Over 1,100 “hackers” from across the U.S. overtook the ECS West building for HackUTD, this year the largest hackathon in North America, to gain hands-on experience with software development and user interfaces, network with industry professionals and win a part of the $120,810 in prize money.
Since its creation in 2015 with around 120 hackers and $1,000 in prizes, HackUTD has grown massively. Last year’s hackathon hosted approximately 1,000 hackers with $62,000 in prizes. Salman Jaher, HackUTD co-director and computer science senior, said the hackathon is now facing issues with space since so many people wanted to participate.
“We were lucky to get access to both ECS West and ECS South since we are functionally at the limit of how many people we can physically host without bringing in more buildings on-campus,” Jaher said. “We received over 3,000 applications for this year’s event and we were only able to approve 1,500 of them with the understanding that not everyone is able to make it to the actual event when it comes around.”
“We received over 3,000 applications for this year’s event and we were only able to approve 1,500 of them with the understanding that not everyone is able to make it to the actual event when it comes around.”
Thirteen sponsors provided specific challenges for the hackers to compete in, as well as funding for awards and amenities provided during the event. The title sponsor this year was PNC Bank, with other notable sponsors including Pinata, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, State Farm and NordVPN. Hackers could win prizes in sponsor-specific tracks or the general prize. TalkTuahBank, an AI-based app that answers banking questions through phone calls, was the winner of the Goldman Sachs competition and HackUTD as a whole.
Reiki Hingorani, HackUTD’s experience coordinator and data science junior, said that organizers of most 24-hour hackathons provide the hackers with amenities like free food and water. Hingorani said this year, HackUTD provided multiple meals in addition to a constant stream of snacks, energy drinks and water, sleeping rooms spread out across ECS West and South and access to the ECS West shower and hygiene products. Organizers also included a late night boba social and bracelet making sessions as de-stressing team events.
“I think it is super important for us to hold de-stressing events for the hackers,” Hingorani said. “We of course have our sponsor events and our technical workshops, but having fun social and team-building events allow people to get a much needed break from things so that even if your project isn’t going as well as you wanted it to, you will still have a positive overall experience.”
Jaher said that a common misconception about hackathons is believing that attendees compete to literally hack into something. Instead, attendees work together to hack something that works well within the stressful time crunch against other competitors.
“The feedback we have gotten has historically been pretty good,” Jaher said. “We want to provide a great and unique experience to all of our hackers that they otherwise wouldn’t find at a regular hackathon.”
Hingorani said it was critical for judges and sponsors to have a good experience at the event as well because they play a crucial role in making HackUTD possible, not only through choosing winners, but also through networking and offering advice as industry professionals.
“With just the organizers, none of this would be possible,” Hingorani said. “We had a lot of volunteers from hackathons at other schools in and out of Texas who came and supported us in addition to support from WeHack UTD and the [Association for Computing Machinery at UTD].”
Computer science junior Mudit Upadhyay competed this year in the EOG resources event, which tasked hackers with the goal of creating a software that predicted pipeline blockages based on a preexisting data set. Upadhyay’s team won this category with its project, PipeBrains. Upadhyay said he greatly appreciated all the caffeine the organizers provided in addition to the improved organization compared to past years.
“While I liked the prizes more last year, I greatly preferred how they organized everything this year,” Upadhyay said.
Upadhyay said he felt that he really missed out by not participating in hackathons in his freshman year. He said he had let insecurity over his own skills get the better of him, but that at events like HackUTD, hackers didn’t need to win to have fun and learn.
“From my two hackathon experiences, I learned that you will never feel ready for a hackathon,” Upadhyay said. “You will always feel like there is somebody who is better at programming than you, but they don’t just judge your technical skills: they judge your ability to adapt and your creativity in how you present everything. As long as you have a passion and the willingness to learn, then you will gain a ton from attending a hackathon.”
“As long as you have a passion and the willingness to learn, then you will gain a ton from attending a hackathon.”
This year’s competition was not without its challenges. On Nov. 17, hackers used a brute-force attack to give themselves judge credentials 45 minutes after judging began, which gave the hackers the ability to improve their own scores while decreasing the scores of their competitors. Hingorani said that as soon as the organizers found out about the attack, they paused all judging and worked to fix the security breach. Jaher said the organizers’ web team quickly locked everything down and overcame the issue by making more complex credentials for the judges and including additional checks to verify the final winners. Hingorani said they would be taking more precautions in advance of future hackathons to maintain the security of their systems.
“HackUTD has really grown in the past few years, and clearly we are doing something right if contestants are desperate enough to attempt to cheat to give themselves an advantage,” Hingorani said. “While our amazing tech team was able to fix it in the moment, I think you could see the hack attempt as a compliment that they cared this much.”
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