Event Recap: Berkeley Cal Hacks 6.0
The weekend of October 25–27, rideOS sponsored the world’s largest collegiate hackathon, Berkeley Cal Hacks 6.0. With over 2,000 students in attendance, the event was an exciting combination of innovation, scrappiness, and genuine curiosity. The hackathon lasted 36-hours, with hackers cranking away late into the night to come up with original projects.
As first-time sponsors of an event as large as Cal Hacks, we were presented with a variety of challenges and lessons over the course of the weekend. Tackling these — and witnessing the amazing projects students came up with using our APIs — was an awesome and eye-opening experience.
To start the event, we participated in an API demo during the opening ceremony and showcased our prize for the team who used our APIs in the most creative way. We decided on a drone as our prize, choosing something that was (hopefully) not only fun for students to play around with, but also an exciting piece of technology that ties into the future of the mobility industry.
During the opening ceremony, one of our engineering managers, Bill Chen, presented the concept of rideOS and did a quick demo of the APIs during the opening ceremony. Bill walked through some interesting potential use cases of the technology — including forms of mobility outside of vehicles, like scooters, bikes, and drones — which garnered a lot of interest and curiosity. Teams flooded us with numerous questions around our APIs; in fact, one of our engineers, Mei Wan, was up late both Friday and Saturday night providing answers to these eager students. Their projects were original and fascinating, and some cases even tackled problems that we weren’t thinking of.
On day one, our booth was swarmed with students interested in both full-time and internship opportunities. Quite frankly, we underestimated just how much traction our booth would receive throughout the course of the weekend. We ran out of nearly all the swag we brought with us — t-shirts, rideOS stickers, candy, even my stack of business cards were all gone. As a recruiter, this was a dream opportunity: getting to chat with hundreds of energetic, passionate students who wanted to hear more about rideOS, while also learning about their interests and experiences. One thing that’s wonderful about working with college students is getting to see the spark of curiosity light up in their eyes, the immediate interest and hope for the future is undeniable. Working with young engineers is a special experience for that reason — you are able to directly interact with the future leaders, builders, and shapers of our world and the technology that forms it.
The team that won our API prize (Team Guardian) ended up using our web application and constraint API to plot high crime areas in Berkeley, and route around those areas. They also created an accompanying Android app. Overall, it was an interesting and innovative application of the technology we’ve built, with far-reaching use cases and implications. Team Guardian and all of the students I interacted with were extremely bright and fascinated with rideOS, which to me is a winning combination.
Ultimately, the goal of Cal Hacks was to bolster recruiting and find strong candidates, while also increasing our general presence at Berkeley — goals which I believe we accomplished. Our recruiting pipeline is continuing to grow with candidates we chatted with at Cal Hacks and those who heard about us because we participated in this year’s event. As a growing startup that has mostly worked with enterprise customers, Cal Hacks was a good experience for us to learn how small teams of developers might use our technology, and how we can make our APIs as simple and developer-friendly as possible. We’re fortunate to take away some valuable lessons that we can take with us moving forward.
Interested in opportunities at rideOS? Check out our careers page: https://rideos.ai/careers.
