ACM at USI Hackathon 2024

A Day of Problem Solving through Computer Science and Code

Computer Science students joined forces with local industry professionals to make this year’s Hackathon a success. Attendees were divided into two teams to come up with solutions on the following projects:

Team P&I

Representing P&I Supply were Mr. Abram Devonshire, Business Technology Director and USI IT Alliance member, and Mr. Doug Russell, Business Systems Analyst. P&I Supply is a supplier of tools, safety, welding, and rigging to the largest contractors for large-scale energy, petrochemical, and oil & gas projects throughout the United States. Devonshire and Russell tasked students with a GPT that scans existing documentation to provide users with simple instructions or explanations for various tasks or topics.

Team Atlas

Leading Team Atlas was Mr. Travis Harpenau, Lead Developer with Atlas World Group, a family of companies that delivers transportation and related services. He challenged his student team with the following project:

1. Uninterrupted web app deployment. Atlas provides a sample web project and students are asked to enhance the project to enable deployment slot rotation once deployment in the slot is complete. App deploys to Slot B and then is switched to the production slot. This prevents downtime during deployment and allows immediate roll back if testing should fail.
2. Migrate Estimating Validation Core to its own NuGet package. Now that the validation core in Estimating has been well used, it needs to migrate to its own NuGet package. Students are asked to extract and migrate code to a new project that can produce a NuGet package and units tests demonstrating it working as expected.

The industry members nominated their best team performer as “winners” of the Hackathon. Junior Ashley Chambers from Team P&I and senior Peyton Hopkins from Team Atlas, both Computer Science majors, were selected.

Overall, more than 30 people attended this year's event, held Sunday, April 7, on the USI campus. Shout out to Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) officers for organizing the event: Alyson Collins, Cathy Sandoval, Kairvi Bhatt, and Dr. Srishti Srivastava, Associate Professor of Computer Science.

Computer Science and CIS faculty members were on hand throughout the day providing assistance with the projects and facilitating student interactions and networking. Thank you to Dr. Xue Han, Mr. Josh McWilliams, Mr. Christian Will Pinto, and Dr. Gongjun Yan. 

The prizes and snacks were sponsored by the USI Romain College of Business.