Triton Hacks is a high school hackathon organized by the UCSD student group CSforeach. One of the head organizers for this initiative is Jose Guaro, a graduate of the high school where I taught computer science. In fact, when I first started volunteering to help with Triton Hacks, I was still teaching and managing the school’s website and social media — this gave me the unique ability to advertise the hackathon and recruit our students!

By the time it was time for the hackathon, I had changed roles to work as a junior software engineer at Achieve Internet. I leveraged my position there to help sponsor the hackathon and to lead a workshop on REST APIs and Postman. It was a ton of fun, and completely virtual!

Being able to tutor/mentor and to present a technical workshop on APIs as a SWE in a high school hackathon where I’m seeing many of the students I formerly taught as a CS high school teacher is everything. I love that I’m still able to stay connected to CS education & empowering teenagers to learn about tech while improving my own technical skills in the industry!