I recently attended a Hackathon called Pearl Hacks. Pearl Hacks is an all-female hackathon hosted by UNC-Chapel Hill. Pearl Hacks’ main purpose is to create an encouraging and positive environment for women in technology. The third annual Pearl Hacks event was held this past weekend (April 2nd-3rd, 2016). There were several activities for individuals to participate in, even if they weren’t participating in the competition itself. The hackathon started off with a registration/check-in period and breakfast, as is common with many events. The opening ceremony followed the breakfast. During the opening ceremony the organizers of Pearl Hacks introduced the sponsors and mentors. Each of the sponsors had a representative come up to talk about their company (and the types of prizes/awards they were giving away at the hackathon). Hearing from the different companies was a great experience because it allowed me to gain insight on different companies, their purpose, and the type of work people do there. During the opening ceremony I also realized how many participants were from out of state. There were people from places as far as Florida to participate in Pearl Hacks!

The sponsor fair followed the opening ceremony. At the sponsor fair, there were several companies represented there including Cisco, Google, Fidelity, and CapitalOne. The sponsor fair was a great opportunity to talk to representatives from different companies to learn more about them and the types of positions they have. (They also gave out a lot of free stuff, which is always a plus. :) )

Pearl Hacks also had several workshops offered during the afternoon. The first workshop I attended was called “Beginner Tutorial: Mobile Development (Android/Android Studio)”. This workshop was by a first-year college student from Georgia Tech and an IT employee from Fidelity Investments. I think this workshop had a lot of potential; however, most of the time was used to get people to download Android Studio. I think it would have been more beneficial if they had informed people ahead of time of things they would need to download/install for participating in this workshop. Overall, I think this workshop was a good experience because it got me thinking about building and creating apps. I learned a little about IDE (integrated development environments) and SDK (software development kits). I started researching ways I could create apps with the knowledge I have. This workshop focused on Android Apps and using Java/Android Studio. After researching a little online I found that there are other tools available to create apps and some of these tools allow you to create apps that can be used on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows), such as Visual Studio or Eclipse. Here’s a link I found for a post that talks about Python IDE’s : https://opensource.com/business/15/10/top-open-source-python-ides. In the end, with this workshop I didn’t get a lot of hands-on experience; however, it did inspire me to think of ideas and learn how to create an app myself. This workshop has motivated me to push myself to try and create an app myself.

The second workshop I attended was called “Contributing to Open-Source Projects”. In this workshop the speaker discussed how to find a good open-source community and how to find open-source projects to work on. I learned factors such as leadership and version control are some things you should look at when choosing an open-source project to work on. The speaker showed us how to find open-source projects using Github. She also showed us some other open-source projects that are friendly to newcomers (as well as more advanced individuals) such as Mozilla Firefox, the Sahana Eden Project, and Fedora. In this workshop, I also learned about openhatch. Openhatch.org is a website that is designed to find bugs from open-source projects and it labels them based on topic, type, language, and the size/complexity of the bug. Openhatch is a great source for anyone who is looking for an open-source project to contribute to. Overall, I would say this workshop was very interesting and helpful. I’m glad I attended this workshop because at first I was worried about how I would complete the open-source cultural immersion activity for this class, but after participating in this workshop I feel better equipped to find an open-source project that I can contribute to.

My experience with Pearl Hacks was great. This was worth my time and I gained a lot through this experience. I would definitely recommend Pearl Hacks to other women in technology and I plan on attending this event again in the future.