HackRU Interviews: Heman Gandhi
This spring, HackRU Marketing interviewed members of our organizing team about their experiences with HackRU and hackathons in general!
Here, we interviewed Heman Gandhi, who’s on HackRU’s Research & Development team this spring.
How are you involved with HackRU?
I am one of the RnD directors.
RnD is the dev team for HackRU. We made the QR system and maintain the mobile apps, the mentorship system — helpq, and online judging. I have had the fortune of managing these projects and maintaining the common backend they all use.
How did you first become involved with HackRU?
I was a sponsorship organizer for HackRU Spring 2016.
Describe a memorable experience with HackRU.
During my first HackRU, at the RAC, I went up and saw the scale of the event — you could see all 800 attendees. This inspired me to continue.
What’s an interesting project/idea that you saw hackers working on during HackRU?
Some guys tried to make a hologram. There were a bunch of “I used Arduinos so that you can track how noisy rooms are” projects that I liked. There was also this one bot that produced different braille characters — that was really cool.
How should those who are new to hackathons approach HackRU?
Come learn and build. There’s got to be something that you want to fix or make or try out in tech, so do it. (Or at least get started.)
What was your first hackathon like?
My first Hackathon was the Philly CodeDay in the spring of 2016. It was a bunch of stressful fun. I went with my high school friend and he had an idea for a trading system: at his school, you could trade positions in waitlists for your classes. He wanted to build a system where you can trade in arbitrarily large cycles to get whatever you want. I wrote the server using everything I knew: jQuery, JSON, and the Python standard library. My friend and I collaborated on the algorithm and it was some of the best midnight thinking I did. We had a demo, that worked minimally. No CSS or anything. We won pretty much because the judges liked the amount of jargon in our slides, but it was a nice feeling. It made me want to go to more competitive events.
Give me your best HackRU pun!
I’m a Hack, RU?
This spring happens to be Heman’s last semester organizing for HackRU, so we asked some additional questions about his overall experience with HackRU:
How has HackRU changed since when you first became involved?
It got smaller, grew in organizing team size, and became more efficient.
What is something you think you’ll miss about organizing HackRU?
…everything. Kind of the feeling of ownership over something people really care about. My baby, LCS. (LCS is the backend. We had a normal website, but then other teams wanted features like a scheduler for volunteer shifts, or an app for sponsors to see resumes. We also finished our first mobile app by having the QRs separated from the website. I decided to move everything into one API that spat out data in JSON for the apps to use instead of just the HTML we used to run the site on. Now LCS is finally starting to actually manage everything about all our users (we have 8 types and counting).)
What do you want to see HackRU be like in the years to come?
I wish we did more with the theme: more decorations, easter eggs, themed events, and generally made it clearer that we have a theme (I’ve met hackers who have no idea that HackRU is themed.) I also really wish we still had buses so that hackers from other schools could come. A smaller organizing team would be nice and probably help with increasing efficiency.
Thank you, Heman!
