Hacker Olympics Draws Top Students to Silicon Valley

Imagine a place where computer nerds are revered like jocks and rockstars. That was San Francisco this past weekend.

A carefully selected group of 100 college students flocked to the Bay Area to powwow with veterans of the famed tech startup scene. The students came for an all-expense paid weekend to compete in the inaugural run of the "University Hacker Olympics."

One of the event's organizers, Ahmed Siddiqui, called it the "largest university hackathon ever held."

"Our whole goal is to get the best technical minds to the Bay Area and connect them with awesome startups and companies," Siddiqui told Mashable.

"Our whole goal is to get the best technical minds to the Bay Area and connect them with awesome startups and companies," Siddiqui told Mashable.

Monica Poletti, a 19-year-old sophomore at North Carolina State, was a member of the winning team. Working with mentors from Pinterest, Poletti and five other students — from Brown, Tufts and Ohio State — designed a visually appealing and functional collaborative workspace.

The tool, called "Project Yarn," is intended to help plan trips, parties and other events. Poletti summed up the project as a cross between Google Docs and a virtual bulletin board. It allows multiple users to work on the board in real time.

"I don't know if we expected it to win, but we all really liked what it could do," Poletti told Mashable. "I learned so much out here in just two days; it was incredible."

Despite the known gender divide in the tech world, the six members of Poletti's team were divided equally by gender. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, women comprised less than a quarter of the country's STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce in 2009.

Poletti said this group had the highest ratio of females to males of any collaborative programming project she has ever worked on.

Below is a screenshot of a Project Yarn story board, on which users planned a cross-country motocycle trip.

SignalFire, an organization based in San Francisco, hosted the competition, which was sponsored by tech companies large and small, from Google to Nature Box and many more. Prior to the event, companies brainstormed ideas. When the students arrived, they divided into teams. The companies then pitched their ideas to the student teams who selected which ones they wanted to pursue.

"It's like doing recruiting without resumes," Siddiqui said. "There's a huge problem of getting developers out here in the valley."

The students went through a rigorous screening process to win the chance to compete. More than 500 students from about 30 colleges and universities signed up for online coding challenges during November.

Drawing from the top performers in the coding challenge, SignalFire reps selected a final pool of 100 hacker olympiads, based on their previous experience and LinkedIn profiles.

After about 24 hours of programming by the students and their mentors, a panel of judges selected the top three groups, which then attended a VIP dinner, accompanied by a group of tech CEOs. There, the contest winner was announced. In addition to the networking opportunity, the top three teams also won Amazon Web Services credit packages.

Raj Mukherjee, vice president and general manager of products for GoDaddy, participated in the competition as a judge. He called Project Yarn a "a cool application with an awesome front end."

"I was frankly blown over by the quality of the students that participated in the hackathon," Mukherjee told Mashable.

"I was frankly blown over by the quality of the students that participated in the hackathon," Mukherjee told Mashable.

All parties — organizers, sponsors and students — seemed to agree that the University Hacker Olympics was a success. On behalf of SignalFire, Siddiqui said the company hopes to make this a bi-annual tradition, including even more colleges and universities in the future.

Stay tuned, hackers. Next time, it could be you who brings home the gold.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Scorpions and Centaurs, and Monica Poletti/Project Yarn