LA Hacks is an annual student-led

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

hosted at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...

(UCLA)'s

Pauley Pavilion Edwin W. Pauley Pavilion, commonly known as Pauley Pavilion, is an indoor arena located in the Westwood Village district of Los Angeles, California, on the campus of UCLA. It is home to the UCLA Bruins men's and women's basketball teams. The men ...

. According to UCLA in 2020, it is Southern California's largest annual hackathon.

History

LA Hacks was co-founded by UCLA students Hadar Dor and Alvin Hsia. The inaugural event was held on April 27–28, 2013 at CrossCampus in

Santa Monica Santa Monica (; Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 U.S. Census population was 93,076. Santa Monica is a popular resort town, owing to ...

. There were about 250 people in attendance and over 150 students from universities across Southern California competed in the 24 hours event. LA Hacks Wikipedia

In April 2014, there were 4,000 people registered and about 1,300 to 1,500 participants. This was held at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...

for 36 hours. Special guests came to speak at LA Hacks, including

Evan Spiegel Evan Thomas Spiegel (born June 4, 1990) is an American businessman, co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. Spiegel was the youngest billionaire in the world in 2015. Early life and education Spiegel was born in Los Angeles, California, to lawyers J ...

, founder and CEO of

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before th ...

Alexis Ohanian Alexis Kerry Ohanian ( hy, Ալեքսիս Քերի Օհանյան; born April 24, 1983) is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and executive chairman of the social media site Reddit along with St ...

, co-founder of

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...

, Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, and

Adam Singolda Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as ...

, CEO of

Taboola Taboola is a public advertising company headquartered in New York City. The CEO of Taboola is Adam Singolda, who founded the company in 2007. It provides advertisements such as "Around the Web" and "Recommended For You" boxes at the bottom of man ...

. Their hacks were judged by top tech industry professionals (i.e.

Sam Altman Samuel H. Altman ( ; born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator. Early life and education Altman grew up in St. Louis, Missouri; his mo ...

– President of

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

, Chris De Wolfe – CEO of SGN and Founder of Myspace). In April 2016, the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics signed on as a sponsor. The committee presented two challenges in which students were asked to create apps that would promote fitness and enhance the fan experience at live sporting events. LA Hacks 2020 was hosted virtually due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

References

University of California, Los Angeles Software developer communities Hackathons {{Compu-prog-stub