CSE Undergrad News

Yahoo! is coming to campus this week to hold their annual Hack U competition. There will be talks held on Wednesday and Thursday focusing on mobile development, accessibility and Javascript. The week culminates in a twenty-four hour hack-a-thon running from Noon on Friday until Noon on Saturday.

The hack-a-thon is comprised of teams made up of any number of students. The teams compete against each other building whatever they may imagine. Dinner, snacks and breakfast will be provided throughout the hack-a-thon. Each team will have a chance to present their work to their peers and a panel of judges. The judges will select winning teams and award prizes. The first place team will be awarded three iPads.

Amazon is offering free AWS credits for participating teams. Code for America is sending a representative from the local Seattle government to talk about interesting challenges and data they’d like to see developers working on.

This competition is especially great because there is really no limit to what teams can do. You can see what teams have done in the past here: http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/show/2010/feb/washington

Here’s a schedule of all Hack U events happening on campus this week:

Wednesday, March 2nd – Kickoff Hack U Talk, Raffle & Dinner

Everything you need to know about the competition plus hack examples, industry tools and mobile web programming tips
Location: CSE Atrium
Time: 6:00pm

Thursday March 3rd – Accessibility Lunch Talk

Join Yahoo! Accessibility expert Ted Drake as he discusses the latest advancements in accessibility both inside Yahoo! and across the industry as a whole.
Location: CS 403
Time: 12:30 pm

Thursday, March 3rd – Guest Lecture: Douglas Crockford: Using Javascript Well

JavaScript has been shunned by the academic community because of its many obvious shortcomings. But it includes the best features of Scheme and Self, making it a language deserving of study and research. It was the first lambda language to go mainstream.
Location: EE 105
Time: 6:00pm

Friday, March 4th – 24 Hour Hacking Period Begins

Let the Hacking begin! Ongoing talks, Food, Music, Games, Raffle prizes and Fun throughout the day/night in central base camp area
Location: CSE – 6th Floor Gates Commons
Time: 12:00pm

Saturday, March 5th – Demos, Judging, Lunch & Awards

Location: CSE – Gates Commons
Time: 12:00pm

More information can be found at the Hack U website: http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/uw.html

You can follow @hacku for the latest news on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hacku

Happy hacking!

Steve Geluso