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about 4 years ago

One week to go!

Hello Steel City Hacks participants,

With under a week to go until Steel City Hacks begins, we have a bunch of announcements to make about workshop opportunities, professional judges, event logistics, and more. Please read this email carefully; we know it's long, but we have a lot of important information to share.

IMPORTANT:

Registration for workshops is now open at this Google form! Please note that registration is not binding or necessary, but greatly helps organizers and workshop leaders out when planning and teaching.

There is a Discord server available for our event, invite link here. This server requires a Discord account (free and easy to set up) and will be available as an optional resource for all attendees. However, you must join the Discord if you:

  • Are looking for a team member. A #looking-for-team channel is available in the server which will allow you to form your own teams prior to the event. If you do not join the Discord server, you will likely end up going solo for our hackathon. More information about setting up teams through Devpost will also be available on our server.
  • Would like tech support for our echo3D workshop (more below)
  • Would like chat-based or audio support for our ideathon or workshops
  • Are a volunteer assistant for the hackathon.

Once in the server, please use Discord's nickname feature to change your server name to the name you registered for the hackathon with.

EVENT INFORMATION:

We will be hosting the majority of online events through Zoom, with additional support available through Discord. Discord information is available just above, and Zoom information will be sent out via an Update email just like this one shortly before the event. As a reminder, these updates are also available on our Devpost here.

The following changes have been made to our workshops and events:

  • Due to logistical and scheduling conflicts, one of our sponsors, MRI Software, was unable to send a panelist for our hackathon, and as such, that event has been removed.
  • Also due to logistical errors, our Game Development with Kaboom workshop has been removed from our roster. That time slot is now free time!
  • It's not all bad news! Thanks to echo3D, one of our sponsors, we have added a prerecorded workshop opportunity in the 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM slot on Sunday, 5/1. This workshop will go over setting up VR and AR web apps using echo3D's platform. Questions and tech support will be available in a dedicated channel in our Discord server.

We are pleased to announce our first professional judge joining us on the judging team!  We are very excited to welcome Martin Shepherd and his 20 years of computer science experience to our judging team. Martin is the CEO of Arch Access Control, a Pittsburgh-based cybersecurity company that specializes in risk mitigation consulting solutions. We hope to bring more professional experts in computer science to our team for the event, and we're excited about possibilities currently in the works for that. Stay tuned!

MISCELLANEOUS:

There's still time to spread the word about Steel City Hacks! Feel free to email contact@steelcitycodes.org with requests for promotional material, or simply tell your friends about our hackathon!

As a reminder, our Hackathon rules explicitly state that working on projects is not allowed for this event, and participants should only begin writing code and pitches at 10:00 AM on 4/30 at the earliest. Everyone is encouraged to brainstorm before the event, though!

If you have any questions about the hackathon, please post on the discussion forum or email us at contact@steelcitycodes.org. We're so excited to see you all at the event soon, and to marvel at what you are going to create with us.