Ready, set, code! — hackathon 1st in S.F.
Lowell High junior organizes 24-hour Hack the Fog event for high schoolers
Yev Barkalov strapped on two backpacks and put on his headphones to start the 30-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Palo Alto. The long night ahead, which took place a year ago, required one bag for his computer and electronic equipment, and another for a sleeping bag he would barely use. By then, Yev was already hackathon veteran.
He attended his first event as a high school freshman in 2015 and was mesmerized by the energy that comes from the 24-hour sprint to build a new technology or product from scratch. The only problem was how far Yev had to trek to events.
Now a junior at San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Yev recently decided to bring the party to his own backyard in a surprising first for San Francisco: This past weekend, he and his friends hosted the city’s first high school hackathon at the Horizons School of Technology.
In a nod to the city’s unpredictable weather patterns, they dubbed the event Hack the Fog.
“All the hackathons I could find happen in Fremont and Mountain View,” Yev said. “That’s just not accessible for kids in San Francisco.”
Roughly 75 students, mentors and judges set up shop Saturday and Sunday in a long open space, pulling desks and monitors into
pods for each team to build out their ideas. Participants bounced between sketching out products and taking part in scheduled workshops to taking naps in sleeping bags scattered across the floor.
The event was the first hackathon for Maria Wangamez, a senior at Lowell. On Saturday evening, she and her team spread out on couches and ate snacks while discussing ideas for a new website. They settled on building a database of Instagram-worthy spots in the city inspired by their own social media habits.
“Everything we do revolves around social media and our phones,” Maria said. “So, we hope that, by putting it all in one place, it’ll encourage people to get out and see more of the city they live in.”
Sponsors and organizers of Hack the Fog were surprised to learn no other high school in San Francisco had hosted a hackathon prior to Yev pitching his idea.
“I don’t know why that is, but I feel like a question is, ‘Why not?’ ” said Will Yoo, a Horizons School of Technology employee. “There’s a lot more that tech companies can do in their communities.”
Space constraints are one reason hackathons are hard to pull off in the city, said Zach Latta, head of the nonprofit Hack Club, which partners with schools to create coding clubs. Latta, who worked with Yev to plan Hack the Fog, said that venues capable of hosting hundreds of students overnight are more readily found in suburban areas.
Tech employees might work in San Francisco, he added, but they more often start families in the South Bay where real estate is cheaper and public schools generally perform at a higher level while offering dedicated STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curricula.
Before the 24 hours of coding kicked off Saturday, Latta asked those in attendance to raise their hands if they had never been to a hackathon. Almost all of the hands in the room shot up, a contrast to events he has attended in Palo Alto, where only a quarter of the students say it is their first time.
“The difference is really stark,” Latta said. “Coding is one of the closest things we have to a superpower these days, and if you learn this you’re on an equal playing field.”
Hack the Fog did bring in a few veteran coders, despite their age. Franklin Wang and Oliver Ni, both in the eighth grade, said this was their fourth hackathon despite not being old enough to attend events that expressly forbid middle school students.
They dreamed up an app that gives users smarter book recommendations based on a machine learning framework that Franklin taught himself from YouTube videos. The two both started learning computer science in elementary school, and they’ve been looking for hackathons that will let younger students participate.
“It’s just 24 hours where you do nothing but code,” Franklin said. “I mean, that’s just so cool.”
“Coding is one of the closest things we have to a superpower these days, and if you learn this you’re on an equal playing field.” Zach Latta, founder, Hack Club