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.
