From Hacker to Organizer

Published in

Student Voices

4 min readApr 13, 2017

On January 2017, I got the chance to be part of HackConcordia, the organizers for ConUHacks. I never thought that I would get involved in university.

How It All Started

A friend of mine was President of HackConcordia and asked me if I wanted to be part of it. Initially, I was not sure about it because of the work load at school. I accepted the offer after all. I knew I liked to be in a Hackathon as a participant, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to be an organizer.

What Did I Do?

I was the Director of Technology. I was responsible for maintaining the websites, implementing the registration system and working with servers. It was the VP Technology and myself who were in charge of all the technologies for HackConcordia.

All the web technologies were built using the MEAN stack. I had to learn everything from scratch since I had no experience with the MEAN stack at all. I previously had experience with basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP from the web programming class I had and some personal projects.

Luckily, most of the technologies were inherited from the first iteration of ConUHacks. I had the access of the source code, so I was able to figure out how everything worked. Still, it was not an easy task to do.

Making changes on the websites was not that bad. The most challenging part was to add new features on the registration system. The system was a project written by MIT students for their hackathon. We got access to it and a student from HackGT gave us some guidance since they also used this system for their hackathon.

MIT Registration System

The MIT system allowed users to register, fill the application form, fill the acceptance form, create or join team. There was a God mode for the organizers to search, view every applicant’s profile, accept/decline/check in participants. There was also stats about the participants, demographic breakdown by school and more. The system was efficient.

QR Code System

We also had a hacker tracker system for the event which was built by Tyler and Nejteh from the first ConUHacks. Every user had a badge with a unique QR code as ID. This system allowed organizers to check in users using QR codes. It was able to track whether an user has eaten or not. We had stats breakdown of everything. Users were able to view each other profile by scanning the QR codes. The sponsors were able to view hacker’s profile, view/download/send resumes.

Server

During the event, we had a backup server in case anything happens. We had a cronjob which would back up the server on every 5 minutes during the registration. We had bash script which would pull the data from the backup server to the second server in case the first one goes down. After the registration, the server would back up on every hour. We also planned for the worst case by having papers printed and pens.

How was your experience as organizer?

It was a very fun experience as an organizer. I was constantly under pressure, but this helped me to become better and it was all worth it in the end. I would do it all over again at anytime! Having participated to 9 hackathons, I was able to see the hackathon from another perspective.

How was your experience as participant?

I really liked my experience as a participant. Hackathons have helped me to learn new technologies which are not even taught at school. The projects done at the hackathons helped me to build my resume. It also helped me to meet new people as well as getting internships.

Where is the source code for everything?

Unfortunately, all the projects are not open sourced yet for the reason that they are tailored specifically to our event. Our registration system is inherited from the system of MIT and HackGT. The MIT registration system is now open source!