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San Francisco

Wake Up, San Francisco! 

I’ve dreamt about moving to San Francisco since the trip I took here for a high school choir competition in Grade 9. I still remember the morning of that trip, I was so anxious to board the plane of my solo journey that I somehow gave myself a stomach flu. But it wasn’t long before I fell in love with the city and its laid-back, yet, rich culture. I opened my heart up to this city and SF found its way right into it.

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Some emails I sent to my mom from my trip— super cringey emails. I swear I don’t type like that anymore, but that “stylistic writing” sure brought me right back to that time period.

 

So 6 years later, I finally found my way back. I spent my summer at Pinterest learning more than I could have imagined. I kept my days busy with work, nights fun with meet ups and intern open houses, and weekends reserved for my friends and hackathons (usually both). It was scary moving to a new place on my own, who would have known that toilet paper rolls don’t refill themselves? But soon enough, I found myself a couple groups of friends who I did everything with, I still felt homesick at times, but I found my second family here. My fear and loneliness were muffled by love.

 

So here’s a highlight reel of my summer:

  • Had the warmest welcome to San Francisco by attending Twitter’s #DevelopHER camp, which I wrote about here!

 

  • Stayed in a hostel right in the Tenderloin before moving into my new place, and if you know, you know.

 

  • I went to my internet-turned-real-life friend’s potluck and met Zoe and Daniel there.

 

  • Ate the best bread pudding at Tartine Bakery, best rice pudding at Loving Cup and spent too many late nights with a bowl of baklava frozen yogurt from Souvla in one hand, and a can of La Croix in the other.

 

  • Went to my first Pride Parade and I 👏 was 👏 not 👏 disappointed 👏.

Me with a pin-teresting wheel 😉

Me with a pin-teresting wheel 😉

 

  • Went to meetups that I have been dying to go to since the beginning of time, including SF DevRel, WaffleJS, Lesbians Who Tech, and Sentry Scouts. Listen, these 4 are the most iconic meetups I have ever had the honour of attending.

 

  • Witnessed apps on my phone work better than they ever have in Vancouver, I’m looking at you, Yelp.

 

  • Spent my first 4th of July at Mark Zuckerberg’s old hacker house in Palo Alto, where he built Facebook.

Breathing the same air that Zuck used to.

Breathing the same air that Zuck used to.

 

  • Took advantage of the free food at every intern open house / festival / hackathon. Huge thank you to the friends who share mutual passions with me in tech, and in food.

 

  • Shivered from the insanely cold SF summer nights no one warns you about, and the view from Battery Spencer (day) and Twin Peaks (night).

 

  • Watched School of Rock, Soft Power and Halsey’s concert (preference in that order only because my girl did not sing Roman Holiday).

Halsey's concert, in which she did not sing Roman Holiday

Halsey's concert, in which she did not sing Roman Holiday

 

  • Wondered how I spent my life without knowing René Magritte. SFMOMA, you showed me the light.

 

  • Stayed up too many long nights losing our sanity over made up board game rules.

 

  • Spoke on the intern panel at Spectra, which I am so proud of my friends for putting together!

 

I’ll have to stop listing things before I start getting emotional again (I'm talking Michael Scott leaving The Office in episode 148 emotional. Speaking of which, this remix of The Office theme song is my summer anthem). It's also important to note that these are only the highlights, San Francisco has its fair share of problems as a city that deserves a whole post on its own— I'm well aware of that, but let's celebrate the good things for now! 😉

 

Needless to say, I’m not ready to leave. But I guess I won’t ever be. I’ll make the most of my time left here and hang on to the latter half of this bittersweet feeling I’m drowned with, with the constant reminder that this city will always be here when I need it. 

 

San Francisco, stay Golden.

Twitter #DevelopHER Camp 2018

Most of my traffic sources to charmaineklee.com in the past year have predominantly been through Twitter. So, I really wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how your eyes ended up on this page as well. Why is that though?

At one point, Twitter was everyone’s go-to social media platform—I remember this because I didn’t have it, and my best friend would beg me to make an account every single day. So one day, I caved in and made a Twitter account under the handle @misscharmainerockz (carefully chosen by my classmate at the time). All I saw on my timeline were tweets from my friends announcing that they are bored, I followed the pattern for a bit until I decided that Twitter just wasn’t for me. The next day, I deleted my account and skipped happily back to Tumblr. I always loved Tumblr because of the freedom I have on there. I was recently speaking to the PR Manager at my work and she described the platform perfectly, “Tumblr feels like a black hole that you can yell into”. It was true, that’s why I loved it so much. But when I finally gave Twitter a second chance this past year and made what is now @charmaine_klee, I realized that Twitter filled in the gap of a platform like Tumblr (which I love oh so much)—a place where people could not only feel safe to share anything to their little heart’s desire, but also to have their voices heard and amplified. For me, I built a network of support within Tech Twitter. In other words, I found a family on Twitter where I felt more than a CS student from UBC— I was part of something greater, and I belonged. And of course, Twitter always comes through with those fresh memes and exclusive threads. But for others, well, name a platform with something that comes remotely close to Black Twitter, I’ll wait.

Needless to say, I was #ecstatic to attend #DevelopHER at Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco this past week. I went inside a company that I thought I could only ever get behind. 😉 

The camp was a series of ice breakers, workshops, #tern panels, selfie with @jack, lots and lots of delicious food, office tours, networking opportunities, resume revamps and coding challenges.

Selfie with THE @jack!

As a hackathon organizer, I’m always on the lookout for fun ice breakers that don’t have everyone in the audience sweating to find 7 “fun facts” about themselves, and I’m pretty sure Twitter’s nailed it this time. So to let my fellow event organizers in on the secret, the ice breaker rolled out in 3 rounds. The first was where we guessed who had more followers between two Twitter accounts, the second was “Name That Song” where we wrote down song names of instrumental tracks they, and the last was “Who D@” where we guessed whose Twitter profile pic was shown on the screen along with their handles (@TheRock, @KingJames were definitely some fun ones). They might be a little Twitter specific, but they’re definitely easy enough to modify to suit any audience. These ice breakers gave us the opportunity to actually get to know each other down to our interests and preferences, and you really couldn't get through the rounds without learning something new while contributing. I loved it! Between the uniquely valuable workshops and panels (I don’t want to spoil anything because I want future #DevelopHER attendees to be as pleasantly surprised as I was going in!), we also had a lot of fun competing in a series of coding challenges. It was inspiring getting to collaborate with these incredible women, I definitely felt that adrenaline rush from the challenges.

As the camp wrapped up, we all bid our farewells to Twitter and hung out for the rest of the night. #DevelopHER was a good one. It was a really good one. I loved everyone I met from there and I can’t wait to see what they all get up to next. If you're a rising Junior, you can (and absolutely should) apply for it here!

In the meantime, I am now officially in SF for the rest of the summer—hit me up if you’re around, I’ll be hanging out at Pinterest (and probably a lot of Pug Sundays @ Alta Plaza 🐕)

Microsoft Internship, Build 2018

I interned as a Program Manager at Microsoft's Experimental Projects Division, the Garage.

Group pic of all my best friends, aka fellow interns & our fearless leader, Stephane.

Group pic of all my best friends, aka fellow interns & our fearless leader, Stephane.

It’s the feeling of finding those who share mutual passions, those who make you laugh so hard you lose your voice for a week, those who go to the beach at 2am just to lay down and count the stars with you, people who just get it— your people. That feeling came rushing back to me every morning as I stepped foot into our office building. A series of inside jokes and silent chanting of our intern anthem (speaking of which, please listen to it while you read the rest of this post 🙏) laid the foundation of inseparable friendships. And I hope you too, will find your own Microsoft Garage.

I just came back from the Microsoft Build Developer Conference 2018, with a ticket so generously gifted to me from the incredible Cloud Developer Advocates team during my internship 🎉 . I went last year too, but this year was really something else. I sat in the audience as they announced the release of 2 AI projects we worked on during our internship— Snip Insights & Mobile Chest X-Ray Analysis. It was heartwarming to see how different teams across Microsoft have also spent the past year revolutionizing the way AI is used in our day to day workflows. But also, tears flew out of my eyes when I saw our faces on the screen credited as the team behind those 2 projects. The early mornings and late nights (not to mention, getting a flood of messages from our manager to go home) we worked have evolved from prime team bonding time, to now, products on the big screen for everyone to try at Build. Our project even made it to TechCrunch! It was at that very moment when I felt like the luckiest person in the world to be able to create such impactful projects. I never want to stop doing this.

Our pictures at Build!

Our pictures at Build!

These past 4 months have probably been one of the greatest experiences in my life. Every day of the internship held a new surprise and we never quite knew what we’d be working on or what challenges might come up, besides the fact that our team would always come out of it stronger. As the only Program Manager intern, I had the pleasure of working across all 4 project teams (Snip Insights, Cloud Chest X-Ray Analysis, HoloLens & Minecraft: Education Edition). 

This internship wasn’t an easy one. We built out our own prototypes, we sketched our own ever-changing architecture diagrams, threat models and scoped our own features, only to be (constructively) torn apart at our weekly “Dragon’s Den” style pitches to different internal teams. We did over 50 user research and usability testing sessions to continuously iterate on our features and design. We actually went through a 180-degree UI/UX change for Snip Insights 3 days before presenting our project to the CVP of Cloud AI. Needless to say, agile did us well. We passed compliance (accessibility review and testing, privacy reviews, security reviews, global readiness, code analyses, open source release review) by a hair, as we worked until exactly 5:00pm on our last day. And believe me when I say, I will never view products, and accessibility in particular, the same way ever again. I have a LOT more respect for products that go the extra mile to protect users' information, handle localization, and be accessible for all users. This internship was a life-changingly rewarding one.

The once foreign Garage desks, chairs, and kitchen had become so familiar. As I walked past the area one last time, the rush of nostalgia flushed away that familiarity and suddenly, I realized what was once the entrance had become the exit. With that being said, I know those doors will always be opened. In fact, I’ll be heading back very soon for an exciting Tweet Chat panel and to present our project at the Imagine Cup Finals! As for all the friends I made during my time here, stay in touch. The world is only so small. 😉 

Here are some bonus videos and tweets from our internship that you might enjoy!

If you too, love turning ideas into real projects, you NEED to check out the Garage.

TEDxUBC, MVP Summit 2018

“Finish your TED talk, head straight to the airport, land in Seattle & check into hotel in Bellevue, practice your presentation a few times, sleep, wake up for breakfast with Teresa, give the MVP Summit talk, get dinner with Justin & Teresa, and finally, hop on the plane back to Vancouver at 5am for work at 9am.” That was what I kept iterating to myself over and over again in the past month. Yet, the second I stepped on that stage, all I can think about was how lucky I am to be able to stand exactly where I was. 

 

I spent the whole month of February in rehearsals for TEDxUBC— my talk was on Hacking the Glass Ceiling with Neopets. I like to describe the talk as a “That’s what you missed on Glee” version of my life, which for a long time revolved around the virtual pets online game, Neopets. I thought it would be a fun snippet to share because looking back, that game and the people I met through it are the reasons I’m studying Computer Science today. I also bring up topics like open-source software and most importantly, the strengths of diversity and representation along the way. It felt uncomfortable at times sharing moments of my life where I struggled a lot, but at the end of the day, aren’t moments like those the ones that build ideas worth sharing?

Sarah is the coolest politics geek ever and we actually hung out again after TEDx ended!

Sarah is the coolest politics geek ever and we actually hung out again after TEDx ended!

So I stormed into UBC on a Saturday with the crew of speakers I’ve made friends with over the past month, and I was in awe of how far all of our talks have come. My thoughts that only existed on little scraps of paper 1 month prior now became a TEDx talk in front of an audience of 500. You can watch the full video of the talk on YouTube. If you’re ever debating speaking at a TED event, let it be known that it’ll be one of the most challenging, yet, rewarding experiences you’ll ever have. So you should just do it. But really, we were debriefing after our talks, and everyone was talking about how they’ve skipped school the past week just to prepare for this. Think: a roller coaster ride that went on for over a month, and finally getting off of it. As soon as I got off that ride, I boarded the flight to Seattle for the MVP Summit. 

 

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I was invited to speak about Engaging with Student Developers (I presented right after Scott Hanselman on the same stage, my inner fangirl is still not over it) at the summit. Kairui, a fellow student from UC Berkeley and I took the stage together, but let’s not forget everyone who worked so hard backstage— huge thank you to everyone who helped us with the presentation, it may or may not have taken us 5+ tries to finally get the content cleared. Teresa, Justin and Susan not only invited us to speak at the event, but also gave us the opportunity to live like princesses for the days we were there. Molly accommodated our request for a mic check before our presentation— a giveaway that we were amateurs but it also made us feel 10x more confident during the presentation, so thank you! And lastly, shoutout to my boy Kairui who went to the drugstore with me at 1am because I realized I forgot my entire makeup bag at home, and for calming me down about the presentation throughout the past couple of months. The talk went surprisingly well, and we received lots of questions after the session, which means the content must have somehow resonated with them!!! We also got millennial :hearteyes: 😍 as our Twitter feeds were flooded with support from the incredible crowd. We wrapped up our night up by grabbing yet another delicious meal at the Lakehouse with Teresa and Justin. My tummy was filled and so was my heart. 

 

So there we have it! I can finally go to sleep without feeling the need to rehearse just “one last time”, and maybe, I can even relive all of this in my dreams. 

Musicals, Podcasts & Books

January’s been one long (but fun) month!

For starters, I started my internship at Microsoft! More on this in another post, but I am loving the work, the people and the overall environment. I feel humbled and grateful to be surrounded by some of the world’s brightest minds. I also helped judged nwHacks 2018! I know this isn’t a big deal, but it really was a special moment for me. nwHacks was my first ever hackathon I attended as a freshman and here I am now, on the other side of the event. As a person of habits, I was back at GIRLsmarts4tech volunteering for the third year in a row— it was still as great I had remembered it. And fast forward to yesterday, I dyed my hair blue and went to Vancouver TheatreSports to watch an improv show with my co-workers. 😂

Somewhere between all of this, I’ve started appreciating music (more specifically musicals) and podcasts a lot more in recent months, as I’ve spent more time commuting to different places. So I figured I could share some of my recommendations with you, listed in no particular order. 

Musicals

Dear Evan Hansen

Perfect for: anyone looking for a relatable musical with a more modern sound

Hamilton

Perfect for: everyone, seriously, Lin Manuel Miranda has blessed the Broadway stage (to no one's surprise) again, please go listen to Hamilton right NOW if you have been living under a rock for the past year

Waitress

Perfect for: anyone who still bops to Sara Bereilles' 2007 hit single, "Love Song"-- she wrote the entire musical herself and it's kind of the best thing ever

Ordinary Days

Perfect for: those looking for something a little different from typical broadway musicals

Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812

Perfect for: those interested in a fresh take on a classic story (Tolstoy's War and Peace)-- ALMOST reminds me of Les Misérables and Hamilton

Podcasts

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Perfect for: techies, entrepreneurs, startup lovers

Rerun

Perfect for: TV show lovers who are interested in dissecting the mechanics of iconic episodes

Reply All

Perfect for: anyone with a love for what's happening on the internet

Lastly, if you're interested, I started a bookshelf of books that I have recently read / am reading. Follow me here! 

That's it for now! Feel free tweet me any recommendations to add to the list.

I hope you have an incredible February! 🎉

Sincereley, Me

September Recap: Communities

One of my main goals for this school year is to explore my passions and to better prioritize my time based on the value I see in different things. I have the momentum to do almost everything that I want to at the moment, but this momentum might not last forever so I’ll take advantage of this while I still can.

As September went on, I’ve discovered one key thing that matters to me— communities. The tech community fuels my passion for the industry, and here are some events / things that happened this past month that helped me realize this:

 

1) I started my internship at SAP! 

I just started as a Full-Stack Developer Intern at SAP. I am on the SAP Jam team, working on our very own enterprise social collaboration platform. Beyond the beautiful office and the free coffee ☕️, what makes this internship special is the Internship Experience Project. This program recognizes value beyond the work you do at SAP. It gives you the opportunity to easily schedule 1:1 with company executives, matches you up with a compatible mentor and regularly hosts intern social and networking events (including hackathons, conferences and summits)! I’m excited to see what’s in store for my next few months here.

 

2) Hack the North 💖

Hack the North never disappoints. As a community who is constantly pushing the boundaries of hackathons, I feel honoured to have been a part of this incredible event for the second year in a row. From Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister kicking off the hackathon to late night poutine and beavertails, Hack the North took one big step for growing the Canadian / global hacker community. 

There were lots of different meet ups happening to celebrate the diversity of students showing up at Hack the North. I also had the opportunity to sit in on the Diversity & Inclusion Panel held by Tracy Chou, Jennifer Dewalt and Cat Noone. It was one of the best Q&A panels I’ve participated in. 

My teammates (Daniel, Payton and Chetan) are the best. This team reminded me of why I fell in love with hackathons in the first place. They were so kind. Their sense of humour and sarcasm was what got me through the nights. My favourite part was definitely the night before submission time— one of my teammates was determined to get the Spotify API working before he slept, but the rest of us were prepared to slip into dreamland. Instead of just going to sleep, we all stayed up to cheer him on because we knew how much it meant to him. It was humbling to have worked on JukeBAUX with them.

 

3) WWCode ft. Slack 👯

I had the opportunity to visit the Slack office with Women Who Code Vancouver. Brenda Jin, Roo Harrigan and Jen Long from Slack SF spoke about their journeys through the tech field, and we even got to see some live coding from Roo! The sense of joy I felt after the event made me realize how much I loved the community of women that I’ve successfully surrounded myself with. 

 

That's all for now, I'll keep you posted on what I get up to next! Until next time!

SIOLAB Internship

I spent the summer as a Software Developer Intern at the SIOLab— a Digital Catalyst Lab thriving in between the Strategy and Innovation Office's startup culture and the purpose of transforming pediatric health care within BC Children's Hospital.

Spotted from left to right- :luke: :juan: :kevin: :shirley: :char: :john: Missing- :darwinOh wait. This isn't Slack.

Spotted from left to right- :luke: :juan: :kevin: :shirley: :char: :john: Missing- :darwin

Oh wait. This isn't Slack.

A "Turkish" Delight. A backend cyborg. A tinkerbell with magical designer dust. An analytics wizard. An analytics wizard intern who couldn't turn down a good Game of Thrones debate. The boss who had 2 masters and an extra one in sarcasm. And there I was, wondering how I got this lucky to have the opportunity to work amongst them.

On my first day of work, I went home and told my mom that this place would be hard to leave behind. 

On my third day of work, I changed my mind. I jokingly typed "sudo rm -rf", but ended up accidentally actually destroying the VM (thankfully) I was working on. I was so angry and disappointed in myself. But my manager told me that everybody makes mistakes-- he refused to think less of me or my skills as a developer because of the mistake. I needed to hear this. I needed to know that someone believed in me enough to encourage mistakes for my own personal growth. This one sentence left an impact on me. I went home and told my mom that this place would be impossible to leave behind.

On my last day of work, I look back at one of the best summers I’ve ever had and I’m completely speechless about this whole experience. I’ve dug up my passions by working and falling in love with PWAs— the allergy symptom checker app I was working on had its beta released, but I can’t wait for it be released to the public! I felt like a proud mother as I watched and helped transform mockups to first a working front end (Angular 4, Ionic 3 & Cordova), then to implementing a backend in PHP (Laravel) with a MySQL database, and finally seeding data and testing the application thoroughly. In addition, I was given the opportunity to extend my interests as a Hobbyist Game Developer to developing an HoloLens application that combines slices of patients’ MRI scans into a 3D model to provide holistic visualizations and analysis of a patient's brain in Augmented Reality. 

I also spent some of my time playing with Data Analytics and Machine Learning (Python & R). So workwise, I felt fulfilled. I saw the impact of the work I was doing, all while learning and discovering new things every moment of the day. However, that experience could be gained anywhere (well, maybe— considering how diverse the tasks I was given were, but they really do adjust your work according to your interests to the best of their abilities). But what I couldn’t have learnt anywhere else was the importance of dynamic within a team. It’s impossible to explain my work family but it all boiled down to the fact that we valued each other, we respected each other, and we were constantly learning but also challenging each other. And in a blink of an eye, my 4 month internship was over.

Sooo... to upkeep my title as the intern who sang one (or ten) too many musicals at work, I'll summarize my internship and this post with a song from my favourite musical, Wicked.

We spent a day working in separate areas, so we decided to communicate by sticking our heads out the window. We laughed for 3 hours about these 2 pictures. You had to be there.

We spent a day working in separate areas, so we decided to communicate by sticking our heads out the window. We laughed for 3 hours about these 2 pictures. You had to be there.

MLH Hackcon 2017

Not everyone knows why you can’t hang out every weekend. Not everyone understands why you travel from place to place to attend hackathons. Not everyone cares about the new VR project you’ve built on the Vive. But you do, and you want everyone around you to too. So you take on the initiative to make your own hackathon and grown your own local hacker community. You hope that your passion and joy can be felt by those closest to you too.

That’s the journey that most hackathon organizers go through. Organizing a hackathon is tough. So when Hackcon puts 400 students who have been through the same journey in one room, everyone becomes instant friends. By the end of the 3 days, you know everything about each other’s hackathons, favourite programming languages, and not to mention, Resistance tactics.

The conference was held at Pocono Springs Camp, a beautiful (& super clean!) campsite where you can swim, kayak, zipline, you name it— they probably have it. This venue was by far the most unique conference venue I have ever been to. By putting us all in one isolated campsite, we were given the opportunity to truly bond and focus on what mattered to us. 

This conference was definitely made with inclusivity & diversity in mind. From the gender pronouns on our name badges to the talks, the environment kept us feeling safe and comfortable at all times. Most of the talks I attended were discussion-based. This was valuable as it was interesting to hear about everyone’s unique experiences, and how we overcame similar challenges in different ways. I loved that everyone was there to learn and share. Everyone’s passion for the growth of the hackathon community was so inspiring and I was constantly reminded that “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle”. Individually, we can build great things, but together, we can build the future. I also loved how the topics were well catered specifically to organizers, I was pleasantly surprised by discussions like dynamics between co-directors and how to leverage different communities. These were topics that aren't usually discussed within the attendees community, but heavily impact the core of an organizer's role.

Here are some of my favourite sessions by Victor & Chi, Lizzie and Kaitlyn (Madi, Joe, Swift & Kim’s + more are also part of this list but their slides / presentations aren’t up yet. I will link them once they are)!

The workshops generally ended before dinner so any time after that was free time. Li organized a Ladies Storm Hackathons meet up at the campfire. We made delicious s’mores and had a great chat. I was also able to catch up with a bunch of friends that I have met over the past year at different hackathons. We ended up playing board games and Resistance until 2am. Our laughter filled every moment of silence in the night. 

Just like that, Hackcon flew by. Before I knew it, I was leaving the campsite with new friends, memories, ideas, and the most adorable Octocat plushie. At the end of the day, the growth of this community is the growth of the people in it. So what better way to celebrate this than by gathering all of us together?

 

(A big thank you to Major League Hacking and GitHub for making Hackcon possible, and big hugs to all my friends— new and old!)

New York

The crowd was muffled by the sound of “Empire State of Mind” by Alicia Keys blasting in my headphones. I looked around and took a deep breath. I couldn’t help but let out a smile in disbelief. Time was frozen and I, was in New York. 

NYC Times Square

NYC Times Square

Somewhere between attending hackathons, conferences and visiting my best friend around the world this year, I found myself slowly becoming numb to the excitement of travelling. Something that I once eagerly counted down the days to, became second nature to me. I think a large part of why this came to be was because I realized the location of where I was never mattered, what I was doing did. But the bustling city that never sleeps took me by surprise. The excitement of travelling came rushing back to me. It’s been a week since I came back from my trip, but not a day goes by without me daydreaming about it.

I spent my first night in NYC walking around Time Square. My partner in crime, Shreya, and I checked out The VOID (Please check this out if you're into VR! Huge shoutout to my work for gifting me these tickets before I left! <3) and later on met up with some friends. We were all perfectly content with the aimless wandering, as the flashing billboards and lights blinked well past midnight. I wanted to keep exploring, but eventually, everyone got tired so we headed back to our hotel. We tucked ourselves in and I stared at the ceiling until I finally got used to the light pollution.

The next morning came around and we headed to Wall Street to meet the famous Charging Bull and Fearless Girl, but in return, we were greeted by the rain. So we quickly headed to SoHo and seated ourselves at a cozy Italian restaurant. A few hours went by and we found ourselves at the Rockefeller Centre, but the view was obstructed by the rain and fog. Therefore, we were encouraged to go back the next day. We then visited our friends at Major League Hacking and Spotify. Both of those offices were very welcoming, and catching the Behind-the-scenes of 2 companies that I adore so much was such an honour. Shreya and I parted ways shortly after as I headed to the Gershwin Theatre to watch Wicked. Watching Wicked on Broadway has been on the top of my bucket list since I sang Defying Gravity for my choir in Grade 8. Shreya had to meet up with her friends that evening, so I ended up going alone. It was the most heartwarming musical my eyes had ever laid eyes on, and it truly earned its spot on my bucket list. I’ll be keeping it on the list for a while longer because watching it once was no where near enough. I hung around Times Square for the rest of the night. I snatched some souvenirs and tried Shake Shack for the first time. I met Shreya back at our hotel room, we jammed to some music and shared some snacks as we Skyped her boyfriend.

Shreya, Shy, Li, Swift &amp; I at Major League Hacking

Shreya, Shy, Li, Swift & I at Major League Hacking

Spotify tour with Aimee

Spotify tour with Aimee

We woke up early the next morning and met our friend at the Facebook office. He invited us there for breakfast and told us to come with a very empty stomach. We were lucky we did because their breakfast was a full on buffet. He then showed us around the office and snapped tons of hilarious shots of us. We then revisited the Rockefeller Centre and the view up there was jaw-dropping. Being able to stare at the Empire State Building from this distance felt surreal. Central Park was our next stop. We sat around for half an hour and decided that we would walk around some more. So we grabbed Joe & The Juice and proceeded to shop around together. It was a sweet ending to an unforgettable trip. 

Left our mark on the Facebook NY Wall!

Left our mark on the Facebook NY Wall!

I’m currently in a love-hate relationship with this city. It treated me sooo well but now I’m left with a bad case of wanderlust. New York, I promise I’ll be back for you.

View from the Rockefeller Centre ft. The Empire State Building

View from the Rockefeller Centre ft. The Empire State Building

Huge shoutout to Li, Aimee & Sean for showing us around the awesome tech spaces in New York! Come visit Vancouver soon! <3

Microsoft Build Developer Conference 2017

I’ve been putting off this post ever since the conference ended because I knew that no matter what I wrote, I wouldn’t be able to do the event justice. However, not writing about it would be even worse. So, here goes!

My friend, whom I met at Pearl Hacks, Sabrina and I were both lucky enough to have received scholarships to the Microsoft Build Developer Conference. Therefore, we ended up booking our flights to arrive and leave Seattle at the exact time to split those Uber rides and of course, be roommates. The moment I saw her at the luggage carousel, I already knew that this was going to be a trip to remember (partially because we screamed and dramatically ran into a hug from 10 ft away). We ended up checking in at the Hilton and headed to the Convention Centre.

We were welcomed with huge swag bags, a conference badge and lots of optional pins to put on the lanyard. We then went to the pre-conference student event where we participated in a Machine Learning Competition. My friend, Gora and I won an Azure Machine Learning Competition a couple months ago, so we dug in and got the base of a fairly complex model going right away. Unfortunately, the competition was only 45 minutes long, so we ended up with what could have been a great Machine Learning Model whose potential never saw the light of day. We then checked out the Women in Tech event with some of our new friends and got interviewed by Sit With Me. We made our way to GameWorks and played with unlimited arcade credits for the rest of the night. After it closed, we gathered a group of approximately 30 students for a trip to Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream. I think it’s hilarious that we kept blocking off multiple sidewalks because of how many of us wanted ice cream. After some great chats and ice cream, we headed back to the hotel. Just as we were about to enter the elevator, another student, who we later on became super great friends with, asked if we wanted to hang out at the lobby. Not to make you jealous, but there may or may not have been a little free styling session, and a minor freak out over the fact that we were using Premium Hotel Wi-Fi instead of the free one. We ended up chatting with a little group of people and called it a night when the clock finally struck 12.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella

We woke up at 6am the next morning and headed for the keynote. We had VIP seats and sat right in front of Satya, no big deal. I also got to see Scott Hanselman, one of the coolest Microsoft peeps that I follow on Twitter present. They announced Visual Studio for Mac (which I downloaded yesterday and it looks soo slick) and their new Azure mobile app with the command line built in. I think it’s exciting to see how Microsoft has transformed from the traditional company that they were a couple years back, to the one they are now. They’ve come a long way. After the keynote, I ended up checking out a bunch of booths. I was mostly interested in all the booths and talks that were focused on Progressive Web Apps, Angular, TypeScript, Cordova etc. because that’s what I am currently using at work. As a side note, is it just me or is TypeScript going to take over the world? Obviously, Slack has already openly replaced their entire code base with TypeScript. But the syntax is so intuitive for JavaScript programmers and the language itself is so clean, there is no way TypeScript won’t make its way to become one of the most used languages within the next year or two. Anyway, we ended up going to the Space Needle after day 1 ended. We returned to the hotel at around 10pm and stayed in the lobby with a bunch of us just discussing our thoughts on the keynote and our predictions for day 2.

View from the top of the Space Needle

View from the top of the Space Needle

We woke up slightly later on day 2 and started the day with another incredible keynote. The HoloLens team announced that they were working with Cirque du Soleil to create Mixed Reality stage planning. My mind was completely blown as we headed back to the Hub and checked out some more talks and booths. We ended up getting so much free swag (including a Surface Dial and fidget spinner), things were falling out of our bags left and right. That was the indication that we’ve had a successful conference day. We put down our stuff at the hotel and took the free shuttle to go to the CenturyLink Field for the after-party. The entire stadium was packed with free food. My favourite was definitely Beecher’s Mac & Cheese. We had so much fun at the photo booths that time flew right by us. We almost missed the last shuttle! We ended up going to one of our friend’s room and we all spent the night dancing and playing charades. At one point, we tried to fool a bunch of Americans that us Canadians dance with our fingers instead of body. I doubt any of them actually believed it, but the best part was that everyone played along.

We had the MSP summit on the last conference day. All the students from all over the world were gathered again, and lots of people shared what they learnt from the conference with a very supportive crowd. They also gave out awards and turns out I won the Top Microsoft Student Technical Contributor of the year?!??! I was so surprised that the work that I have been doing has been recognized, by more than just a pat on the back by my parents. We gave the student scholarship coordinators our million thanks and headed on a tour of the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond. The campus was huge. Touring the campus alone made us so hungry, we Ubered straight to the Cheesecake Factory after. We then spent our last night in our friend’s room watching the new season of Silicon Valley together until 3am. I guess that’s what happens when you put a bunch of computer geeks in one room.

We checked out the Starbucks Reserve Roastery the next morning and headed to lunch with our little group of friends. I cried when we hugged each other goodbye. Thankfully, Sabrina and I still had a bit of time left in Seattle, so we checked out the Public Market and the rest of Downtown Seattle together. We then went to the airport early and had to bid our farewells. It was sad but sure enough, we’ll see each other again- whether it be in North Carolina, Seattle or Toronto.

Now, here I am sitting at a coffee shop ending the blog post about one of the best experiences in my life. Thank you for the incredible opportunity, Microsoft and I hope to be back again next year!

Los Angeles

My super duper cool sister (I’m serious, she’s really cool) got an invitation to the VRTL Summit at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles and guess who she brought? MEEEEEEEE (I didn’t get to go to the summit because apparently I wasn’t VIP enough, but I got to go to Hollywood, so I’m not complaining)! I was a bit hesitant at first as I bought my plane tickets 8 hours before we were supposed to leave for the airport, but me being me, I just went along with it. 

On the first day, we went to Urth Caffé for lunch, checked out KoreaTown, the Walk of Fame, brought some snacks back to the hotel and watched (what we call) "trashy tv shows". We called it a night as we prepared for Universal Studios the next morning. 

We went to Universals on the perfect day. The weather was great but most importantly, there wasn’t more than a 5 minute line up for any ride, which meant that we went on everything. As predicted, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter was the most magical place ever. We bought butter beer and ate at the Three Broomsticks. However, the best part must have been Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. I used to be very certain that my favourite amusement park ride is Space Mountain from Disneyland but I have to admit, after the Forbidden Journey, I’m not so sure anymore. The transition between the real ride and the simulation parts were so seamless, it’s hard to remember that in reality, you are a sad and boring muggle (you, not me). WaterWorld was a phenomenal production. Please go if you ever drop by Universals because that show itself will get your money’s worth, I promise! Lastly, I loved the Studio Tour. Don’t get me wrong, the tour was fantastic, but my favourite part was the girl next to me. She was so bored throughout the entire ride, but the second we caught a glimpse of Wisteria Lane (the street from Desperate Housewives), she SCREAMED and took approximately 2.4 million pictures on her phone. I take it back, THIS is what made my money’s worth. We ended up eating Voodoo Doughnuts and pizza for dinner. Sorry mom.

On the third day, my sister went to the summit so I spent the day exploring myself. I went around Melrose Avenue, Beverly Hills, the Farmer’s Market and the Grove. Those were the pretty part of L.A., the other parts were… not so pretty. I also had the best Earl Grey Milk Tea at Alfred Tea Room, and now everything in Vancouver tastes subpar. I ended up sitting down at Barnes & Noble at read Dataclysm for a good 3 hours before realizing I should probably just buy it, so I did. I then met up with my sister and we went to the Santa Monica Pier and Third Street Promenade, everything was closed but we got the gist of it. As our legs gave up on us after walking around the entire day, we used the last 1% on our phones to call an Uber. However, turns out we put the pin on the wrong side of the mall and our Uber driver yelled at us- we still gave him 5 stars because we were scared. #touristproblems

That summed up my trip to L.A. It was so much fun, especially since I started my internship a couple days after coming back, so the timing was perfect! 

What are your summer plans?

Facebook Developer Conference: F8 2017

Facebook invited me to F8, Facebook's Developer Conference! This came as a complete shock to me as I had no idea why they would pay me to go meet my idol- Zuck, but the offer was there and I happily took it. 

The trip to San Jose was not an easy one. I had an exam on the 19th and the conference was from the 18th-19th. This meant that I had to take the exam right after I landed in Vancouver. I emailed my prof and made backup plans upon backup plans to ensure that I would be able to go to the conference, and make it back in time for my exam. I was studying every moment I had, whether it be during the plane ride, the layover, or getting back to the hotel after the conference.

I flew in a day early because they had a special Join All Voices event on the 17th. It was an exclusive event that was meant to celebrate diversity withinin the tech world. I love that Facebook has consistently showed their appreciation of community and the diversities that come with it. As I was heading back to the hotel after this event, I ended up bumping into someone I met at Pearl Hacks. It was great catching up with her, and we met up the next morning as well.

The conference itself started with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote. The whole idea of this F8 was to showcase the potential of augmented reality and how the camera is the next big thing. Facebook spaces serves as a virtual reality social platform to connect people the way a regular video call would- but in an immersive environment. I ended up demoing it and it was really fun. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. In addition, amongst the many ideas they mentioned was Messenger. They came out with parametric QR codes that were on everyone’s conference badge, allowing you to scan each other’s badges for a quick connection while networking. But most importantly, chat bots have been taken to a whole other level, allowing businesses to take use of this convenient platform to ease their day to day processes. The messenger booth was one of my favourites, partially because they gave out the cutest messenger socks. 

I ended up going to most of the sessions and my favourites were definitely ones where developers walked through the process of their design choices. I often spend so much of my time making sure a project works, that I often forget to think through design choices. Therefore, hearing about them from industry professionals was a much needed reminder. It was also interesting to hear how much actually goes into the creation of a new product, down to the finest details. In addition, I was so honoured to have been able to meet so many brilliant individuals at the conference. The downside to being a student at such a big conference means that I felt out of place at times, but the upside is that lots of people were willing to chat with me, even if it was mostly because they were curious as to why I was there. 

Leaving my first ever conference definitely made me very sad- either that, or because I knew I had an exam waiting for me at home. Regardless, it was a fantastic trip and I wouldn’t have traded this experience for anything. Thanks again, Facebook, for giving me this incredible opportunity and I am looking forward to attending more conferences in the near future! :)

HackPrinceton 2017

I’ve experienced Murphy’s law at its finest on my trip to Princeton- the only thing that didn’t go wrong was the hackathon itself.

To start off with, I woke up at 5am to an email saying my flight to Toronto was cancelled. That was the first leg of my flight to Philadelphia. After being kept on hold for about 30 minutes, I finally got on the phone with an airline operator where she told me to call their partner airline instead. The blame was shifted back and forth for over an hour. They kept insisting that they can refund me that leg of the flight, but what good would that have done if I wouldn’t even be able to go the rest of my destinations? After multiple holds and a couple impatient sighs, they finally rerouted me to fly to Newark. I hastily drove to the airport and was very lucky I made it in time because of a huge delay.

I peeked out the window at the Newark airport and noticed the heavy rain. As a Vancouverite, I’m not easily fazed by the rain. However, at that point, I still had a 2 hour commute ahead of me before getting to Princeton University, so I certainly wasn’t in the best mood. I ended up arriving a little early so I was able to go around Palmer Square and take some pictures. However, with the heavy rain and the lack of an umbrella, I ended up just working for a bit at Panera’s.

Princeton itself was like a castle. As someone who has grown up watching A Cinderella Story (the best chick flick ever), I felt like I was fulfilling some sort of childhood dream because Hilary Duff went to Princeton University in the movie. 

A conscious effort was made by the HackPrinceton team to revolutionize the hackathon experience. To begin with, they had bouncy castles and laser tagging. Those were put in place to encourage hackers to take breaks while hacking. They also had delicious food and a room that looked like it came straight from Tumblr. There were fairy lights, bean bags and very boho chic decor. The best of all was the fact that instead of taking a 30 minute nap on the floor like regular hackathons, we were assigned dorms to stay in. Everyone had to go to a dorm and sleep for the night. Unfortunately, my original host didn’t respond to me so I had to go through a whole process of finding a new host. However, with the help of the accommodating HackPrinceton team, we were able to figure it out in no time. I ended up having a nice chat with my roommates before heading to sleep.

When I woke up, I received yet another email saying my flight back home was cancelled. This worried me so much more than the first time, as I was now stranded in a foreign place. After SEVEN hours of calling between WestJet and their partner airlines, I was finally told that the flight was never cancelled in the first place- one of their employees removed me off the plane by accident. I was so frustrated not only by the situation, but also because I wasted 7 hours of work time on the phone. Thankfully, my team was very understanding and trusted me to work while I was put on hold, time and time again. 

We ended up developing an Android app that sets up a buddy system to ensure users safety when going out for the night. We originally planned on making a React Native app. However, half the team couldn’t set it up and it was also evident that the majority of the team didn’t know React, so it would have been rather difficult to pick up everything on the spot. However, it turned out that I was the only one with Android dev experience, so that was simply another recipe for disaster. We took a break and explored Princeton for a bit. We took lots of pictures and even found ourselves in the middle of a concert at one point. My team ended up going to sleep after the walk, feeling very defeated. I napped for 15 minutes and jolted awake, knowing that I would regret it if I didn’t give it my best shot. I stayed up for the whole night and ended up with a simple but functional app, the UI was cute as well! I was able to set up IBM Bluemix and Firebase, but couldn’t quite get to integrating Twilio’s API into the app (even though I really wanted to try Twilio :( ) It felt great knowing that my team could at least present a finished project though, and I think my teammates really appreciated it as well. When they woke up, we polished up our Devpost and bootstrapped a landing page.

Project submissions were followed by demos and the closing ceremony. You should definitely browse through the HackPrinceton Devpost if you have time, the project that won first place has got to be one of my favourite hackathon projects ever.

I snuck out of the ceremony a bit early as I had to catch my flight. I ended up waiting 20 minutes for an Uber and when the driver arrived, he told me to cancel the trip because the airport was too far for him. We were then in this sticky situation where neither of us wanted to cancel the trip as whoever cancels would have to pay, but he also refused to drive me. He ended up driving a block down and pretended that he dropped me off on the app, so that I had to pay him $8 for a ride he cancelled- I had to send an email to Uber after to get this fixed :(. I’m surprised I made it in time for the flight at all in the end.

All in all, although my luck ran out in terms of the travel itself, HackPrinceton was a fantastic experience and New Jersey was a beautiful city. I do hope that I’ll be back next year. :)

TreeHacks 2017

Oh TreeHacks you were quite something.

I landed in San Francisco after a 5 hour delay. I tried not to look like a complete foreigner as I struggled to download Uber on my phone to call myself a ride to Stanford University. Obviously, that never works. I ended up having to ask the guy next to me how to work the app.  “What do you mean? It says right there that your driver is already coming. He’s meeting you at Terminal 2”, he answered. I thanked him as I looked up to see the “Terminal 3” sign. Don’t worry though, I ran there just in time and didn’t have to pay for that $5 no show fee (I found out about this later as I messed up another pickup haha). 

I found my way there as I tried to message some people on Slack, looking to join a team. Finding that team was no easy task. I ended up having to embarrassingly make my way to the Team Formation session where I, along with a bunch of what felt like Thanksgiving leftovers tried to gather a team. I ended up finding an amazing team though! I am thankful for all the people who ignored me on Slack because I am so proud of the project we ended up making. 

The first thing we did as a team was to listen to Bei Yang, a Disney Imagineer’s Tech Talk. He was the CMU Legend- Randy Pausch’s student. He talked about his work as a Disney Imagineer and I was touched to see my teammate’s eyes glow as he listened to him. He too, is a design major at Carnegie Mellon and I could feel the passion radiating off of him as he made his way to Bei Yang after his talk.

We ended up grabbing a little room for ourselves as we began hacking. I was in awe of the amazing talent in the room. We had an awesome design major from CMU, a first year student (that’s incredible!) from UCLA and another student who is currently interning in the Bay Area, from the National University of Singapore. We were joined shortly by two guys from Harvard who also had incredibly brilliant minds. It definitely felt intimidating, but also an honour, to work with such amazing students from different programs. After our teammate was chased after by organizers for stealing a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for our room, we began hacking.

The hack itself was something I would have never came up with on my own but hackathons really do trigger innovative ideas. Our idea was to map a 3D video onto a virtual 3D object- a sphere, displayed on a 2D surface. Users can then manipulate the rotation of the video with a Griffin Powermate, and change the axis that it rotates along and the zoom by tracking where their hands are on the controller with a Leap Motion. The input of the hand gestures was analyzed by the Leap Motion through Unity, and was then sent back to our main device with OSC.

It definitely felt bittersweet as we all packed our bags after the demos. However, I will be holding on to my Stanford hoodie as I impatiently wait for TreeHacks 2018.

You can read more about our project here.

Pearl Hacks 2017

The hackathon game has been changed. I just went to my first all-females hackathon at the University of North Carolina- Pearl Hacks!

I finished class at 10am on Friday and hastily made my way to the airport. I remember stepping foot on my flight to Toronto- where I would have a 4 hour layover prior to reaching Raleigh. I was so drained from that week of school, I recall messaging my mom telling her that I wish I never accepted the hackathon offer. After all, I was flying to the smallest little city where I knew no one.

When I landed, I was greeted by the friendliest hug from a girl holding a “Pearl Hacks” sign. My phone then rang and I was notified that my ride was here. On our way to the University, the car full of girls talked back and forth about the Computer Science courses we were taking, hack ideas, and even dabbled on where to get cocoa butter in non-lotion form. 

It was about midnight when I arrived and all the hackers were tucked into their sleeping bags and drifted into dream land. That was definitely a shocking sight as I almost pride myself in never sleeping at hackathons. But I too, grabbed an air mattress and drifted away after chatting with the coordinators for a bit.

When I woke up the next morning, I, along with 2 other girls decided to head out to Franklin street to do a bit of exploring before the hackathon officially started. It was loads of fun. We grabbed coffee, took pictures, shared jokes about me being Canadian and falling in love with Walgreens- you know, the usual. We then headed back and decided to become a team and hack together. 

After approximately 12 hours of brainstorming and crossing out every idea in our notepads, we found a girl whose team last minute bailed on her, and was looking to join a new one. We met up with her and chatted about ideas. Finally, we came up with the idea to create a mobile app that would allow users to tap their phones against a street performer’s NFC tag, and tip them on the go. 

We used Ionic (AngularJS) and Cordova for our application framework. We originally wanted to do this in Java, but because of the time constraints we were facing, this definitely seemed like a more optimal solution. We were then able to parse information from the NFC tags and connected them to Amazon’s DynamoDB to store street performer’s profiles.

Despite desperately wanting to finish the project with a time crunch, our spirits were still high and I don’t remember a moment when we weren’t laughing at each other’s jokes. (2 of those involve evaluating a significant other’s potential based on their GitHub commits, and the phrase “code digger”) 

We ended up winning Overall Third Place, Best Open Source Hack, and the Best Use of Technology Hack. Bear with me as I say this but the most important thing that I won was the opportunity to meet the 3 girls on my team- speaking of which, I just got a notification from them on our Facebook group chat. 

As someone who walked into Pearl Hacks with little expectations, I return home with my heart filled from the support of a tight knit community, with the common goal to Hack the Glass Ceiling.

Read more about our project- Encore here.

Global Game Jam 2017

5 months ago, if you had asked me how to make Space Invaders in Unity, I would have probably asked you what Unity was. However, within 5 months, I did actually end up making Space Invaders, worked on a 3D endless runner with little success, went to my first Full Indie Summit (and got excited about turning 19 so I could finally attend the regular meet ups!) but most importantly, met a group of amazing like-minded people from AMS Game Development Association (AGDA). 

I signed up for Global Game Jam with my friend from AGDA. We ended up bumping into one of our fellow club mates and another amazing artist to form a team. The day started out with the theme of the game jam being announced as “waves. Hence, we immediately got to work based on the idea of having waves of enemies attack a barista at Waves, our local coffee shop. 

The game was a 2D top-down shooter game. Despite the simplistic idea, there were still lots to include. Everything from implementing coffee machine turrets, the health packs, the coins, to the character and enemies’ movements- our 48 hours were eaten up in a blink of an eye. 

The best part was definitely how polished our final project turned out to be. Our artist was talent wrapped in a human body— we ended up with awesome graphics and the animations were spot on. I enjoyed being able to interact with the animations and audio options in Unity as I have been so used to keeping both of those to a minimal in my own little games. 

We stayed for the final presentations and ended up with the opportunity to demo ours as well. It was a gratifying experience being able to support and be supported by fellow game developers. 

All in all, Global Game Jam was nothing short of amazing and I'm glad I'm starting my year off right!

As always, catch you next time! :)

 

Check out our project submission here!

A temporarily hosted version of our game is here. (there are occasionally bugs in the WebGL version that don’t exist in our actual game, so apologies beforehand!) *Will update this link when we post the game somewhere cooler ;)

Watch our presentation here.

Full Indie Summit

On Saturday, I went to my first Full Indie Summit with UBC’s AMS Game Development Association. 

Prior to going to the event, I was JUST starting off with game dev, how to use Unity & C# etc. I’ll admit that I don’t play as many games as I should (my mom would disagree but you know what I mean, everyone at the summit knew every game in the market, and there was me- I didn’t even know what Firewatch was). I definitely felt intimidated but was only later on greeted with wonderfully kind faces and suddenly, I felt like I was part of something, and that felt great.

The full list of speakers are listed here. but I particularly enjoyed Kevin Regamey’s (Power Up Audio) talk. He started the whole summit, but he left the bar of standards so high that I was simply in awe. His talk was powerful and engaging. As a noobie game dev, I had no idea how great of an impact audio can have on a game but now, I definitely have a better idea of it. Seriously, when the summit video gets released on youtube, you need to check out his talk. He is a talented speaker with great stage presence. 

I also loved Marc ten Bosch’s (Miegakure) presentation. Here is a video of what he roughly spoke about. The video is needed simply because the 4th dimension is incredibly intriguing coming Bosch. But from me, I can only describe it as pure magic. 

Lastly, I enjoyed Nels Anderson’s talk on Firewatch. He was a game designer of Campo Santo’s Firewatch. Let me tell you, I couldn’t stop googling and watching videos of Firewatch ever since I stepped out of that summit. The game is beautiful and I can’t believe I have never even heard of it before. The moment I have some more free time, I will make buying & playing Firewatch my top priority. 

The talks were then followed by some amazing game demos, free food & free booze (Ah that underage life). I’m so glad I was introduced to Vancouver’s wonderful indie game dev scene and I can’t wait to go back next time. I am now more excited than ever to work on my own game! :)

Hack the North 2016

If you read my previous post about Toronto, you would have known that I may or may not have skipped school this past weekend to go to Hack the North, Canada's largest hackathon. But if you haven't, then you should go read it here!

Skipping class on my second week of school was definitely nerve-racking, but how could I pass up a free trip to Toronto / Waterloo and the opportunity to attend a hackathon that I have heard nothing but amazing things about. Therefore, I made my way to Waterloo on Friday night, with my laptop fully charged, and prepared myself for 36 hours of hacking.

I met my team through Facebook and in hindsight, I am so glad we did! They are all from Waterloo and they are so so so nice. We all have the same kind of humour, so we all pretty much clicked the second we met. After spending 36 hours with them, we bonded so well as a team that we figured even if we didn't win, we won friendship. Haha, okay that's way to cheesy, but you know what I mean.

Prior to attending Hack the North, I thought nwHacks- which I attended in February was HUGE. However, this hackathon was at least twice that size, with a much larger (and in my opinion, more beautiful, but don't tell anyone I said that) building- E5 to work in and there was free food up for grabs all the time (pasta, beaver tails, ice cream, DIY cottoncandy, popcorn etc). Also, there were tons of booths with different sponsors to chat with throughout the night. There was also a photobooth and claw machine for free prizes! There was pretty much always something to do if you were taking a break- tech talks, demos, shirt painting stations and even air mattresses, blankets & showers! (I am not usually one to sleep on air mattresses, especially since I am a clean freak, but I was so tired I couldn't resist - they were very comfy). 

In addition to the neverending list of activities they offered, Waterloo also had lots to offer. My teammates showed me around the plaza, their residences, the little museum etc. We squeezed in some great walks & talks during our down time!

Okay, now let's move on to the actual hacking! Brainstorming and getting everyone to agree on an idea took us a very long time. Therefore, even when we finally agreed on creating a Pebble smartwatch app for tracking user location & converting restaurant currency to the user's desired currency, we already felt super behind in the whole hacking timeline. We were all so excited to do our first hardware hack together, but at the same time, things just weren't quite working out for us on the first night. Both our front end and backend were experiencing lots of trouble. We couldn't even get anything to display on the smartwatch by the end of the night. At that point, we all just silently agreed to give up on our hack, as things just weren't looking great. We slept through the night and I finally woke up at 7am.

I freaked out when I woke up because despite knowing that we probably couldn't finish our hack, deep down, I still really wanted to at least submit something. At that point, we had less than 2 hours before submissions were due. I woke everyone up and we all agreed to go all in during the last 2 hours. The second all of us plugged in our headphone, magic was created. It was crazy, we were all so well concentrated, and our brains just functioned so much better than the night before. The APIs (XE.com & zomato) were working seamlessly, our UI was working perfectly, and the backend connected everything & worked out without encountering too many problems. However, I must admit that we didn't actually finish everything at 9am, but we kept pushing and pushing. Since Devpost just happened to be experiencing technical difficulties, we managed to submit our project, right before the extended deadline. We then rushed to our demo and you could tell, we were all suppressing our nervousness while giving that talk. Thankfully, we had each other's back, and kept the whole presentation flowing. 

We walked out of the demo knowing that we tried our best and that was really all the mattered. We each exhaled a sigh of relief and headed to line up for food. While we were lining up, one of our teammates got a phone call from XE.com and was told that they had something for us. We literally screamed in the line. We knew we didn't get first place, but even an honourable mention would have made our day at that point. So we ran to their booth, where they told us we won second place for our use of XE.com's API! We were ecstatic! We then proceeded to take pictures, in which afterwards, they asked us if we wanted to pose with the drones that were going to be given out to the first place winners. We sensed something was up and suddenly, they told us that they were joking, and we actually won first place. We were screaming and jumping up and down. We looked around and we all knew how much we appreciated each other, and how grateful we were that we didn't give up and kept pushing through the project.

The sick drone we won after it surviving the ride from Waterloo to Vancouver!

The sick drone we won after it surviving the ride from Waterloo to Vancouver!

So to sum it up, Hack the North was a phenomenal experience where I met some of the best people ever & tons of like-minded computer geeks on the bus & plane. I also learnt how important a positive mindset is during hackathons because it might just be the one thing that leads you to your victory. Watch out, Hack the North 2017, I'm coming back for you!

Read more about Pubble here: http://devpost.com/software/pubble