Harness the power of cloud services to create applications that connect, educate, and inspire.

A UW Bothell Tradition

UWB Hacks the Cloud is the third annual hackathon at UW Bothell. Check out last year’s event page for more information about the Web Development hackathon and check out what our attendees created! You can also read about the 2018 hackathon on the school news site.

Technical Tidbits

On the first day of the event (Friday April 17th), all of the following resources will be available to all attendees:

  • Project mentors to work with students
  • Introductory presentations for users who are new to the cloud
  • Lightning talks given by technologists from Microsoft, Amazon, and UWB

What if I don’t have any experience with cloud computing?

That is perfectly fine! The hackathon organizers have planned informative talks, assembled documentation pages, and created demo projects to help get you started. All talks will be facilitated over Zoom.

Check out the event website for information about the talks and workshops, including URLs for the Zoom sessions; look for provider information and example projects on the documentation page.

There will be industry mentors on our Discord server on Friday April 17th to help you when you get stuck.

View full rules

Prizes

$900 in prizes

Student Favorite Prize Pack

Awarded to the team behind the most popular project, as voted on by student attendees and volunteers.

Prize pack details will be announced in April!

Most Innovative Prize Pack (2)

Awarded to the team behind the most innovative project, as voted on by organizers and judges. The project chosen for this award has the most interesting and technically advanced use of cloud services out of all submissions.

Prize pack details will be announced in April!

Most Impactful Prize Pack (2)

Awarded to the team behind the most impactful project, as voted on by organizers and judges. The project chosen for this award has the best impact on social inclusion, health, and/or community improvement.

Prize pack details will be announced in April!

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Eligibility

Any college student aged 16 or older in the Puget Sound may register for the hackathon. All registered individuals must provide a valid .edu email address. Register here: https://bit.ly/HackTheCloud

Students may work in teams of up to 5 people; collaboration is strongly encouraged, but teams of 1 person is still allowed.

To be eligible for prizes, you must do the following:

Requirements

This hackathon focuses on projects built in the cloud! As such, we expect all submitted projects to utilize cloud technologies as a core implementation component.

In order to show us your amazing cloud computing project, there's some things we need from you in your submission. For each category listed below, there are a few options for fulfilling the requirement, listed in order of preference.

Category 1: README

All submitted projects should have an accompanying document which explains the following:

  • Goals of the project
  • Desired user experience
  • Implementation details and how cloud computing technologies were used to implement the project
  • Issues encountered, bugs fixed or still present, and future work to be done (every project has them!)

Category 2: User Experience Example

Show us how users interact with your project! It could be one or more of the following:

  1. Link to live endpoint (web app, custom API, etc)
  2. Video recording or screen recording of user interacting with the project
  3. Screenshots of the UI or other pertinent information

Category 3: Implementation Details

We want to see how the project was created. Any or all of the following could be provided:

  1. Credentials for a read-only access point for the cloud platform used for implementation, so that judges can explore your configuration (if desired).
  2. Screenshots of configuration steps in the cloud platform used.
  3. GitHub repository containing all written code (Lambda/Functions or other programming language-centric products).

The more information the judges have to evaluate your project, the more likely you are to receive recognition for your hard work!

Judges

Lizzy
Incoming SWE, Google

Erica Ferguson

Anish Prasad

Anish Prasad

Taylor Cumings

Marcela Gomez

Huy Nguyen

Anna Jennings

Chris Johnston
SWE, Microsoft Azure

Saam Amiri

Saam Amiri
Product Manager, Microsoft

Craig Nishina
SWE, Google

Judging Criteria

  • User Experience
    Does this project delight the end user? Is it funny, whimsical, or otherwise pleasing?
  • User Interface
    Is the user interface (where applicable) easy to use, intuitive, and pleasing to the eye?
  • Technical Complexity
    Is the project's code and implementation advanced?
  • Cloud Computing Usage
    Does the project make use of cloud-hosted services or VMs?
  • Innovation -- Prize Category
    Does this project combine technology, cloud computing providers, and code in a unique and functional fashion?
  • Impact -- Prize Category
    Does this project create impact for users, communities, and current events?

themes

  • Productivity
  • Lifehacks
  • Social Good