by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Four Zero Four: Eliot vanHeuman and Femi Aluko
Team Four Zero Four is using Zenko to build a connector to Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized data storage. This team hit the ground running (and earlier in the day than most of the hackers here): Eliot vanHeuman and Femi Aluko.
Eliot has been a student at 42 for about five months, having learned about the school through his sister, who has a friend in the administration. He packed-up and moved from Temecula, California and into the dorms here at 42, where he’s been for just shy of half a year. Eliot had studied business for awhile at Palomar College, but left that behind to be a chef, working at Valee de Brume in Temecula. While he enjoyed being a chef, he had always been interested in computers and gaming, so the prospect of learning to code was exciting. He’s enjoying 42, and is hoping to keep the pace of moving up one level each month (there are ten levels). Cooking is a great stress reliever for him…and there’s none of that with dorm living, but he’s enjoying the challenge of school and hackathons. The Zenko Hackathon is his second hackathon; the first he did was Internet of Cows, aimed at developing technology to help farmers.
Femi has a lot going on. He started at 42 at the same time as Eliot, five months ago, but is still enrolled at San Jose State as well, in a Master’s program. He was just about done with that master’s degree in Industrial Engineering, but, inspired by the work he’s been doing here at 42, he expanded its scope to a double-master’s, adding Software Engineering just this semester. Femi, originally from Nigeria, has been in the U.S. for three and a half years. It was there that he received his bachelor’s degree, and after that and his year of Youth Service came to the U.S.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Zenkoders Giacomo Guiulfo, Tomas Bisi, Angelina Shula and Gibran Kalta
Zenkoders are building a graphical user interface to make data storage usage and statistics more consumable and, therefore, more actionable. Their application pulls the utilization data from UTAPI and manipulates it for presentation. Zenkoders members Tomas Bisi, Jibran Kalta, Anhelina Shulha and Giacomo Guiulfo are almost done with their hackathon UI project.
When Tomas isn’t coding, you might find him sailing or playing in a band. He came to the U.S. three years ago after having earned a B.A. in music production from EMBA School of Music in Argentina. His first foray into programming came in the form of a coding bootcamp that he attended in Miami, and now he’s got the bug. Working as a professional sailor—racing and coaching—he moved to San Francisco and learned about 42 while out on the water from Scality’s COO, Erwan Menard, and has been at the school for about 9 months now. He’s got lots of interests—in addition to sailing, he sings and plays drums and guitar—but he’s 100% immersed in and passionate about programming.
Jibran is originally from Pakistan. He moved here with his family in time to complete his last year of high school in Dallas, then go on to earn a Bachelor’s degree on University Studies from UT Arlington. After college, he taught Arabic for a few years, then founded an ecommerce start-up with some friends. That venture, selling camping gear, closed down recently, but from that experience, he learned that he wanted to learn to code so he could build things. He read about 42 in a Tech Crunch article, so came to check it out by joining the “Piscine”. Needless to say, he stayed, and has been at 42 for 6 months now. For Jibran, being able to build things makes it thoroughly addictive.
Anhelina started at 42 at the same time as Jibran and Giacomo. She came to the Silicon Valley from Miami, where she managed a restaurant while she was waiting to get her residency status established so that she could qualify for in-state tuition. She had already earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance after studying Engineering for three years at a university in Ukraine and finishing-up through distance-learning with a Moscow university after she moved to Miami. She learned about 42 through Google search: she was looking for a coding school she could attend while she waited to qualify for in-state tuition so that she could take some classes.
Giacomo learned about 42 from an IBM employee who spoke at a conference that he attended in Peru. That was it–he knew it was for him. He had attended university in Peru for one semester, but made his way here as soon as he was able to get his residency status worked out. Where is he headed? Giacomo knows that he wants to embark on a startup when he’s finished at 42. Exactly what that startup will be, he doesn’t know. He knows that things change quickly, so he’ll decide what his startup’s focus will be by assessing needs when he moves to that next stage.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 16, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Team Majic: Isaac Rhett, Justin Chow, Anurag Mittal and Chris Renfrew
This is not their first hackathon… Members of Team Majic have done it before; some on the same teams, some opposing. This time they’ve got a great business-focused application in the works together. Chris Renfrow, Isaac Rhett, Justin Chow and Anurag Mittal are building a payment platform for data storage that uses Ethereum’s smart contracts feature to process pay-as-you-grow data storage charges out of the user’s Ethereum wallet.
Chris came to 42 from community college in San Luis Obispo. Having spent two years at Cuesta College there studying computer science and breaking the bank, he jumped at the chance to join 42 and live here in the dorms about a year ago. He’s loving it, and in addition to learning to code at 42, he’s doing hackathons – this is his third in two months, unless you count Game Jam. Past hackathon projects for him include building a chatbot and a synchronized DB manager.
Isaac’s story is similar, but it starts farther away from 42’s Fremont, California campus. He was working in a coffee shop and studying at a Northern Virginia community college. Finding that pace hard to sustain, when he heard about 42, he took the nearly 3000-mile leap. He’s a hackathon veteran as well, having done Game Jam and Silicon Hacks.
Justin came down from Vancouver, thinking 42’s “Piscine” (what they named their first month’s vetting program) would be fun – kind of a vacation. He hadn’t expected to stay, but he’s enjoyed his three months at 42, and he’s staying. Before coming here, he had earned a BS in biology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and was self-studying Web development while working as an office clerk for 6 months after college. The Zenko Hackathon is his fourth, but his first with this team of coders.
Anurag is splitting his time between 42 and San Jose State University, where he’s working on his Master’s in Electrical Engineering. He came to the U.S. from India, where he earned his Bachelor’s in Technology in Electrical Engineering from UTU. After university, he worked at EMC for three and a half years, designing datacenters. He heard about 42 a couple of years back when it was only in France, so when the Fremont campus opened, he made it his mission to get there. He is most interested in systems and DevOps….and building his own operating system. Anurag says that he works with three OS’s, each of which has different advantages, so he wants to build one that has all the protocols and tools he needs.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 15, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Joseph Eftekhari, Hanu Prateek Kunduru and Salim Salaues: Jeff-Tech
Jeff-Tech is heads-down integrating Zenko with the hot new file system, IPFS. By building a Zenko stack into IPFS, they will enable yet another venue for Zenko’s multi-cloud power—leveraging the peer-to-peer distributed file system across connected computers. Because IPFS enables distribution of parts of files across huge numbers of “peers” it enhances data durability—even making it immutable, according to the team. The Jeff-Tech team doesn’t have any members named Jeff…long story, but as you might guess, it has something to do team member Joseph Eftekhari’s name, and his being absent when the team chose the name. In addition to Joseph, the team’s two other members, Salim Salaues and Hanu Prateek Kunduru are all students at 42, living in the dorms.
Joseph is from Fresno, California, where he attended Fresno State and earned a B.S. in Communicative Disorders and Deaf Studies. After graduating, he worked in his field for a year, helping children with autism. He got the tech bug, though, so decided he wanted to join a tech company. He saw 42 as the perfect way to get there, and has been here for 10 months now. This is his third hackathon, if you count game jams as hackathons (and we do J).
Salim is from Los Angeles. He studied graphic design, but he pivoted to tech as he moved into the working world. He’s been an engineer for a drone startup, in addition to having held multiple sysadmin and network admin jobs. He joined 42 ten months ago to learn to program, and couldn’t be happier. In addition to studying here, he volunteers in the Bocal doing, guess what, systems and network administration. This is his second hackathon; his first, just two weeks ago, was a weekend-long web app development hackathon. That one, he said, gave him the confidence to do this one.
Hanu is originally from India, but has been here in the U.S. for one year. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and MBA with dual focus in Marketing and Finance. He ran a startup in India, and came to 42 after a successful exit…this is his post-exit break. He thought it would be a great way to formalize his skill set. Initially, he thought his time here would have been shorter, but he loves it, so he’s been here about a year, as one of the first student at 42 US. He also volunteers at 42, doing pedagogy and devops. Definitely becoming a serial hacker, he’s done five hackathons since his first in February—and he won the first three. All that, and he wrote a book: ES6 for Humans.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 15, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Team NA: Vitaly, Art and Guoxin
Meet Team NA:
The three-man team that calls itself NA (no, definitely not N/A!) is building a Mongo DB Connector using Zenko. Each of the three team members, Guoxin Li, Artem Valmykov and Vitaly Tenigin have been students at 42 for more than a year. Guoxin and Vitaly live in the school’s dormitory; Art commutes, but occasionally crashes in the dorms. All three of them love a challenge. They’re learning a new language—Node.js—as they build with it but they say it’s fun – and they love the competitive spirit. They also say that the Scality engineers who came to help are awesome – super helpful and friendly (of course!).
Guoxin came to the U.S. from China ten years ago. He earned a Chemical Engineering degree from that little school up the road, U.C. Berkeley, and even passed the notoriously difficult EIT exam, but his passion is programming, so he left all of that behind for 42. He loves starting with nothing and building things from scratch. This is his third hackathon – he loves them because of the fast-paced creativity.
Art surprised me by telling me (in Russian-accented English) that he speaks Chinese. Originally from Russia, he earned a degree in psychology from Transbaikal University, and lived in China for ten years. He came to the U.S. a little more than a year ago and discovered 42 shortly after he arrived. He joined the school in June, 2016, as one of 42’s first students on the Fremont Campus. He lives in San Jose with his wife.
Vitaly has visited most parts of the Continental U.S. in the course of carrying out his job when he was a long-haul truck driver. He studied programming in Russia, but hadn’t yet finished his degree when moved to the U.S. nine years ago. He loves hackathons for the opportunity to learn something new – and that he is.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 15, 2017 | Meetups & Events
The three “C’s” of a great week are at play: collaboration, competition and, of course, coding.
The site of the Zenko hackathon is the campus of 42, an innovative—and free—computer programming university, in Fremont, California, and the sound of clicking keys is constant!
Participants are working to come up with creative modules, solutions and code using open source multi-cloud controller Zenko.
Watch this space over the next few days for descriptions of the teams and projects as they progress. Innovations could include blockchain integration, AI, IoT, cloud integration, or just hard core data storage technologies (dedupe, compression, encryption, …).
Eleven teams are hard at work, and will be judged at the end of the competition by a panel of four judges, on four criteria:
- Execution
- Performance
- Design quality
- Creativity (Finding a creative solution/use-case, implementation thought process, logic & algorithms, etc.)
Watch this space for team introductions and updates.
