Category Archives: College of Engineering & Technology

HackWITUs So Cool

A hackathon is a friendly competition for students to network with other students – and sponsor representatives 🙂 – while making hardware or software tools and games. We provide free food, space, power, internet, other hackers, some hardware, some APIs, workshops, and prizes. Free.

One thing: we get a lot of questions about who can and cannot come to a hackathon. Everyone is invited and anyone should be able to enjoy the time. We have some events and workshops planned that require 0 computer science or programming experience. I’m not a computer science major…

Last week, the head of the group that is organizing Wentworth’s Hackathon announced that we have entered CRUNCH TIME. HackWITUs 2017 will be Wentworth’s first annual Hackathon. The planning committee has been preparing since fall semester for this event that lands on March 25-26. One of our members even made a blog just about us! We have our own website designed to spread information and show off our development skillz (even though it’s a static webpage, it’s cool enough that it feels interactive).

 

Behold our fancy logo and website!

We’ve been reaching out to sponsors all over the place to gather the resources to put this on for the people that come to the event. So far, we’re getting stuff/help from various departments and people around the school, Microsoft, Facebook, edX, kwidil, goPuff, and a few others. I always bring my resume to hackathons for a shot at jobs with sponsors; some companies sponsor hackathons and send a representative as a way of scouting talent.

Like us on facebook!

hackathon cover

If you can’t come this year, this will be an annual event. So hopefully I can meet you next year :D.

Wolfram Visit

The start of this year has been absolutely crazy. I think perhaps I overcommitted and am in over my head. Regardless, cool things keep happening so I will try to keep it the work rate.

FAKEwolframlogo

Last Tuesday, Stephen Wolfram visited the school to give a talk about what he does and what computational thinking can do for us. He is convinced that computational approaches to old problems are the future of science. In addition, he described ways that any number of normally boring processes can be automated, replaced, or obsoleted.

Image result for stephen wolfram That’s the reason that he built his Wolfram Language. He was originally mostly a particle physicist, hanging around the same crowd as Einstein, but a bit younger; he was good friends with Richard Feynman.

Earlier that morning I had gotten to direct Wolfram to his presentation room and explain a little bit about the school. Because of this, some of the faculty from the computer science and math departments invited me to come along with them and Wolfram to dinner! They had made reservations at The Squealing Pig for that evening. By the time students attending Stephen Wolfram’s presentation were done asking questions, time had slipped away and the hour was slightly past 7:30.

Time had slipped so much, in fact, that we missed our reservations at The Squealing Pig and Wolfram opted to go to Au Bon Pain in the interest of getting food quickly. Talking is hungry business and everyone wanted to go home.

IMG_0273

We did go to Au Bon Pain and talked for a long time there and two of the three students that came to dinner got autographed books.