Event Recap — UWB Hacks the Cloud
On May 13–15th, 2022, the University of Washington Bothell’s (UWB) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) club hosted its 5th annual and 3rd virtual UWB Hacks the Cloud hackathon. This 2-day virtual event welcomed students from around the nation and challenged them to use Cloud Computing to create solutions in Sustainability, Education, and Entertainment. Close to 70 participants were in attendance, submitting a total of 13 projects.
Challenge tracks:
Sustainability- How can humanity avoid exhausting Earth’s resources? Think of a way to utilize the cloud to either educate young people about sustainability or to build a sustainable solution and help conserve energy, water, or other resources.
Education- As the pandemic became a new normal for all of us, it left lasting changes in our education system. Covid influenced the use of new technology in education to help students continue their education remotely. Think of ways to keep education effective and available remotely, bonus points if you use a cloud. (e.g. online learning, time management, etc.)
Entertainment- Quarantine has had us in search of the best ways to keep ourselves entertained, seeing huge jumps in usage for streaming services, video games, social media, and more. Entertainment continues to grow as people lean more towards the internet for entertainment. Explore the unique avenues in which we provide people with connectivity and entertainment through technology and the cloud.
UWB Hacks the Cloud featured two guest Speakers:
Ryan Russell (Software engineer at Microsoft, former UWB ACM president, and founder of Full Stack Training Academy)
Brandon O’Toole (Masters certificate student)
Ryan discussed how to use hackathon projects as a way to help land a job in the software engineering industry and Brandon discussed how to successfully and efficiently ship software solutions.
Over $1K in prizes were awarded at this year’s event. There were three first place teams and three runner ups.
Winning Teams:
Daniel Banko, UWB ACM President, shared with us his thoughts on this year’s hackathon.
“We are most proud of coming together as a team to plan and successfully host an event as large as a hackathon. There are so many moving parts to events like these, and it can be very overwhelming to put in the hours and plan out the event. We struggled at times but overcame every issue that we faced along the way. Being able to provide an event for our peers like this, and see people learn new skills, make new friends, build cool projects, or just have fun makes all the time and effort of planning an event like this entirely worth it.”