Students travel “Back to the Future” for RowdyHacks X competition

This means that Zuniga, Murray and the rest of the team have had to organize two major events in one year. While this has increased their workload exponentially, Zuniga believes the additional organizing experience leaves the future of RowdyHacks in good hands.

"Usually, we get the full calendar year to plan it all out," Zuniga said, "and now we've had to condense it into five or six months, so it's definitely been hectic. Fortunately, a lot of people have stayed from last year, and many of them are sophomores and juniors who plan on continuing with this."

While the timing of RowdyHacks X has changed, the basic structure of the hackathon remains the same. Participating students, or "hackers," can enter their projects into either a beginner or a general track based on their experience level. From there, they can choose to hone their skills by tackling a specific challenge, such as cybersecurity, hardware and various sponsor challenges.

Making the hackathon approachable for newcomers and challenging for returning hackers, is a balance RowdyHacks has always tried to achieve. To advance this goal, the event features a variety of workshops to help students learn the basics, master specific skills or just have fun.

"We are a beginner-friendly hackathon, and we're still staying with that theme," Zuniga said, "but we're also reaching out to the more experienced audience as well with some of our workshops, so I think hackers will be pleased to get some of that knowledge as well."

The event's workshops will cover a variety of topics, from an introduction to Github - a web platform that allows developers to create, store and share code - to deeper learning experiences around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

"Everything's becoming focused on artificial intelligence, so we wanted to reflect that in our workshops," Zuniga said. "Hackers are going to need those skills in the workforce or to do research in the future."

The hosts for these workshops will be as diverse as the topics, with programming provided by groups like Major League Hacking and The International Collegiate Programming Contest, tech firms like AI developer Groq, and even UTSA alumni.

"We're covering a little bit of everything for sure," Zuniga said, "so I think it's diverse enough that all our hackers will be more than satisfied."

With such a wealth of knowledge available at RowdyHacks X, Murray says he understands why newcomers might be intimidated. How can somebody who has never written a line of code expect to compete against students from all over the country with years of experience? Between the beginner's track, the introductory workshops and the fun social aspects, Murray believes RowdyHacks is the perfect place to dip your toes into the hacking water.

"We fully understand why it seems daunting," he said, "but I would really encourage people to just show up and give it a shot, because anyone can learn. And that is very much a goal of RowdyHacks: to make sure anyone and everyone can show up, learn something new and have a good time."

While RowdyHacks X aims to celebrate the past decade of hackathons at UTSA, Murray finds himself looking ahead to the next 10 years. Since its inception, the event has grown over 10-fold, and Murray says he has high hopes for continued expansion in the future.

"With the new college opening up, UTSA's technology scene is only going to grow," he said, "and I want to see RowdyHacks grow with it and help foster that growth. I would love to see RowdyHacks in 10 years' time maybe even be a 1,000-person hackathon; that would be really incredible to see."

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