GlobalHack IV: J-Rod The Prodigy Wins 1st Place |

GlobalHack IV 1st Place Champions: J-Rod The Prodigy

June 7, 2015: This weekend saw GlobalHack IV take over the CIC in the Cortex Innovation District in St. Louis, MO

GlobalHack is a non profit cofounded by St. Louis startup entrepreneurs Gabe Lozano, Drew Winship and Travis Sheridan.

How GlobalHack Works

Teams compete over a weekend on a problem provided by the sponsor for that specific GlobalHack and in the past the winning team received a cash prize of $50,000. For GlobalHack IV, there were four winning teams (see pics below) and four cash prize amounts. Companies have been eager to put up the cash prize because they get first look at talented developers and oftentimes extend job offers to some of the competitors after the weekend concludes.

For GlobalHack IV, St. Louis startup LockerDome provided the prize money for the winning team. When asked why, CEO of LockerDome Gabe Lozano had this to say:

“There is little value in technical job interviews. GlobalHack provides LockerDome direct insight into the technical chops of hundreds of developers, while simultaneously fostering the St. Louis tech ecosystem. On a personal note, it’s fascinating to experience my two professional worlds — GlobalHack and LockerDome — collide for a weekend.”

GlobalHack Executive Director Matt Menietti

Past GlobalHack events have proven out Lozano’s thinking. In GlobalHack I, prize sponsor Jim Eberlin of TopOpps said the same thing.

This year, GlobalHack IV saw the addition of Matt Menietti as Executive Director to the organization and in 2016 GlobalHack plans to hold a one million dollar hackathon.

The Problem

Prize sponsor LockerDome lets users, “personalize the web” by delivering content to users based on their interest areas. For GlobalHack IV, the competitors were given this task:

For this weekend, teams will be tasked with concepting and building a new publisher tool. The goal of the tool should be to better engage and activate a publisher’s audience, on both lockerdome.com and through an embed widget on the publisher’s own site.

You can use the programming language of your choice, however, whatever you build must fully integrate with LockerDome’s APIs to qualify for prize money. With your final product, a publisher should be able to:

Create a new piece of content, one that is native to LockerDome;
View the content on live on LockerDome’s staging environment as a standalone content page; and
Embed the content on a third-party website.

Diversity Increases

GlobalHack cofounder Drew Winship was proud to point out the growing amount of diversity each year.

“Often at startup and/or coder events, mostly white males make up the attendees. We’ve seen a dramatic shift in participants each year with GlobalHack and this year fifty percent of our participants are a mix of minorities, women, high school kids and grandparents, which we think is fantastic and shows the changing face of what a ‘typical coder’ looks like. We’re really proud of that”