Students win national programming competition

While the men’s water polo team played at the NCAA Championships in California this weekend, four Princeton computer science majors took first place in an entirely different event just an hour away at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

Daniel Chyan ’14, Angela Dai ’13, Tiantian Zha ’13 and Amy Zhou ’13 won the $500 top prize at the national Facebook Hackathon finals on Friday, a coding competition that gives college teams from 14 universities just 24 hours to execute an idea. Their winning program, “Color Me Bold,” allows a user to upload a photo, highlight the outfit worn and receive a list of algorithmically generated colors to match and accessorize the outfit.

“Everybody’s demos were really brilliant, so we’re in awe of what other people did and we’re proud of what we did,” Dai said in an interview with TechCrunch.com.

The only team to be composed mostly of women, the four Princeton students qualified for the all-expenses paid trip to the national hackathon, often referred to as “Camp Hackathon,” by winning a Princeton hackathon earlier this month. They beat 12 other entries with their “Food@Princeton” program, which distills the Dining Services website into visually appealing, informative menus for all of the dining halls and includes the ability to “like” or “dislike” certain menu items.

The Princeton and national hackathons operated on similar premises: after a dinner of Chinese food, students were given 24 hours to come up with an idea and design a program. At the event, students learned how to juggle and play with Facebook’s famous “ripsticks” — two-wheeled skateboards — and Facebook engineers offered assistance as needed. At the Princeton event, prizes were given out every hour, and the national event offered an Xbox 360 for diversion and gave participants Facebook Snuggies and messenger bags. Teams then presented their programs, which were judged based on originality, difficulty and quality of execution and overall polish.

“Facebook was absolutely wonderful,” Zha said. “You can tell that hacking is a part of their culture — they have a warehouse offsite that’s devoted to these kinds of events.”

Camp Hackathon was designed to inculcate students with this company culture that has programmers working throughout the night on each other’s ideas for presentation in the morning, according to Zha.

Though unified by a passion for computer programming, Chyan, Dai, Zha and Zhou were not all acquainted before the Princeton hackathon and began working together through the coincidence of sitting at the same table. Zha and Zhou said they learned about the hackathon from Facebook recruiters at a career fair, while Chyan said he attended because he saw the advertisement on Facebook and wanted to meet more computer science concentrators.

Dai happened upon the hackathon just by being in the computer science building when it began. About the 24-hour experience and her first college all-nighter, she said, “I definitely fell in love with the fast-paced, do-what-you-have-to-do to make your idea work.”

They said that they see both of their programs, “Food@Princeton” and “Color Me Bold,” as ideas that could potentially be expanded. “Food@Princeton” could be developed as a TigerApp and include the eating clubs as well as dining halls, they said. As Chyan added in an interview on TechCrunch.com, he sees potential for “Colour Me Bold” to become a startup company.

To those intimidated by the prospect of learning scripting language PHP at 5 a.m. or only sleeping 12 hours over four days, Chyan offered three pieces of advice.

“Stay with your hack to the end. Stay in constant communication with your teammates. Never give up,” he said.