Student coding creativity on display at ConUHacks' ninth hackathon

ConUHacks held its ninth edition of its annual hackathon on February 1st and 2nd. The 24-hour coding competition is put together every year by HackConcordia, Concordia University's hackathon society and student-run group and it is open to anyone older than 18.  Teams of participants have 24 hours from 11 am Saturday to 11 am Sunday to submit their project. There are also general challenges offered by ConUHacks and sponsor challenges that make teams create a more targeted project

But ConUHacks is not just a hackathon.

“We have also the career fair,” says Sabine Hleiss co-president of HackConcordia. “We give the participants the chance to network with the sponsors we have. We also have workshops.”

Some workshops at the event were given by Major League Hacking (MLH) and trading firm DRW. 

“We also have some activities such as a spicy noodle challenge,” says Hleiss.

A team of CEGEP students called We’d Rather Not Say worked on an AI tool for Far West duels. 

“We're trying to make an AI that would detect and give you instructions when to turn around,” says Samuel Bergeron. 

We Rather Not Say came to the hackathon to improve their skills.

“We want to start being more competitive in the informatics field,” says Beregon. “So, we thought it would be a great opportunity for us to come here.” 

The team did not win any prizes. However, they did say they were proud of their accomplishments on their project submission page.

Cache Me If You Can, a team of Concordia and Polytechnique undergraduates, were ready for the challenges. Lizzie Gudino says their idea is to create software to help airport businesses with optimization. 

“So around flights, they'll know the rush time, and it also helps a lot for waste management, and in general, because it's better to know the different trends and how they can optimize the amount of people coming for sales,” says Gudino.

Although the team did not win a prize for their main project, they did win “Best Social Media Post” in a mini competition to create a LinkedIn post sharing their hackathon experience, project, and key takeaways. 
Code Alchemist was the final team that spoke to CJLO. They worked on an AI tool that was designed to look at bank accounts and spending data to provide users with tailored financial advice. 

“We are really close friends and we wanted to build a project together,” said Sadath Roshan. “We thought, what better platform than just attending a hackathon together.”

Adding to why they signed up, Pankaj Deep Sahota says, “Plus on top of it, you get to learn a lot of new technologies within 24 hours."

Their project won a mini competition for the best use of Lovable, an AI tool that generates code from input ideas. It got the team interview opportunities with Lovable for Customer Success roles. 

This year the event saw over 800 participants. The number of projects submitted and completed was 179.