The Disrupt SF Hackathon kicks off this Saturday, September 9th at noon and you still have a chance to snag a ticket. Also, we’re excited to announce the hackmasters, judges and API workshops for the event.
Hackmasters
Jeffery Bennett and Reshma Khilnani are reprising their roles as Hackmasters and are currently practicing cutting off presentations that go longer than a minute.
Judges
For this year’s hackathon, we’re lucky enough to have a talented group of industry veterans, experienced in fields ranging from venture capital to astrophysics. If you’re participating, you owe it to yourself to see who you’ll be presenting to.
Ryan Broshar
Ryan Broshar is the managing director of the Techstars Retail Accelerator in partnership with Target and the founder and managing director of Matchstick Ventures, an early-stage tech VC based in Minneapolis.
John Melas- Kyriazi
John Melas-Kyriazi is a senior associate at Spark Capital. John is interested in the AI and machine learning space and as a firm, Spark Capital has invested in a number of companies focused on AI/ML, including Cruise Automation and Sift Science.
Before joining Spark, John left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to help run StartX, a startup accelerator program affiliated with Stanford University. John received a B.S. in Engineering Physics and an M.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from Stanford.
Jeff Queisser
Jeff Queisser is a co-founder and SVP Engineering at Box, where he is responsible for the core technology, architecture and infrastructure of Box. He sold his first software at age 10 and later formed Q-Squared, a successful IT consulting company based in Seattle.
Chris Rill
Co-founder and CTO at Canary, Chris Rill has been tinkering with computers since he was seven.
At Canary, Chris is developing the simplest way for people to connect with their homes and families. He oversees technical strategy and partnerships at the company, while working with the team to drive innovation and future product development.
Chris has experience transitioning from software engineer to CTO and understands why that’s important for how one can establish themselves as a leader in such a fast-paced, evolving landscape as tech.
Passionate about robotics, Chris is a former participant and ardent supporter of the FIRST Robotics program, an international organization promoting science and technology to students.
Michal Segalov
Michal Segalov joined Google in 2007 and is a Software Engineering Manager. In her current role Michal works on Play apps discovery, building great experiences for Play’s Billion+ users.
Michal co-initiated Mind The Gap, a program aimed at encouraging high school girls to select computer science and math as their high-school major. The program expanded globally and is now in its 8th year, with more than 10,000 participants to date. Michal holds a B.A. in computer science from the Technion, and a M.Sc in computer science from Tel Aviv University.
Bonnie Schulkin
Bonnie graduated from Williams College with degrees in Computer Science and Astrophysics, and went on to a variety of jobs including: teaching physics at an all-girls high school, managing education programs at a planetarium, writing for a science radio show, and 14 years in the software industry.
She is currently combining her love of teaching with her love of coding as an instructor at Hackbright Academy. Bonnie loves music of all kinds, and in her spare time she is learning the upright bass.
Emily Zhao
Tiny house enthusiast, certified yoga instructor, and Android engineer, Emily Zhao currently performs one of these roles five days a week at Airbnb.
The Chicago native graduated in EECS from MIT, worked briefly at the Media Lab, Google and Facebook before working at Dropbox for a long time until it wasn’t really a startup anymore. She’s previously held roles in product and business operations.
API Workshops
In addition to the competition, get your learn on with API workshops taught by their respective companies.
Braintree – 2:00pm
This workshop will cover the fundamentals of collecting payments through Braintree. It will go over how to get a sandbox, obtain API credentials, and setup the client SDK and server SDK.
CrunchBase – 2:00pm
CrunchBase is the world’s most widely used database of companies, investors, and people. At the API workshop, we’ll show you how to integrate the CrunchBase API into your application.
Panasonic – 3:00pm
Introduction to Panasonic Avionics, overview of APIs and test environment.
Cisco – 3:00pm
Learn about Cisco Spark and what’s possible with Spark APIs. These RESTful APIs allow you to send a message, create rooms, manage people, and more!
Twilio – 3:30pm
An introduction to adding phone calling, messaging and video into your hacks using the programming language you already know plus the Twilio API.