Guest blog post by Kelsey Ruiz, PR and Media Relations Manager for AngelHack.
I found my way into the wonderful world of startups at 24 years old, newly graduated, and excited about making a positive impact on the world. When I first joined AngelHack I didn’t know what a hackathon was (a 36-hour long coding competition), or realize the crazy journey that I was about to embark on that would take me all over the world.
My first trip took me on a multi-country hackathon tour that started in England and ended in Switzerland. I learned the ins-and-outs of what a hackathon was, who participated, and how to nurture the projects created post-event. From there, I went on to Australia, Spain, Thailand, Mexico City, London, Zurich, Fiji, and several places within the United States including Las Vegas, New York, Houston, Austin, and Hawaii. During this time, I explored different tech scenes, met tons of new friends, and saw some developers, designers, and even some non-technical entrepreneurs build some pretty impressive apps.
In 2014 we encouraged our community to become ‘Whole Developers’; a concept AngelHack coined that encourages developers to learn business soft skills to adequately and accurately describe what they built. In 2015 we watched their ‘Thoughts Become Things’ by taking the winning hackathon ideas from around the world, turning them into startup realities. Last year, we proved that ‘Anyone. Can. Code’ regardless of your skill sets, and brought out 52% more hackers than any series in the past.
I truly fell in love with the hackathon culture and community.
While this life of travel, and exploration is more than I ever could have hoped for, there is nothing quite like coming back home to Sacramento. Like a majority of my colleagues, I am based in Sacramento with lots of fond memories of this place. Compared to some other cities it is small, but I have never seen so much heart, coffee, or farm fresh food in one place.
For these reasons, and many others I am beyond excited to bring AngelHack’s 10th Global Hackathon Competition: ‘Commit To Your Code’ to my home town!
A little behind this year’s theme: Commit To Your Code. Since 2011, AngelHack has been in the business of organizing, facilitating, and executing hackathons – however, something some may not know about us is that we are also in the business of accelerating hackathon ideas. Having perfected the sourcing process over the course of our ten global hackathon series’, we invite each winning hackathon project into our HACKcelerator; ensuring global representation during our 12-week program, Silicon Valley week, and Annual Global Demo Day.
You can get a glimpse of this from the documentary Seed, now streaming on Amazon Prime, which shows the entrepreneurial journey of three startups from Nairobi, Palestine, and Palo Alto – all of whom went through our program last year.
While I am excited to bring a hackathon to Sacramento, I am even more excited to have Sacramento representation in our HACKcelerator this year! Though small, the tech community in Sacramento is thriving, and stock piled full of, super talented entrepreneurs.
Join us June 24th-25th in Sacramento at The Urban Hive for your chance to gain entry into our HACKcelerator, and represent SacTown with the top 1% of developers, designers, and entrepreneurs, globally! Use: kels for a free ticket as a thank you for reading!
Our guest blogger, Kelsey Ruiz, is the PR and Media Relations Manager for AngelHack.
