full stack web development programme at Lighthouse Lab, transitioning from a career in nursing.
Tell me about your project and how you got the inspiration for it.
Zela: I found both Tiffany and Floria, our other team member, on Discord actually. I saw that they were specifically interested in working on a project with Three.js and I’m really interested in 3D modelling so I reached out and they accepted me as a team member.
Tiffany: For me, I wanted to add a game to my portfolio as I haven’t created a game before. But I also wanted to create something with a purpose and some meaning. So I was trying to think of what we could incorporate or gamify and I thought about mental health and relaxation. I know there are some meditation apps out there, but I feel they’re all mostly very audio focused. And some people, like me, have a need for visuals because I fall asleep to it otherwise. So I was thinking, Oh, maybe we can incorporate some of that into a game, so it’ll be more interesting for people who prefer more visuals and become another type of application that they would enjoy using.
What has been your favourite part of attending cmd-f?
Zela: My favourite part was just being able to sit with people in a room and work on a project that’s not for school or anything like that. And it’s kind of just for fun. And it was also really easy to do. The team I had was really, really great. Despite the fact that we met each other 24 hours ago, it was really fun working together and just chatting.
Tiffany: I really enjoyed cmd-f and hackathons in general because of how we can be very innovative and come up with such creative ideas, especially this time when I worked with a great team of inspiring women in tech. It was really fun to come up with ideas. Even though we couldn’t implement everything due to the time constraint, at least, we came up with fun ideas. Hopefully, if we have time we can add more to our project!
What are some words of advice you have for other hackers?
Zela: This is specifically for anybody who wants to get into UX design, is not in comp sci, or doesn’t know how to code. Don’t be afraid to just go to a hackathon, join a team, try your best, and do the work. If you asked me in 2020, whether I could ever win a hackathon, I’d say absolutely not because my 2020 nwHacks project looked so bad. But it was a huge learning opportunity for me and while coding helps a lot at hackathons, it’s not all coding. So don’t be afraid to try something, and even if you don’t win anything, you can come back again next year.
Tiffany: For first-time hackers, just have fun and learn. Allocate your time so you can spend a certain amount of time meeting new people, networking, and building something super cool and fun. At the end of the hackathon, you’ll have had a lot of fun and a great project!
Hackers: Marina and Sarah
Hi! Please introduce yourselves!
Marina: I’m Marina. I’m a Grade 12 student at Lord Byng Secondary. It’s my first time here.
Sarah: I’m also a Grade 12 student at Lord Byng Secondary. My name is Sarah.
How are you finding cmd-f so far?
Sarah: I think it’s pretty cool seeing everyone hard at work. It makes me feel like I should also do more work and attend more of these events because I realized that I’ve never been in these types of environments.
Why did you come to cmd-f today?
Marina: For me, I want to go into computer science so I thought that it made sense to attend a hackathon and see what the community is like. I’m in Girls in STEAM and I saw that they posted about this event so I applied and came!
Sarah: I was asked by Marina if I wanted to do this. It’s something completely new to me because I’m not going into CS–I’m going into architecture–but I thought it’d be cool to see what it’s about, especially since it’s beginner-friendly as well.
Marina, how did you get into CS?
Marina: In Grade 10, I thought that I was going to go into the arts because Lord Byng is an art school. But that changed during COVID when I joined an online HTML bootcamp. I honestly just copied the teacher’s website but it was really cool to see how I could make a website with different functions. After that, I started taking the few classes we have at school and I’ve now been coding for about a year. I’ve done some HTML, Java, and Python and I also work as a coordinator teaching little kids how to code.
Tell me about your project!
Marina: We’re doing an app that has two parts. One part of it is exploring local food places and connecting you to community members and people like your peers to talk about these restaurants. The other part of the service is a simplified system for elderly people or people who have language barriers with restaurants because I noticed that some places have their menus on QR codes or some menus are only in English. So the app would guide them step by step to navigate through the food ordering process.
Was there a particular occasion that inspired this idea?
Sarah: I went to a noodle place with my grandmother and their menu was on a printed QR code. The waiter told us to order ourselves via the app or website because they were understaffed. I realized that if it had just been my grandmother by herself, she wouldn’t be able to order or pay for food because it was all online.
Marina: We know that it’s still an app but we think that while it’s not perfect, it’s definitely still a lot easier to learn just this one app than having to operate so many different apps when they go to restaurants.
Hacker: Melanie
Hi! Please introduce yourself!
Melanie: I’m Melanie. I’m currently a second year CS student at UBC. This is my first time attending cmd-f.
Is this your first time attending a hackathon?
Melanie: No, I attended both HackCamp and nwHacks earlier this year.
How did you become interested in computer science and tech?
Melanie: I’ve actually been at UBC for three years. In my second year at UBC, I was in microbiology and I took a first-year comp sci course, I think it was CPSC 100 (Computational Thinking). It was a basic intro to computer science class and I found it super interesting so I decided to take 110 and 121 just for fun. I ended up really enjoying them so I applied to transfer and I got in. Since then, I’ve been trying to do as many hackathons and tech-related stuff as possible. Getting into CS was really by accident.
Tell me a bit about your project idea.
Melanie: So we actually just had to scale it back a bit because we were a bit too ambitious at the beginning. Our original idea was an app where the user can take a photo of their meal and the app would identify the food and translate it into the approximate amount of nutrients, like sodium, protein, carbs, fibers, et cetera, in that meal. Throughout the day, as you eat more food, the app would adjust the priority for which type of food you should eat more of. The app would also have a calendar which can help you keep track of how much of each category you’re getting and will show you when you had too much of something. From there, you can work on balancing out your diet a bit more. We only just got the camera stuff to work so that’s why we decided to scale it back a bit.
What inspired this idea?
Melanie: Our idea was inspired by how a lot of students tend to struggle to keep track of our health. Oftentimes, when I’m super busy, I find myself eating a lot of instant noodles or other food that isn’t healthy. I know for myself that I have lots of sodium during study weeks so I thought that this type of tracker would be super helpful — that’s how we came up with this idea.
Mentor: Hyunuk (he/him)
Hi! Please introduce yourself!
Hyunuk: Hi, my name is Hyunuk. I’m a fourth-year computer science student at the University of British Columbia. This is the final semester of my second degree. I previously worked as a game designer for years in my home country, South Korea, but decided that I wanted to immigrate and also change careers.
What inspired you to change your career?
Hyunuk: Back when I worked in the game development industry, I worked with a lot of software engineers. And I thought, I can do that. Instead of writing documents and pitching in front of other people to convince them to create a game, a feature, or something like that, creating the actual games seemed to be more interesting. So that’s why I chose to change careers. Being a game designer involved a lot of writing and presenting which is completely different from developing so that’s why I decided to come to UBC to start from scratch. The transition wasn’t easy. The BCS program is advertised as a 20-month program but I’ve been here since 2018 so it’s been a long time.
You mentioned that you’ve been here for much longer than the advertised 20 months. Is there any particular reason?
Hyunuk: Partly due to the pandemic, but also because I did a lot of internships. Some of them were even eight months long! My first internship was at SAP, then I also worked at Amazon and Wealthsimple. Last summer, I worked at Google in a hybrid role in Manhattan.
What’s one takeaway you had from all these internships?
Hyunuk: My main takeaway is that people in this industry are all smart. Not only are they smart, but also very kind. They are always spending their time sharing their knowledge.
How is it being a mentor at cmd-f?
Hyunuk: I feel some pressure to be a mentor because I’m still a student and I feel that I still have a lot to learn compared to other mentors, who may be junior, senior or even principal developers. But, I really like sharing my knowledge with other people and I believe that teaching or mentoring someone is not only just them learning from me, but that I can also learn from them.
I previously worked as a TA for several Computer Science courses, including CPSC 213, 210, and 221, so I am a bit familiar with teaching but never so much in one go; I mentored for eight hours yesterday. It’s a very rewarding experience and I learned a lot. All the ideas were incredible. Despite the limited time of these hackathons, I really love joining them and feeling this atmosphere of learning and building. I’m learning about these cutting edge technologies and new frameworks that I have never seen before and I definitely think that this is one of the best ways to learn about technology and get out of my comfort zone.
Let’s circle back a bit. Tell me about how you got into game development.
Hyunuk: It’s a pretty long story. When I was a kid, I really liked playing games, not just playing them, but also making them. When I was 16 or 17 years old, I dropped out of high school and got my first job as an intern. At that time, I thought, ‘Wow, these foundational skills are a waste of time. I can learn everything from experience!’ But after spending several years in the field and growing up, I realized that I always felt like I was lacking in my foundational knowledge.
Game development is very different from web development or web services. It requires a lot of skills in computer graphics, math, and stats. As I spent more time in my role, I gained more experience and was promoted but realized that it wasn’t really the right fit for me anymore and why I made the decision to come here. It was honestly a struggle starting from scratch when I came here, not only with English, but also with other basic knowledge. But now that I know the importance of foundations, I don’t regret spending five years in my program.
Mentor: Jacky
Hi! Please introduce yourself!
Jacky: My name’s Jacky. I’m in my fourth year at UBC, studying Computer Science and Philosophy.
You’ve been a part of our community for such a long time, tell me about your experience.
Jacky: My relationship with nwPlus goes way back. My very first hackathon was in Grade 11, when my friend was like, hey, this nwHacks thing is happening, we should go even though we’re high school students. We were like impostors, I didn’t know what I was doing and I barely knew how to code at the time. I thought that the hackathon was pretty cool and fun, just being able to get together with a lot of other people and make stuff together — I’d never seen an event like it before. This led me into doing more hackathon stuff.
Heading into UBC, I was looking for a community that I would feel at home in and nwPlus was my first immediate choice since I knew about it from all the hackathon-adjacent activities I did in high school. It quickly became my home for the next three, four years and it’s been a place where I had a lot of personal growth and made lifelong friends.
I joined as Local Hack Day Logistics Coordinator then became Director the next year, rebranding it into HackCamp when we ended our partnership with MLH. The following year I became co-President of nwPlus.
How do you think hackathons have changed over the past few years?
Jacky: I’ve written an article called Hacking the Hackathon which talks about this. I remember hearing a lot of older friends talking about the “golden age” of hackathons between 2012 to 2015. These were the early days when hackathons were very much about just getting together, building stuff, hanging out with friends, meeting cool people, and celebrating cool technical things. And it’s kind of slowly lost that over the last few years. Companies have moved into the space and used it as a way for advertising, free API testing, hiring pipelines, and all that. It’s become a vicious cycle where hackathons are hard to run (because they’re inherently costly but have traditionally been free) so we subsidize the cost by securing sponsors, who then start to have a say in how we run the event. Hackers then start to expect sponsors to be a presence at these events and the cycle continues to propel us towards a more corporate environment, instead of an event for people to just learn and have fun.
One specific thing that I feel has changed a lot over the years is the rise of platforms which highlight the hackathons with the biggest prizes instead of emphasizing that you should attend hackathons because you’re going to learn a lot of stuff. It kind of dilutes the whole process of going to a hackathon where hackers attend to win and add it to their resume, which I think is a dangerous attitude to have when you’re trying to learn something new because you optimize for winning or for something legible for your resume, rather than sitting down and learning something deeply. Having talked to a lot of first-time hackers at various hackathons as a mentor, a common problem they shared was that they pigeon-holed themselves into a small niche because they attend to specifically go for a sponsor prize or learn a specific skill for the sake of winning a prize. It’s like in school where you don’t learn as well when it’s only to get a good score on exams. Hackathons used to be this awesome place to make stuff with friends and learn cool topics, and it’s kind of lost that over the past few years.
A lot of my thinking and work in the past few years has been on how we can change hackathon culture and structures to focus on the learning aspect of hackathons again. My work as HackCamp director was a big part of experimenting with these structures as well, where we tried peer-to-peer judging which focused on feedback instead of always doing mentor-based judging. We also did charity donations instead of podium prizes and other things to de-emphasize the winning aspect of things and put more emphasis on the process of the project. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from hackathons like Hack Lodge, which is a week-long hackathon with a super small and cosy hacking experience where people decide to build something for a week and have a really healthy sleep and eating schedule. I feel like these structures let you walk away feeling like you’ve accomplished something substantial.
How does studying philosophy play a role in your view of Computer Science and hackathons?
Jacky: I think all computer scientists should study philosophy. I think there’s an increasingly popular view in Silicon Valley and the tech world that tech is apolitical, that because it’s coding, software, and math it is neutral. But that’s not the case. Any sort of infrastructure is inherently political (has political implications) with how it affects people, and how it embeds itself into social structures. This is especially important because a lot of our core internet infrastructure feels invisible until something happens. It saddens me that people say that they work in tech because they don’t want to care about politics, because it feels like the very opposite, where you need to care about politics because tech is embedded in everything.
Special thanks to these hackers and mentors for sharing their stories. We’re always so happy to hear from our community, so that we can create more inclusive experiences for new and experienced hackers alike.
Don’t forget to check out our other Community Spotlights!
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