Baruch College Undergraduates Win Best First-Time Hack at Local Hackathon

August 9, 2022

Three Zicklin students who met in the Baruch Association for Information Systems (AIS) club have been named the winners of “Best First-Time Hack” at this year’s HackNYU, a 48-hour event in which students from around the world come together virtually to create new technology products.

Cirill Florenz Dalangin (‘23), Ying Mai (’23), and Hao Kai (Kevin) Liao (’23) won for their creation “GitHub Gato,” which uses gamification to teach coding commands on GitHub, a code hosting platform. Liao managed the overall project and shared coding responsibilities with Florenz Dalangin, while Mai oversaw graphic design (she came up with the team’s cute purple “Octocat” mascot).

Liao and Florenz Dalangin are majoring in computer information systems, while Mai is a marketing major.

As first-time hackers, Liao and Florenz Dalangin say that their biggest challenge was “the difficulty of creating a solid idea under a time crunch,” Liao says.

“We had to discard a lot of ideas and focus on creating a functional project that we could demo,” Florenz Dalangin adds.

The team members urge other Zicklin students who might be considering joining a hackathon to “just get into it” and not worry about results.

“You’ve got nothing to lose by joining, and it’s an amazing opportunity to see what all the other participants are able to think up and execute in two days,” Liao says. “It can give you a good slice of humble pie, but can also be a fantastic source of inspiration for you as a developing professional.”

Liao plans to continue his own professional development this summer as a software engineering intern for American Express, while Florenz Dalangin wants to take a deep dive into more hackathons, especially non-virtual ones.

“As a department, we are incredibly proud of our students and their accomplishments,” says Professor Marios Koufaris, chair of the Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics. “This team’s win at HackNYU 2022 is another example of the amazing talent among our students and the strength of the computer information systems major, which prepares them for a wide range of careers in tech.”

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