Column: Hack, hack, (sleep?) hack

A hackathon is a competition for computer programmers and designers where you stuff 200 to 1,500 people into a room for 24 or 48 hours, shove some energy drinks in there and see what happens.

Whatever website, game or weird pile of wires they come up with is then judged. On the weekend before Halloween, UNC saw the biggest hackathon it had ever hosted — HackNC.

About 400 coders from over 30 schools were in attendance in addition to eight core organizers and representatives from 10 of the 21 companies that had sponsored the event. Almost 70 total projects resulted.

Among the competitors’ creations was a strange device made of string, cardboard and circuit boards that could translate input text into Braille.

A favorite of the judges — who were representatives from Microsoft, Square, Google and EMC, among others — was a wooden box with a single button, made by a few students from Appalachian State University. With a press of that button, the device ordered a sandwich from Jimmy John’s. The winning project was a mobile app that could detect whether you had crashed on a bike and, if so, would then call 911. A number of projects relied on Oculus Rifts — visual reality headsets — and some hardware that hasn’t been released to the general public yet.

Most people had produced something; a sizeable number had crashed, burned and learned something new. That was fine.

The organizers of these events are a bunch of sleep-deprived students who work to make contacts on a national level, which they use to bus in students from around the country and convince companies to commit to sponsorship.

My job was to host the opening and closing ceremonies and make sure the sponsors were happy. Our lead organizer, junior Vance Miller, had the eerie ability to remember every single thing that had to be done during the event and keep track of the contents of our sadly overstuffed email inbox. A sort of autopilot controlled his actions more and more over that weekend. The average amount of sleep among the organizers must have been four hours, but the participants probably slept less. At one point our main sponsor, a guy who simply calls himself Swift, brought in a smoke machine for some reason. Everyone evacuated the building at midnight for half an hour when the alarm went off.

Multiple hackathons happen every weekend at American universities during the school year, with the largest ones bringing in well over 1,000 coders. These events, largely unknown outside tech circles, are a high-funded example of collective creativity. Tech companies are realizing that hackathons are the best form of a career fair for recruiting talent. Participants think of and create an invention that could easily be turned into a marketable product with a bit more time and funding.

Why write a column about hacakthons? Well, now you know what a hackathon is. Maybe try one — they’re cool.