#lyndseyscott

Hack Holyoke is a unique hackathon held at Mt. Holyoke College (a small,  women’s private college located in Western MA) which aims to achieve an (unprecedented) 1:1 ratio of women:men hackers. The purpose? Fix the leaky pipeline for women entering STEM professions by providing an open, friendly environment for learning about technology.

Earlier in the year, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced a progressive program to equalize Intel’s gender balance by hiring more women...supporting hackathons which focus on the experience of “Women in STEM” is just one way to bridge the gap!

In it’s second year, Hack Holyoke featured some strong speakers including Lyndsey Scott (mobile software engineer, actress and model) and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit)!

On day one, hackers showed up (often driving from local nearby schools such as Smith College, UMASS Amherst, Olin College and others) to register. Fortunately, Hack Holyoke managed to assemble an all-star cast of speakers including Lyndsey Scott (mobile software engineer, actress and model) and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.

Kamila Stępniowska, global COO of Geek Girls Carrots made the journey to provide mentorship on the topic of startups and careers. 

Alexis Ohanian gave a rousing keynote (with surprisingly few cat pictures) touching on his experience and perspective on the future of technology and careers.

Just me giving my usual keynote.

After the keynote and introductions of technical mentors, I invited hackers to attend my Intel Edison workshop.

100% full! I love to see so many students working with hardware and learning. There were definitely a lot of lessons in the use of Linux learned in a very short time period.

A 24 hour hackathon, developers spent Friday and Saturday building their projects on a variety of different hardware platforms. Time flew by...time for presentations!

Students gathered in the auditorium to see all the projects that were built...

Team WellShapedSlug built CubeTrix, a visual way to learn linea algerbra.

Team Pawz presented a web application for pet adoption.

Team Edison_Crack_The_Safe built a safe cracking game using Intel Edison.

Team EIR Guitar prototyped an air guitar using Intel Edison.

To wrap things up, Lyndsey Scott (CS graduate of Amherst College, Victoria’s Secret Model and actress) presented a talk discussing the hostility she faced as a women building software applications and participating in online developer communities.

Afterwards Lyndsey Scott spent a few minutes discussing her experience and perspective with Mt Holyoke students.

A fashion model who also a tech geek? 

That's the ULTIMATE DREAM for every programmer (and ex-programmer like me) out there!

Lyndsey Scott is a Victoria's Secret model who happened to be an app developer also. From the insights she got from her colleague friends (and herself) everyday routine, she got an idea for developing this app, iPort, a simple solution for models to manage their portfolios and billing.