two weekends in a nutshell

Weekend #1: November 11-12
Along with some friends from school as well as the Pivotal Girls Who Code program, I attended my first overnight hackathon at Gunn High School! It was an interesting experience to say the least, being surrounded by so many other computer geeks. Our team coded a web application that allows the user to chat with a punny farm animal (click the link to try), and we were pleasantly surprised to have it win an award for best domain name. Unfortunately, we still have no idea how to clear the database of chat logs, so we hold no responsibility over what anonymous users post there. The following list contains some things I learned that weekend.

1. Stickers to hackers is like catnip to felines. Seriously.

WOWW SO MANY STICKERS!

2. How to learn cybersecurity skills through Major League Hacking's partnership with Watchdog 2 to create a virtual Capture the Flag challenge. (Tip: find the hidden html files)

3. Soylent is an acquired taste. Apparently, drinking three bottles is equivalent to a full day's nutritional needs, but my friend and fellow hacker described it as a very milky yakult. 

4. The range of ideas that high school hackers can come up with is incredible! Projects included a Bernie Sanders RPG game, virtual reality simulations, credit card scanners for grocery shopping, and reddit re-post detectors. Instead of feeling intimidated, everyone was extremely helpful and fun to work with.

5. Pulling an all-nighter is extremely difficult. As I was walking around outside at 4AM trying to stay awake, I noticed other students either passed out in their sleeping bags or in a state of "wouldn't notice if a zombie apocalypse happened in the next five minutes."

Our hackathon team's lovely faces after not sleeping for 24 hours.

6. We felt pretty nervous pitching our project, as it wasn't especially technical or life-saving, put when people understood the light-hearted nature of our goal in making people happy by laughing at animal puns, it was a cool moment B)

GunnHacks we are coming back next year!

Weekend #2: November 19
This weekend, our female STEM club members participated in the Young Women's Engineering Symposium, hosted at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. I learned about this event from the Janksters (an all-girls robotics team from Notre Dame) during Calgames, so I was eager to see how it would turn out.

I personally attended three workshops, for Software, Aerospace, and Electrical engineering. Each workshop included a woman in the field speaking about her experiences as an engineer and the projects she worked on. All of the presentations were extremely engaging, especially the bit about Ms. Albuz building a 7,000 piece Lego autonomous car in college. Unfortunately, it seems as if I have another conundrum, as now I want to be an artificial intelligence programming electrician who is an astronaut in outer space. Just kidding, but nonetheless, all the fields were intriguing.

The wonderful speakers who shared their knowledge of industry with us.

The amount of robotics girls there was more than I have ever seen, which was gratifying. At the same time, if it is the same group of girls attending all the robotics competitions and engineering events, maybe it is time to spread beyond our group.

Bonus Day: November 23
WOW I just watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with my mom in theaters (like any super cool sixteen year old), and I absolutely loved it. I had a ton of fun watching Mr. Scamader and  Ms. Goldstein scramble around New York trying to retrieve all the magical creatures of my childhood. On a side note, did Credence really die...?

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3!!!!!