This year’s Tijuana Innovadora included what’s become a staple extracurricular activity in the tech world — a hackathon.
Tijuana Innovadora, a biennial conference, features 200-plus speakers, exhibits, workshops and special events about technology, food and fashion.
Around 750 young people spent Wednesday typing away on laptop keyboards in the underground garage of a Tijuana mall. Most of the participants were computer engineering students from Baja California universities.
The hackers were all given instructions and parameters for developing some kind of software. The grand prize: $1,000 — and a great line on your resume.
Mayra Vasquez, 20, a student at the Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana, took up a challenge given by National Geographic and Qualcomm to work on an educational video game. Vasquez said she loves the creative doors that computer programming opens.
“If you have an idea and you know how to code, you can make it happen,” she said in Spanish.
Edgar Baeza, 20, joined the hackathon with fellow students from the Instituto Tecnológico de Mexicali. He said there weren’t a lot of people interested in coding at his university.
“Seeing a lot of people (here) who like to do the same stuff, it’s kind of reassuring,” he said.
Baeza is set to graduate soon, and he doesn’t plan to stay in Mexicali. He wants to work for Google.
“Like everyone in here, I think, is aiming at Google or Facebook or anything like that,” Baeza said.
