Today, we fill the U-Center with over 1,000 hackers. But in 2016, HackDavis was just an idea shared by a few students who had to build from scratch.

To celebrate this decade milestone, we sat down with the original co-founding team– Christina Zhu, Vignesh Palaniappan, Rohit Tigga, and Sridatt Bhamidipat to hear how it all began.

Here is the origin story of HackDavis.

The Challenge Starting From Zero

Looking back, it’s easy to assume HackDavis was inevitable. But in 2015, the concept of a major hackathon at UC Davis didn’t exist.

Vignesh Palaniappan recalls that the biggest hurdle was the uncertainty. “There was no template,” he says. “We knew students were interested, but there was no playbook for how to actually run one at UC Davis.”

The team faced two massive walls: Funding and Logistics.

“The biggest challenge was getting people to fund a project that didn’t exist yet,” says Christina Zhu. “It was hard convincing people to sponsor an event that had never happened.”

On top of that, the university administration was skeptical. The idea of students staying “overnight” in a campus building raised eyebrows. And the logistics? They were a nightmare. “We had no idea what ‘running a hackathon’ meant in reality,” Christina admits. “We didn’t think about buying 100 power surge outlets, renting a generator, or dealing with WiFi in the ARC — a solid concrete building with access point issues.”

Sridatt Bhamidipati remembers the hustle vividly. It was all cold outreach. He used a Chrome extension called “Streak” to track email pipelines, collecting business cards at other hackathons and pitching sponsors one by one. “We started with nothing,” Sridatt says. “It was total ambiguity. We had to create our own opportunity.”

The Mission: Why “Social Good”?

From the very start, HackDavis refused to be just another coding competition. The founders wanted an identity that reflected the campus.

“Davis is an agricultural, health-focused, eco-friendly school,” Sridatt notes. They leaned into that reputation to find their prompt: Code for Social Good.

Vignesh adds that this mission is what surprises him most ten years later. “From the beginning, HackDavis wasn’t just about building for the sake of coding. It was about inspiring students to think entrepreneurially. Ten years later, that mission is still at the core of the event.”

They weren’t just building an event, they were trying to build a culture at Davis.

The Reality

The morning of the first event in 2016 was chaotic. Sridatt recalls waking up at 4 AM to get to the ARC, filled with excitement and nerves. “It was more nerve-wracking before the students came in than when the actual event was going on,” he says.

Things didn’t go perfectly. Sridatt even gave an Angular workshop where the demo completely broke — “shit hit the fan,” as he puts it. But he learned a valuable lesson that day: “It was a blip on the radar. People won’t remember the mistakes, they remember the community.”

Despite the power strip panics and the concrete walls blocking the WiFi, the feedback was unanimous: The students loved it.

A Decade Later

When we asked the founders what they think of HackDavis now, the sentiment was pure pride (and a little jealousy).

“Dang, y’all have your own fall quarter camping retreats in cabins now!?” Christina joked. “We should’ve done that! And I actually bought a sticker and keychain of the mascots — I don’t think any other UC hackathon has such cute mascots.”

For Vignesh, the shock is in the scale. “Our first HackDavis took place in the ARC Ballroom with around 350 students. Today, the event fills the entire ARC Stadium with close to 1,000 participants.”

Sridatt’s advice to the current generation? “Embrace the moment. Tell yourself not to be nervous. These are the things you’ll talk about on job applications and remember forever.”

To the Future

As we look at how far we’ve come: from 350 students in a ballroom to a stadium filled with innovators. We remain grateful to the team that took the risk in 2016.

Sridatt’s advice to the current generation? “Embrace the moment. Tell yourself not to be nervous. These are the things you’ll talk about on job applications and remember forever.”

They proved that even without a playbook, if you have a mission for social good and a team willing to grind, you can build something that lasts a decade.

Happy 10th Anniversary, HackDavis!

Read more about our co-founders here!

• Co-Founder Series: Christina Zhu
• Co-Founder Series: Sridatt Bhamidipati
• Co-Founder Series: Rohit Tigga
• Co-Founder Series: Vignesh Palaniappan

As the HackDavis 2020 website officially launches, we want to share the collaborative process that the members of the HackDavis Team went through in creating the site! This year’s website was made through many discussions, meetings, iterations, and teamwork between the Technical Team, Ben Ankiel, Nick Sulistio, and Josh Arnold and the Design Team, Michelle Gore and Celina Leong here to talk about their process in building the website!

How was creating the website for you and what is different about this year versus last year?

Ben: To speed up the development process, we started with the website from last year, since the design this year was pretty similar. We had a couple of ideas on how to make it “pop” and stand out from other websites, some of the things we discussed were parallax and micro animations. On the landing page, you can see how we used a lot of micro animations to create different effects.

Nick: “Right now it will be just some bug fixes but we are cleaning it up over time as traffic starts to build up from the launch. I have never had an opportunity to collaborate with designers so it was a new process for me but it was so much fun working with other people and iterating back and forth. It is mainly the same structure as last years but with a new look and motion graphics”

I love the moveable parts and motion graphics, how did you all do that?

Ben: “Thanks to the Design Team, we were able to split our illustrations into multiple layers so that each part could be animated individually. The animations themselves were actually just simple CSS animations, but I think that they look really great, especially with the background of the animated stars.”

Nick: “So actually it is a bunch of scalable vector graphics in different positions on the screen so it creates the effect of it moving animation. Using a WebKit we are moving the image itself up and down in a box to create and position the gifs on the website and placed it there. Its an animation in Javascript that assigned to a specific image so each part is moving individually but it gives the effect that it is the whole image.”

How was working with the Design Team?

Josh: “Oh man…The Design team did a great job with the theme and the colors and fonts this year. We did a template and layout before the designs were complete, and we had our work meetings together so we could collaborate on Figma and find out what we need. We implemented as best as we could with the template worked with Design to integrate the final assets. We then put those on the website, and we are rolling out updates as we get more sponsors and other changes.”

The logo this year looks awesome! HackDavis has different branding themes every year, how did you all come up with the themes this year and how did you all implement it?

Michelle: The design team worked collaboratively to come up with a vision. We each created a mood board and then we as directors put our heads together for the direction of the branding. We decided to go for a neon color palette with isometric assets. On the splash page, you see an illustration (thanks to the amazing tech team for animating!) depicting a laptop with a screen of code. The code translates into projects symbolized by the yellow boxes, which then goes through the reader that identifies the track the project is, such as health, environment, and education. Throughout the process, we worked side-by-side with the technical team to ensure that everything we did was feasible.

The site looks amazing, how was it working across teams and what was the inspiration behind it?

Celina: “For our colors, we were inspired by neon streets to give our brand an electric tech feel. One of our goals for the site was to play with micro-animations. We focused on the speed and fluidity of the moving elements to create a subtly immersive experience. It was fun to work with technical and adjust through feedback and feasibility — I got to see our vision gradually come to life!”

Thanks to our Design Team and Technical Team for doing an awesome job with the website this year! Applications for HackDavis 2020 close on Dec. 18th! Apply today.

Meet and CS-Discover your new friends.

This week, we welcome the Meet and CS team, composed of UC Davis students Benjamin Ankiel, Cyrill Castro, Karen Chan, and Kimberly Lee. Their Meet and CS project was used to create an effective way for CS students to feel less isolated when doing projects by creating a social platform where CS students can help, learn, and meet each other. Meet and CS won the award for Best Use of SnapKit at HackDavis 2019!

Today, we talk with Ben Ankiel about Meet and CS and the team’s journey in HackDavis 2019.

What school are you from? What year? Is this your first hackathon?

Ben: Also a StarWars enthusiast, is from University of California, Davis, class of 2021 (was a sophomore during the hackathon, now a Junior)

“My first Hackathon was HackDavis, by the time I got home and actually went to bed, it was closer to 36 hours. It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up that long, but it was a lot of fun!

Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Ben: “The project that my team and I created was called “Meet and CS,” a social networking app intended for CS majors to help them collaborate and socialize. Users can log in using SnapChat and then can view nearby events and things that people have posted, such as socials, studying, and others. Our project fits mostly into the education and health categories.

What was your inspiration behind this project?

Ben: We had a lot of different ideas of projects to work on going into it, but we decided on this because we felt that it could have a positive impact on the community of computer scientists. CS people aren’t the most social, and an app like this would help them get connected and meet new, like-minded people.

What kind of languages or resources did your team use?

Ben: Our app was a web-based project, so we used web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JS for the frontend. The backend was written in NodeJS. Other resources that we used include SnapKit Login API, socket.io, and Google Maps API.

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Ben: “We sought to do something more socially meaningful, it helped us find a solution to a problem we identified rather than blindly create a project that we could apply our current skillset to. This also helped us streamline our project goals and ideas on how to solve these challenges using what we had in 24 hours”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Ben: “My favorite part of HackDavis was meeting new people and joining a team of a bunch of strangers. I really like meeting new people even though I’m not very good at it, and this was a perfect opportunity to do so. I formed a team with three others at the team mixer and we got along well and happened to execute a successful project!”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Ben: “My advice for new hackers is probably 1) meet new people 2) ask for help 3) start small so you can *Kylo Ren voice* “ finish what you started”. A lot of people start projects but don’t end up finishing them, but even if you can just get *something*, you can submit it for a chance to win cool prizes! Another tip I have is to aim for a specific prize category or two — this helps you focus on exactly what you need to work on so you can have a great shot at winning something.

A fun fact about your group?

Ben: “We didn’t know each other before HackDavis! I still keep in contact with one of them a bit because she’s actually the president of another CS oriented club that I joined and I didn’t even know.”

Since the hackathon, Ben has become a part of the HackDavis organizers and currently works with the Technical Team developing the website and other applications for the hackathon coming in 2020. Stay tuned for more HackDavis news!

This week, we welcomed the Meal Helper team, composed of UC Davis freshmen Vishnu Rangiah, Sabarno Islam, Oliver Yau, and Christopher White. Their Meal Helper project was used to create an effective way for UC Davis students to find a healthy personalized diet on campus based on their biometrics. Meal Helper was able to win the award for Most Creative Hack at HackDavis 2019!

Today, we talk with Sabarno Islam, Christopher White, and Oliver Yau about Meal Helper and their journey in HackDavis 2019.

What school are you from? What year? Is this your first hackathon?

Sabarno: “UC Davis class of 2022. This is not my first hackathon, but it was my first college hackathon.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Sabarno: “This theme played a huge part in coming up with our idea for the app. It helped us come up with the idea and approach it, knowing that it could, in the future, be used to help people.”

Oliver: “I thought it was a great idea to focus the project on something that will benefit a group of people. It’s very easy to think about “our” problems, but this event makes us think about “their” problems, which I think is something all hackathons should strive.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Sabarno: “My favorite part of HackDavis was the atmosphere. Everyone was working hard but also having fun which translated to how I felt during the event.”

Christopher: “Meeting new people and hanging out with my friends was my favorite part of HackDavis. Winning was nice too.”

Oliver: “I enjoyed the different activities the organizers planned for us. I really liked playing badminton and table tennis with my friends.”

What was the most challenging part of the hackathon?

Sabarno: “The most challenging part of the hackathon was coming up with the initial idea. It took us quite some time to form an idea that correlated with the hackathon’s theme.”

What are some valuable skills you gained from HackDavis?

Sabarno: “ I learned how valuable version control was, especially when working with three other people on the same project. I also learned how to work with a small team to create a successful product in a short amount of time.”

Chris: “I learned how to work in a team under high stress to create an app in a short period of time.”

What was life after winning the hackathon (internship, networking, resume boost)?

Sabarno: “Putting that I won the hackathon and being able to put the app I created on my resume helped me get my current software engineering internship.”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Sabarno: “I believe hackathons are a really good place to learn new technologies. I would recommend going in with a mentality of working with new technologies and learning something new that you can expand on after the hackathon. In my opinion, winning should not be the main priority of the hackathon, but creating something cool while learning something new is more important.”

Christopher: “Get lots of sleep the night before the event because you will probably be up for 24+ hours.”

Oliver: “Brainstorming some ideas prior to the event gives you something to work with. Even if you think they may be bad, tweaking one or two details can change that garbage idea into something golden.”

A fun fact about your group?

Sabarno: “Destressing with badminton was really fun.”

Since the hackathon, Sabarno has become a part of the HackDavis organizers and currently works with the Sponsorship Team gaining sponsors for HackDavis 2020. Stay tuned for more HackDavis news!

Welcome back to our #WinnerSeries where we interview winners about their HackDavis 2019 experience.

Next up we would like to introduce Nadia Etemadi, part of the Davis Displacement Database team along with Noah Rose and Akash Malode. Their project was designed and created as an online database for the homeless and displaced to find resources and aid.

What school are you from? What year? Is this your first hackathon?

Nadia: From University of California, Davis, class of 2021, (was a Sophomore during the hackathon, now a junior transfer).

“I’m a third-year transfer student from UC Davis. This was my first hackathon, yes!”

Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Nadia: “Our team put together a web application to make it easier for displaced people to find the resources they need to get back on their feet. Originally, the application had a list of checkboxes corresponding to different resources, such as medical help, legal help, food, shelter, and others. Users can check one or multiple boxes based on what they need, and the web app will display a table of locations that the user can go to obtain those resources.”

What was your inspiration behind this project?

Nadia: “One of our team members, Noah, was walking around in downtown Davis when he saw a homeless individual selling newspapers. Noah bought one of the newspapers, and while he was flipping through it he noticed that it had resources for displaced and homeless individuals to take advantage of. However, the newspaper had these resources laid out very poorly and in a confusing manner, so Noah had the idea to compile these and other resources around the Davis and Sacramento area in a simple, easy-to-read format.”

What kind of languages or resources did your team use?

Nadia: “For the frontend, we used simple HTML/CSS and Bootstrap modules to style the page. As for backend, we made extensive use of Google Cloud products, such as Firebase, Cloud Functions, and later Geocoding API to find the user’s location. We also have a Java-based application that nonprofit organizations can use to input their information into the database, which the web app will draw from in order to display relevant locations to the user.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Nadia: “It was a lot easier to think about a project idea by considering the overall theme of the hackathon. We believe that our project upholds the concept of coding for social good, and the ability to come together with my team to create something that would benefit the community was invaluable.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Nadia: “The food! It was a wonderful experience being able to enjoy Davis Creamery at midnight in the midst of some serious code writing.”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Nadia: “Submit your project! Our team submitted our project under a bunch of categories with no expectation to win any of them, but we ended up winning in two. No matter how unfinished, unprofessional, or uncomplicated you think your project is, you have nothing to lose by submitting it for judging. You never know — you might end up winning something!”

A fun fact about your group?

Nadia: “The three of us — Noah, Akash, and I — met in person for the first time on the day of the event!”

The project has subsequently been rebuilt as Carefinder and is now available for use. Since the hackathon, Nadia has joined the HackDavis family as a member of the operations team for HackDavis 2020.

We welcome back our #WinnerSeries, where we interview winners about their experience at HackDavis 2019.

This year, we begin by introducing Kireet Agrawal, a member of the Odysseus team, along with Phillipp Wu and Travis Brashears. Odysseus, the winner of Best Use of Hardware is an intelligent motion tracking system that alerts, classifies, and monitors types of movement.

What school are you from? What year? Is this your first hackathon?

Kireet: From University of California, Berkeley, class of 2019 (was a Senior during the hackathon, now a recent graduate)

“I am from UC Berkeley and no, my first Hackathon was CalHacks, and my last one was HackDavis, it was a lot of fun but I didn’t sleep or eat very much.”

Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Kireet: “We designed a low-cost and home-safe camera that connects the camera from Odysseus to a computer. We wanted to do a social impact project that also had a hardware component. Because we had a camera, we had the idea of tracking body pose and intelligently remotely checking on people with the specific use case for elderly people. It allowed users to check on activity status remotely through the app. Using OpenPose model, we were able to train and classify movement to track and alert users.”

What was your inspiration behind this project?

Kireet: “We wanted to build a low-cost fall and activity camera system that could benefit society through analysis of human poses. We also made Odysseus into a cat to seem more friendly compared to current systems that seem invasive as a black box with a lens.”

What kind of languages or resources did your team use?

Kireet: “ We used a photon IOT kit, Openpose, Python, Google Cloud platform, and then we utilized a Particle microcontroller to enable cloud-based servo motor commands and compute trajectories for the head of Odysseus to track someone in its sight to enable falling detection of anyone in the room. The camera client locally runs OpenPose [Deep Learned Human Pose estimation model] which runs our manually trained multi-class SVM from outputted pose key points. This classifies the pose from [‘Standing’, ‘Sitting’, ‘Fallen’, ‘Background’] PID Controller determines the angle to track human in the frame, which is posted to the Web Server. Web Server communicates with the Particle Photon (IOT device) to rotate the servo using Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Kireet: “We used our skills and resources to make something that could intelligently check in on people who are otherwise not in such a position or who cannot afford expensive camera systems. The theme helped us focus in on the goals of our project and how we could use our skills to create things outside the academic setting.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Kireet: “It had great ambiance, I loved the music. Having it in the Pavillion was really spacious yet all of the booths and tables were organized in a way that I could meet other participants and still have my own space to do work. For me, it was a fun event to do with my friends before we all graduate.”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Kireet: “Try to make something that is ambitious but still do-able. Stick to a defined plan and execute, it makes the 24 hours be more productive! It also helps when you define a goal in the beginning so its easier to delegate tasks and see what you and your team can and cannot do,”

A fun fact about your group?

Kireet: “This was our last hackathon!”

Since the hackathon, Kireet has graduated from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He will be working at ThoughtSpot as a software and machine learning engineer.

Henry: “We chose the blue/green color scheme as those are the traditional HackDavis Colors, and we wanted to keep that tradition, even as the brand evolves. We infused those color choices with a circuit theme as it represents the idea of both technology and connection. In the same way, HackDavis connects technology to current social issues, utilizing it to leverage new solutions.”

Kaelan: “From a technical perspective, we seek to ensure the website is responsive, fluid, and maintainable. Simple is fast. As opposed to last year’s image based website, we’re choosing a design that is HTML at its core. We optimized our assets to ensure fast page loads while ensuring a consistent quality. Animating most sections of text and images allowed us to make the website feel interactive, without detracting from the essential information.

To improve the rendering of certain animations, we used translate3d() to enable hardware acceleration and rotate(0.0001deg) to fix the sub-pixel rendering on Firefox. These changes were done to ensure a smooth user experience.”

Michelle: “This is the first illustration that we made. We wanted to represent UC Davis in a futuristic theme, and so we created a farm powered by energy lines. This led us to our current illustration with icons for the three tracks, and flowing energy lines.”

These were our first sketches for our logo. We ended up doing iterations of the first one on the top left.

These are the second iterations of the logo.

And this was the final design!”

Henry: “Sometimes working with technical teams can be challenging, because some design ideas might not be easily implemented. However, from the start, we tried to envision and choose ideas that we knew would be more realistic given our timeline and resources.”

Go check out the new HackDavis 2019 website and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to get updates on HackDavis 2019!

This week, we welcome the winners of the Best Health and Wellness Hack, discover.ai. The team was composed of members Aman Inderpreetsingh, Josh Arnold, Jasmin Adzic, and Aakaash Kapoor. The team developed a web application that aids scientists with optimizing drug discovery a task that has been increasing in difficulty.

Today, we talk with Josh Arnold, a current member of the HackDavis 2019 team, about his experiences at HackDavis 2018 and how that led him to become an organizer for this year’s hackathon.

What school are you from? What year? Is this your first hackathon?

Josh: “From University of California, Davis, class of 2021 (was a freshman during the hackathon, now a Sophomore)

No, my first Hackathon was CalHacks, and that was crazy! Didn’t sleep or eat and nearly froze to death.”

Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Josh: “Our project was a web app that aided drug discovery. It allowed scientists to upload a CSV file of potential drugs for a biological target and it would use A.I. (machine learning) to predict the binding affinity, thus helping scientists discover effective drugs faster.”

What was your inspiration behind this project?

Josh: “At the time, I was just starting to really get into machine learning, so I wanted to challenge myself with an ML task geared towards social good, ideally medicine. It's typical to use A.I. for imaging, such as predicting/classifying cancer in images, however, these tools aren’t really useful in reality because at the end of the day the clinician has to make the final diagnosis, so I wanted to attempt to build a model where it was more practical to use. I read a book called “The Quest For The Cure”, which detailed how we might be running out of new “druggable proteins”, so I thought drug discovery would be a very interesting topic.”

What kind of languages or resources did your team use?

Josh: “We used TensorFlow and Keras to build the ML model. We exported it and spun up a flask server to host the HTML and ML. On top of that, there was a lot of CSS and javascript to make the front end look nice.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Josh: “ Added an extra dimension to the challenge of the hackathon project. We sought to do something more socially meaningful.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Josh: “Honestly, it was the whole experience. It had great ambiance, I loved the music. The food was amazing, there was no shortage of caffeine and snacks like at other larger hackathons. Having it in the Arc was really spacious, yet at the same time all of the booths, such as Google Cloud, were close enough to easily go and ask for help. For me, it was a perfect environment to really enjoy the whole hackathon experience.”

What valuable skills did you learn at HackDavis?

Josh: “For me technically, I learned about hosting ML on the cloud for other people to interact with — I never knew how to do this before.”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Josh: “First, bring lots of snacks, warm clothes, and basically everything you could need to not sleep for 24–30 hours. Secondly, decide on a project before attending & form a team. Doing this during the hackathon wastes precious time and can be disheartening when you’ve only got half the time to finally start. Even if you have no idea where to start with your project, its better to have an idea where others can help you.”

A fun fact about your group?

Josh: “We are watermelon enthusiasts!”

Since the hackathon, Josh has become a part of the HackDavis organizers and currently works with the Technical Team developing the website and applications for the hackathon coming in 2019. With HackDavis right around the corner, what would you Stay tuned for more HackDavis news!

This week we welcome the winners of the Best Environment Hack, GISt including members Brian Hungerman, Chad Leiske, David Hungerman, Greg Mellos, and Adrian Darian. Wanting to increase awareness on the Farm to Table movement, their team designed GISt, an application that scans and displays information on nutrition and history of produce at the supermarket. Read on to learn more!

What school are you from? What year?

Chad: “I’m from the University of California, Merced in the Central Valley. I’m a transfer student so I’m technically a fourth year Cognitive Science major. More specifically, my emphasis is in Human-Computer Interaction so a lot of user experience and user interface stuff. On our project for HackDavis I was basically making sure the app made sense and had a decent user flow.”

Can you tell us a little bit about your project?

Chad: “We really enjoy doing AR apps and we’ve done AR apps in the past for hackathons. We think that they are an innovative and effective way to solve problems that exist in the current climate. Now with everyone having a smartphone with a camera equipped, everyone basically has easy access to AR, making a lot of powerful applications. Our app was essentially a glorified QR code scanner that generated its own QR codes. Those QR codes basically had a GPS coordinate tied to it and that coordinate would be the location of a farm or food production site. So when a user would go up to some berries being sold in Safeway or Save Mart, and they hovered over that unique QR code, it would tell them which farm or which factory this was produced at and give them background on the environmental impact of it, distance, history, and things like that.”

What was your inspiration behind this project?

Chad: “The Central Valley is obviously an agricultural center. For us, the Farm to Table movement is becoming a really large thing here. Up in Northern California it’s really present, but because central California is disadvantaged and poorer than other parts of California, Farm to Table hasn’t been a really big thing. But with farmer’s markets becoming more and more of a common occurrence every weekend, consumers are able to go out and get access to fresh and local, cheap healthy food. We wanted to give users a way to navigate through all of that because with knowledge comes power and we wanted to empower users with all that information.”

What kind of languages or resources did your team use?

Chad: “On my end, as a designer, I tend to use Axure RP which is a rapid prototyping software which allows me to easily design mockups to our programming team so that they kind of have something to go off of. In a non- hackathon environment, Axure lets me create a mockup and test it on users, that way we don’t have to do all that programming and test and stuff like that. For the actual programming languages, we used Unity because the AR environment in Unity is very simple and very quick. You can do AR from the ground up but in a hackathon environment with the time limit, it just makes sense to make some sacrifices. We worked with OSIsoft, one of the sponsors, and pulled data from their database and implemented it into our app for UC Davis farms.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Chad: “The app itself is obviously coding for social good. As the central Valley gets more and more access to low cost, healthy alternatives, we really wanted to empower users to learn more about their food because the more educated a user is, the more informed they can be when they make their decisions. I think that’s the general idea.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Chad: “I enjoyed the food, honestly. A lot of hackathon food is pizza and stuff like that. I enjoyed the variety and you get pizza on top, which is always great.”

Did you learn anything at HackDavis?

Chad: “For me I really learned a lot about how to display relevant information, basically transitioning nutrition facts into a user interface. Nutrition facts is generally scary for consumers, it’s just a lot of numbers that get thrown at them, and simplifying them is my job and I really took some time to simplify and make something that looks nice. Of course, unfortunately, due to the time constraint it didn’t get implemented into the main product, but we had a simplified version ready for deployment.”

Do you have any advice for hackathon newcomers?

Chad: “There are two routes you can take for a hackathon. There’s the backend finished product and a frontend pitch. Hackathons at the core is a game of how well you can pitch your product. You shouldn’t stress about a finished product. You just need a very minimum pitchable product that is presentable, something to show the judges for a period of two hours to impress them enough to collect the award and go home. If you want to work on it to make it into a minimum viable product and want to keep working on it that’s great, but just know that for a hackathon, you have either a minimum pitchable product or a minimum viable product.”

A fun fact about your group?

Chad: “A fun fact about our group is that we really only have three programmers. We had a mechanical engineer, two cognitive scientists, and other non programming majors.”

This week for our #WinnerSeries we bring to you Kevin Chan and Victor Tram, winners of the Best Use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) award! Inspired by their own experiences, Jim the Workout Assistant (a clever play on the word “gym”) was created to help anyone looking for a personalized workout plan to target specific areas of your body. Scroll down to learn more about their experience at Hackdavis 2018!

What school are you from? What year?

Kevin: “I am a 3rd year student at Cosumnes River College and Victor is a Junior at Sacramento State.”

What was your project?

Kevin: “Our project was Jim the Workout Assisant, a workout planning tool built for any Amazon Alexa enabled device. After calling the right commands to Alexa, the tool would tailor a set of exercises for a previously specified targeted body area workout!”

What tools did you use in creating your project?

Kevin: “The Amazon Alexa skill was built first through the Amazon Developer Console to initialize and configure the skill. Further refining and the core of functionality was built in AWS Lambda. There, the function code was written in JavaScript utilizing Node.js framework and the Alexa Skills Kit.”

What was your inspiration behind this product?

Kevin: “The inspiration behind this project came from my active lifestyle. I frequently go to the gym and I always meet some people who are fairly new to fitness or weight lifting that ask what my workout routines are. A common issue I’ve noticed with newcomers is that they often struggle to know what exercises to do and what areas of the body these exercises target. This got me to come up with an idea of a tool that will automatically plan one’s workout, making going to the gym that much easier. The idea to create this tool as an Amazon Alexa skill came from the fact that I just picked up an Amazon Echo a few weeks prior to the hackathon.”

How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?

Kevin: “I think having a theme for the hackathon helped us narrow down project ideas. There were many ideas (some good, many bad) that we thought of for our project but having a theme definitely made it easier to sort through which idea was actually worth pursuing.”

What was your favorite part of HackDavis?

Kevin: “My favorite part of HackDavis was the definitely the late night snacks. Since a lot of people left the area and some were sleeping, there were no lines for the snacks and a lot to go around. (Plus who won’t like boba at like 1 in the morning?)”

Do you have any advice to hackathon newcomers?

Kevin: “Don’t stress out about the time too much. Just see how far you can get in the time given rather than try to force yourself to fit everything in the time window.”

Tell us a fun fact about your group!

Kevin: “The graphic we used that’s posted on the DevPost was made using SnapChat!”

Try out Jim the Workout Assistant at https://devpost.com/software/jim-the-workout-assistant!