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.
