MLH Local Hack Day 2017

This past Saturday, December 2, Queens College hosted a local hackathon on their campus. As a student currently enrolled in a computer science class it was a great opportunity for me and other classmates to learn and showcase our skills. Walking into the hackathon was a little bit daunting because most if not all the participants were college students except for me and the other people from my class that also attended. However, once the actual event began I didn't feel out of place, on the contrary the people where very nice and welcomed me even though I was very young. The first secession/activity was a sort of free learning hour where we had the freedom of doing whatever we wanted. The organizers gave us a link to the MLH website and there were multiple activities that we were able to do, but they all involved programs that I was unfamiliar with and they all were very complex. Therefore, it was basically an hour of just learning what different programs did and the basic commands of the program such as the basic commands for Git.

MLH Activity Page
The next activity, my favorite, involved HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so i felt confident that it was something me and my team was capable of doing. The goal of the activity was to recreate the Google home screen in five minutes which saying was difficult is an understatement. My group and I did our best, but since we weren't completely used to using internal CSS it was difficult to remember the CSS tags needed. Nevertheless, it was a enjoyable activity and made me realize how much further I have to improve my skills. The last activity which was by far the hardest and most complex was learning how voice command programs such as Amazon's Alexa functioned. I was unable to participate because in order to do so I needed to create an Amazon account and that required me to input a credit card which I do not have. However, one of mu teammates did participate and I got to see. I barely got half of what the organizer was saying, but it was good to know how Alexa worked.
Alexa Activity
Organizer Explaining an Activity
My classmates working




















Overall, the hackathon was a great experience and it gave me an insight into just how large computer science is that it has so many different components and programs.






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