The 3rd Annual Hack@Brown: The importance of interaction

Ask the average non-CS concentrator about programming and they're likely to describe it in pretty vague terms: coding, algorithms, Silicon Valley. To the uninitiated, even the history of tech is a generally inscrutable one–at most, a layperson may be able to tell you the broad strokes: Alan Turing, IBM's Deep Blue, Microsoft, the iPhone, Uber's rebranding campaign (the last of which is indisputably the most important thing to happen to tech since Charles Babbage).

The truth, as always, is more complicated. In his closing comments in Sayles Hall last weekend, Peter Norvig - current Director of Research at Google - spoke about one such major paradigmatic shift in programming: the importance of APIs. APIs–short for Application Program Interface–are important tools that facilitate program-to-program interaction: for example, allowing a programmer constructing an app that uses Facebook data to incorporate that data into his software. Where once CS was more math-based, Norvig said in his speech, "today, coding is more about putting things together."

Hackathons–those strange, collaborative, playful offspring of programming and programming culture–have have also changed of late. Where once they remained the sole domain of Red Bull-fueled, pale-faced fanatics coding in dark rooms until the break of dawn, today's hackathons have stressed new principles: team-building, mentorship, and, even as the coding itself increasingly relies on program-to-program interaction, the importance of human-to-human interaction throughout the hacking process. And few college hackathons have so unabashedly led the charge to facilitate human-to-human interaction as Brown's own Hack@Brown, now in its third iteration.

If APIs help programs work with one another, how does an event spur enhanced human-to-human interaction between 430 participants arriving in snow-covered Providence from both coasts of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe?

Start with food. A sample: 500 sliders from Mama Kim's, 550 pockets from East Side Pockets, 50 trays of kebab from Kabob and Curry, and countless snacks and beverages composed some of the fare at this year's Hack@Brown. Erica Oh '18 and Katie Hsia '17, the co-heads of the Food and Logistics team, led a team of four others to organize not only the aforementioned quantities of food but also scheduling, volunteers, travel, facilities, Wifi, electricity, recording, and more for the hackathon. Managing large quantities of resources was hardly a unique requirement of this year's event, but logistics experience in prior years helped Hsia and Oh develop their organizational process and iron out the flaws for this year's event. Several participants commented on the quality of the food, and more than once, it was evident that enterprising and hungry students unaffiliated with the hackathon had merely wandered in from the Main Green for a bite to eat.

Then there was the sponsors. 23 sponsors in total–2Sigma, Microsoft, Google, Andreessen Horowitz, AirBnB, and Pinterest were some of the best known–provided mentors to work with students over the course of the hackathon, while several of the larger sponsors also maintained booths in Sayles Hall with representatives and promotional items. After a decade of investors throwing money at tech firms in the search for growth, some of that capital has evidently trickled down into HR budgets; the quality of free swag available at Hack@Brown was noticeably better than at other recruiting events in Sayles, even the Career Fair.

But it was ultimately the mentors, this year's single largest area of focus for improving upon the past two iterations of the event, that proved the greatest contribution of the sponsors. 75 mentors in total, roughly 65 of whom came from sponsoring companies, worked with the participants in varying capacities as they hacked over the course of the roughly 30-hour event. While mentors are a staple at most hackathons, particularly ones that focus on beginner hackers to the same extent that Hack@Brown does, 2016 saw a substantial revamp of how mentors were deployed to aid participants across this year's event. As the leader of the dedicated mentorship team, newly created for 2016, Jessica Liang '16 spoke about some of the improvements from previous years.

"We always say it's the most important part of the hackathon," she noted, "but it's one of those things that always ends up getting pushed to the side."

Not this year, it seems. The first major change - which was widely praised among mentors and even participants - was the utilization of HelpQ, a request ticket system developed at MIT. A number of mentors utilized this system, which allowed hackers to request help with design/development problems from their more experienced counterparts, and which featured a leaderboard for successfully completed requests. Other mentors–usually alums looking to connect with current Brown students–worked directly with teams for the duration of the hackathon, while still others hosted workshops on various aspects of development that have become a staple of Hack@Brown.

The feedback was almost universally positive. Mentor Ricky Medina, a former Brown student who helped organize Hack@Brown last year, described the mentor website as "a really good experience." Medina, who is currently working at cloud-hosting provider DigitalOcean and who spent most of his time at the hackathon working with a team on mood-quantifying tool E-mote (an honorable mention at the awards ceremony), recalled that the 2015 organizational team had not provided "a system like [HelpQ]. Or we kind of did, but it was miserable." David Awad, a current senior at Rutgers and representative from college hackathon sponsor Major League Hacking, also praised the mentorship experience, describing Hack@Brown and PennApps (University of Pennsylvania's hackathon) as particular standouts among the 40-odd hackathons he has attended. Awad's only real complaint was a technical one; he joked that the leaderboard, which was topped by a representative from Facebook at the time, "wasn't updating."

The mentors' eagerness to help students was palpable. With an average response time of about a minute to a hacker's request for help, Liang noted that "a lot of [mentors] are even complaining that the tickets are getting claimed too fast!"

At the same time, however, the willingness to help on the part of the more experienced mentors evidently translated into an improved participant experience. Humphrey Obuobi, a sophomore at Harvard studying bioengineering, said that the "one thing that separates Hack@Brown from any of the other hackathons that I’ve gone to is the great emphasis on learning." Citing not only the availability of mentors but also the bevy of workshops offered over the course of the event, Obuobi was echoed by Cole Hanson '19, who favorably compared Hack@Brown to PennApps and YHack (Yale's hackathon) as a beginner-friendly environment.

The output of these changes? 14 winning teams, including 'Best Mobile App' Fundr, a Tinder-like tool to connect venture capitalists with startup founders; 'Best Real-World App' Stampy, a text-based program for finding nearby retailers that accept food stamps; 'Best Financial App' How Many Pens, a Chrome add-on that replaced dollar costs with the equivalent amount of Bic pens; 'Best Data Visualization' Happy Heart, an app that facilitates accurate records of a user's panic attacks; and finally overall winner IdeaBack, a collaborative platform that allows users to create webs of ideas in an attempt to eliminate unconscious biases that occur with physical presentations.

While winning programs ran the gamut of uses and applications, it is telling that the vast majority of successful apps developed over the course of Hack@Brown stressed the importance of human-to-human connection in both creation and application, even as reliance on APIs meant that the software itself was often based on communication between multiple machines. As Sharon Lo '16, co-director of Hack@Brown along with Athyuttam Reddy '17, said: "One huge thing that we've really emphasized this year to our team is that human capital is way better than money capital."

Regardless of what changes, improvements, and innovations Hack@Brown ends up developing in its future iterations, recognizing and facilitating human capital seems likely to be the most enduring innovation of all.

Images via Hack@Brown, Kenji Endo '18 and Danielle Perelman '17.