Spectra — from the beginning
On July 23rd, 2016 at 11:30 PM, Spectra ended its first hackathon.
Over 250 people (attendees, mentors, workshop leaders, and volunteers) came to lead or attend workshops, mentor in old skills or be mentored in new ones, and participate in engaging talks by women with much experience to share.
Here are some things I learned:
- Ask even though it seems stupid.
A while back, I remembered joking around with my friends about starting a hackathon multiple times, and, for my New Year’s resolution, I wanted to inspire more people to code.
With this idea in the back of my mind, I saw someone post in Ladies Storm Hackathons about how to start your own hackathon, and I reached out to him privately:
“Hi Shy! I saw your comment on my LSH post. I would really like to start a west coast hackathon for women. I’m still debating if I should because this would mean an extreme time commitment, and I also don’t have any real status in the tech world currently. I just think it would be a really great idea since I haven’t seen one yet. Let me know what you think! Thanks for reading this in advance.”
“Hey Christina, Most people don’t do it alone, and you don’t have to start huge either.”
Shy Ruparel from Major League Hacking (MLH) offered support to help make this idea a reality. At first I wasn’t sure what to expect. It took me almost a whole month to debate about actually starting this. I had low confidence in myself, and I figured no one would answer this message. However, I was taken aback by the number of responses.
Although Spectra had an enormous amount of support, I felt like an imposter for doing this for the longest time. There were countless times when I felt like I wasn’t good enough because I was someone from community college — I didn’t go to MIT, Stanford, etc.
I remember reaching out to Shriya Nevatia from LSH (Ladies Storm Hackathons), Izzy Coronado, from Technica, and people from other hackathons. Each time, I was scared they would turn down my idea, but little by little, I was amazed by their reactions and gained confidence and experience from listening to their stories.
I felt super crazy for doing this.
My family was going through a really tough time. I decided to take on five jobs totaling over 35+ hours of work a week on top of taking a full courseload of computer science, math, and physics classes. Having meetings for Spectra in addition to all of this work felt like a lot, especially considering that I was hoping to transfer schools come fall semester. There were many moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle the stress.
Things finally lightened up when I got accepted into UCSD. I remember crying like an embarrassing baby on the BART — but felt like I finally did something right.
I continued organizing and running these meetings, though, until it became a weekly thing with 27 women and one guy (shoutout to Chris Ngo!) from different sides of the nation. The best thing about this was we all had one common goal — to create a hackathon for gender minorities to feel welcomed and included.
2. Find your motivation.
Just like Shy had mentioned, no one organizes hackathons alone. The Spectra organizers motivated and inspired each other to keep working hard regardless of distance and time constraints.
There were many times I wanted to cry because I didn’t know how this was going to work out. We changed our plan multiple times and were getting closer and closer to the event date. It was an honor to work with YouTube for our inaugural event, but with neither endpoint having created a hackathon before, there was a lot unknown — many ideas to define and discuss before they came to fruition. In the end, however, seeing the progress and smiles that Spectra produced, motivated me to continue.
3. Don’t be scared to say something.
A lot of my friends did not understand what I was doing because I would always be “working.” I was considered an extreme workaholic, and many people faded from my life. I remember someone distinctly telling me:
“What is the point of working so hard on this when you have other things to do? It’s not going to work out.”
And I felt like I messed up, but I also realized:
4. Be around people who support you, because doubt stops you from making plans become a reality.
- The people who you surround yourself with help you become the best version of yourself.
During the summer, I started working at Alexa Cafe, a national all-girls camp at which I taught mobile app development, Java, and JavaScript. However, I was working from 7 AM to 11 PM, Sunday through Friday. That was when I was especially thankful for the Spectra co-directors and team leads for helping out so much. Without the team’s support, I believe I would not have been able to put together such an event by myself.
On July 23rd, all of our hard work finally paid off at YouTube HQ in San Bruno. Some of us had never seen each other in person before, and it felt like the first time you meet someone off a dating site (except they don’t ghost you).
What validated our hard work the most were the many people who voiced to the Spectra team that they truly enjoyed the event. We created a hackathon that had one of the most comfortable environments within the hackathon community. For a lot of women who attended, this was their first real taste of a hackathon, and many were able to have a blast without feeling pressured. Spectra was the entrance point that some women needed into the hackathon community. Many even decided to continue and sign up for other hackathons afterwards!
I want to thank Izzy Coronado, Shriya Nevatia, Cynthia Yin, Maggie White, and Natasja Nielsen for being the driving forces from the start of the event until the end. These women went above and beyond to make this event happen, and I’m very proud and grateful for their support.
Thank you to all the other organizers for collaborating together to make this happen so smoothly during the day.
And thank you to the attendees, mentors, and volunteers who played a huge part in putting this together as well. We couldn’t have done it without you all.
If you have any questions regarding Spectra or just want to talk, you can email the team at spectradirectors@gmail.com, or me at tina.fcook@gmail.com!
Shout out to Izzy and Cynthia for taking time out of their day to provide feedback and edits on this post!
