by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Team Video: Robert Passafaro, Wiley Debs and Andie Pha
Team Video is made up of three self-proclaimed mediaphiles. Wiley Debs, Andie Pha and Robert Passafaro decided to build an automated video transcoder with Zenko Backbeat and the HandBreak open source video transcoder. At upload, the Video team’s application will transcode video into all of the required formats for consumption from multiple devices.
Wiley learned about 42 through a cyberpunk blog, NODE. He’d been to college and done general coursework, but was out in the workforce, and not finding his ideal work. After a couple of less than satisfying sales and customer service jobs, he decided that he wanted to do something else, and programming seemed interesting. He heard about 42, and traveled to Northern California from the Tampa Bay area to give it a try. Soon to finish his first year, he’s really enjoying the program and looking forward to finding an internship soon.
Andie must be tired of rocket scientist jokes, but if the shoe fits… He has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Cal Poly Pomona, and worked for an aerospace manufacturing company in Los Angeles before he came to 42. He learned about 42 through Facebook. He wasn’t specifically drawn to programming, but saw it as a chance to try something new. His teammate Robert says that Andie that he tells them all the time, “I don’t computer, I can code, though.”
Robert is from Northern New Jersey, where he went to community college and earned a certificate degree, but credits the work he did growing a small company’s web commerce business with fueling his interest in programming; he used a little bit of C++ in his website work. After three years, that website work paid off, in a big way. He grew their web commerce business 16-fold.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Zensational: Justin Pfefferle, Kyle Davis and William Lee
Zensational is building an auto-tag generator for graphics files using Zenko and TensorFlow. When a user uploads a graphic to storage, their application goes to work, using AI to determine what the image is and apply meaningful tags. The team’s members are Justin Pfefferle, Kyle Davis and William Lee.
Justin has been at 42 for just under a year. He lives in the dorms and is working through the levels as he looks forward to his wife and daughter making the move from Boise to the Bay Area to join him soon in an off-campus home. Justin studied mathematics at Boise State, thinking he would teach high-level Math someday. When he decided to get into tech instead, he took several contract positions, including doing technical support for cellular providers and even training Apple employees, and supplemented those by driving for Uber. His interest in technology made his decision to join 42 an easy one – he found it and knew it was for him.
Kyle earned a Bachelor’s degree in Genetics from U.C. Davis. Working as a Jr. Specialist in a lab at a research hospital in Sacramento, he found that what he enjoyed most about his job was writing macros to streamline tasks and operations in spreadsheets, so started to think that programming was more his style than lab-based research. He learned about 42 from his father, who had read about it in Forbes article that was published the Spring before he enrolled. He didn’t waste any time – he was already looking-into taking programming courses at community college, and this seemed like a great alternative. He loves the collaborative environment: teaching others and learning from them as well, as everyone works at their own pace. And, It’s in familiar territory. Kyle’s from Newark, the next town over from 42’s Fremont campus, and his family lives there still.
William was at U.C. Davis at the same time Kyle was there, but they never crossed paths there. William was studying Biochemisty, and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in that field. After that, he moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona to work on developing a game with a friend. His friend was the coder; he was the writer. His friend heard about 42, and was taking their online puzzle test, which sparked William’s competitive spirit, so he did it too. They both enjoyed the puzzle and did well, but couldn’t believe that the school was real. Nevertheless, they decided to give it a try. He describes that first month, Piscine, as a great experience – hectic, but fun.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Four Zero Four: Eliot vanHeuman and Femi Aluko
Team Four Zero Four is using Zenko to build a connector to Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized data storage. This team hit the ground running (and earlier in the day than most of the hackers here): Eliot vanHeuman and Femi Aluko.
Eliot has been a student at 42 for about five months, having learned about the school through his sister, who has a friend in the administration. He packed-up and moved from Temecula, California and into the dorms here at 42, where he’s been for just shy of half a year. Eliot had studied business for awhile at Palomar College, but left that behind to be a chef, working at Valee de Brume in Temecula. While he enjoyed being a chef, he had always been interested in computers and gaming, so the prospect of learning to code was exciting. He’s enjoying 42, and is hoping to keep the pace of moving up one level each month (there are ten levels). Cooking is a great stress reliever for him…and there’s none of that with dorm living, but he’s enjoying the challenge of school and hackathons. The Zenko Hackathon is his second hackathon; the first he did was Internet of Cows, aimed at developing technology to help farmers.
Femi has a lot going on. He started at 42 at the same time as Eliot, five months ago, but is still enrolled at San Jose State as well, in a Master’s program. He was just about done with that master’s degree in Industrial Engineering, but, inspired by the work he’s been doing here at 42, he expanded its scope to a double-master’s, adding Software Engineering just this semester. Femi, originally from Nigeria, has been in the U.S. for three and a half years. It was there that he received his bachelor’s degree, and after that and his year of Youth Service came to the U.S.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 17, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Zenkoders Giacomo Guiulfo, Tomas Bisi, Angelina Shula and Gibran Kalta
Zenkoders are building a graphical user interface to make data storage usage and statistics more consumable and, therefore, more actionable. Their application pulls the utilization data from UTAPI and manipulates it for presentation. Zenkoders members Tomas Bisi, Jibran Kalta, Anhelina Shulha and Giacomo Guiulfo are almost done with their hackathon UI project.
When Tomas isn’t coding, you might find him sailing or playing in a band. He came to the U.S. three years ago after having earned a B.A. in music production from EMBA School of Music in Argentina. His first foray into programming came in the form of a coding bootcamp that he attended in Miami, and now he’s got the bug. Working as a professional sailor—racing and coaching—he moved to San Francisco and learned about 42 while out on the water from Scality’s COO, Erwan Menard, and has been at the school for about 9 months now. He’s got lots of interests—in addition to sailing, he sings and plays drums and guitar—but he’s 100% immersed in and passionate about programming.
Jibran is originally from Pakistan. He moved here with his family in time to complete his last year of high school in Dallas, then go on to earn a Bachelor’s degree on University Studies from UT Arlington. After college, he taught Arabic for a few years, then founded an ecommerce start-up with some friends. That venture, selling camping gear, closed down recently, but from that experience, he learned that he wanted to learn to code so he could build things. He read about 42 in a Tech Crunch article, so came to check it out by joining the “Piscine”. Needless to say, he stayed, and has been at 42 for 6 months now. For Jibran, being able to build things makes it thoroughly addictive.
Anhelina started at 42 at the same time as Jibran and Giacomo. She came to the Silicon Valley from Miami, where she managed a restaurant while she was waiting to get her residency status established so that she could qualify for in-state tuition. She had already earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance after studying Engineering for three years at a university in Ukraine and finishing-up through distance-learning with a Moscow university after she moved to Miami. She learned about 42 through Google search: she was looking for a coding school she could attend while she waited to qualify for in-state tuition so that she could take some classes.
Giacomo learned about 42 from an IBM employee who spoke at a conference that he attended in Peru. That was it–he knew it was for him. He had attended university in Peru for one semester, but made his way here as soon as he was able to get his residency status worked out. Where is he headed? Giacomo knows that he wants to embark on a startup when he’s finished at 42. Exactly what that startup will be, he doesn’t know. He knows that things change quickly, so he’ll decide what his startup’s focus will be by assessing needs when he moves to that next stage.
by Tyna Callahan | Aug 16, 2017 | Meetups & Events
Team Majic: Isaac Rhett, Justin Chow, Anurag Mittal and Chris Renfrew
This is not their first hackathon… Members of Team Majic have done it before; some on the same teams, some opposing. This time they’ve got a great business-focused application in the works together. Chris Renfrow, Isaac Rhett, Justin Chow and Anurag Mittal are building a payment platform for data storage that uses Ethereum’s smart contracts feature to process pay-as-you-grow data storage charges out of the user’s Ethereum wallet.
Chris came to 42 from community college in San Luis Obispo. Having spent two years at Cuesta College there studying computer science and breaking the bank, he jumped at the chance to join 42 and live here in the dorms about a year ago. He’s loving it, and in addition to learning to code at 42, he’s doing hackathons – this is his third in two months, unless you count Game Jam. Past hackathon projects for him include building a chatbot and a synchronized DB manager.
Isaac’s story is similar, but it starts farther away from 42’s Fremont, California campus. He was working in a coffee shop and studying at a Northern Virginia community college. Finding that pace hard to sustain, when he heard about 42, he took the nearly 3000-mile leap. He’s a hackathon veteran as well, having done Game Jam and Silicon Hacks.
Justin came down from Vancouver, thinking 42’s “Piscine” (what they named their first month’s vetting program) would be fun – kind of a vacation. He hadn’t expected to stay, but he’s enjoyed his three months at 42, and he’s staying. Before coming here, he had earned a BS in biology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and was self-studying Web development while working as an office clerk for 6 months after college. The Zenko Hackathon is his fourth, but his first with this team of coders.
Anurag is splitting his time between 42 and San Jose State University, where he’s working on his Master’s in Electrical Engineering. He came to the U.S. from India, where he earned his Bachelor’s in Technology in Electrical Engineering from UTU. After university, he worked at EMC for three and a half years, designing datacenters. He heard about 42 a couple of years back when it was only in France, so when the Fremont campus opened, he made it his mission to get there. He is most interested in systems and DevOps….and building his own operating system. Anurag says that he works with three OS’s, each of which has different advantages, so he wants to build one that has all the protocols and tools he needs.
