Facebook Global Hackathon Finals - Day 1

This morning I left for a hackathon at Facebook Headquarters. I had to wake up at 3:30 since the flight was at 7:50 and I had to pick up Sam and Jack on my way.

We qualified for the Facebook hackathon at MHacks with our Datanium project. Unfortunately, Robby was unable to make it to the finals since he had too many assignments and projects due this week. So we ended up replacing him with Jack Garner who I had on my HackCU team and on my ICPC team.

Facebook is paying for the entirety our trip, plane tickets, hotel rooms, transportation to and from the hotel, transportation from the hotel to and from Facebook HQ, food, the whole shebang!

Security was literally empty. I got through without a problem, but Jack got stopped because of a tablet in his bag that he forgot about, and Sam got stopped because of all the snacks in his bag.

“Today I learned that a big bag of nuts next to a box of electronics looks like a bomb.”

– Sam Sartor

We had plenty of time for breakfast on the other side of security, and then we headed over to our gate.

The flight was uneventful, and it was only about 10:00 by the time we got our Uber to the hotel. We had a bit of trouble finding the Uber driver since we were on the wrong level of the airport, but he was nice and waited for us and helped us find him.

At the hotel, we got checked in. Each of us got a room all to ourselves!

After we settled in, we went to go eat some lunch at a nearby Pho restaurant. As we were walking, we saw some mid-sized houses and decided to play a “guess the price” game. All of us were under the actual price which was $800,000!

After lunch, we went back to the room and Sam and I worked on our High Performance Computing project milestone report until dinner which was provided at the hotel by Facebook. At the dinner, we met a team from Canada.

After we finished dinner, Sam and I went back up to my room and finished up the report. Now I’m getting ready for bed… We have to leave the hotel at 8:45 tomorrow.