Treehacks Application

I spent a while writing this application and included some personal stuff so I thought I might as well make it a blog post as if I was being asked these questions in an interview lol.

Why do you want to come to TreeHacks 2021?*

I’m interested in making something that can help the world during the coronavirus pandemic. I feel slightly like I’m not contributing enough to the world at the moment, and want to attend a hackathon where I can just dedicate my time to working on something important and ignore school for a bit.

I also am interested in finding more likeminded people to work with who I might not have met normally. I think a remote hackathon is a perfect situation to meet more people from other universities who might not normally fly to California to attend a hackathon here in person.

I also just want to have a good time making something meaningful. 🙂

Tell us about a project that you’ve worked on in the past, technical or nontechnical. Why did you choose to work on it?*

I was the project manager and lead engineer on a project called Bmaps, an interactive map and calendar of events at UCLA built with Angular, AWS, and MongoDB. This project allowed students to easily find events happening near them when they were already on campus, and plan for events happening later in the week. We scraped event data from Facebook, Eventbrite and numerous official UCLA department sites that all published events in their own format. These were processed by our machine learning model to categorize them into genres such as comedy, activism, and business, and also to determine if there was free food. We had about 200 monthly active users, and worked with New Student Orientation to help onboard freshmen to the app. I loved working on it because people told us that it helped bring newcomers to their club and helped people find things to do.

Tell us about something that is meaningful to you, and why?*

The quality of the human experience is meaningful to me. I care about each step of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, everything from the basic healthcare and education that people need to live and work, and also the social needs such as camaraderie with ones peers, the warmth of family, and the finding of love. Before we feared giving each other a respiratory virus by going outside, I cared about finding ways to connect people and promote a sense of community on campus. But the pandemic has rudely awakened me to the sheer frailty of life, and now I am searching for ways I can make a difference either in health care, bioengineering, or other intersections of bio and tech. Ultimately I find meaning in creating valuable things that could potentially help people who need it most.

Tell us a fun fact about you :)*

I have had a non traditional entry into computer science. First I studied for many years to be an architect. Then I got into game development after playing Cave Story, and still make games. But that prompted me to change careers to computer science and not go back.

I would describe myself as a…

Hobbyist Night Photographer, Aspiring Full Stack, Game Dev

(there wasn’t room to prepend all of these with “aspiring” because I truly haven’t achieved any of these in full yet)

Is there anything else that we should know about you? (optional!)

There’s no time for tears
When you live
In the real world
There’s no time for tears
When you live
In the real world

I was listening to No Time for Tears by The Enemy whilst writing this so I just decided to paste the hook.

Optionally, add any links (separated by commas) that you’d like us to check out! GitHub, LinkedIn, Devpost, Dribbble, etc.

https://github.com/Kimeiga

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hakanalpay/

https://kimeiga.github.io/

https://dev.to/kimeiga

https://devpost.com/Kimeiga

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