Hack the North is Canada’s largest international hackathon and is happening September 19th for 36 glorious hours. The experience will happen in Waterloo and has some major players backing the weekend of problem solving and coding, such as Apple, Shopify, Pebble, Microsoft, Cisco, Indigogo, Bloomberg and Y Combinator.
The Hack the North event is based out of the University of Waterloo — which is dubbed as “Silicon Valley’s feeder school” — and will see teams come together to build cool stuff together. The fine print states that the Hack the North hackathon is open to all, even those outside the university, and the projects that will be worked on, but not limited to, “usually take the form of web, mobile or hardware applications.”
The judges rate the hacks based on creativity, technical difficulty, design, and usefulness, with the top 10 being heading to the final round to pitch their idea. The judges include:
– Sam Altman: President, Y Combinator
– Chamath Palihapitiya: Founder, S23P
– Eric Migicovsky: Founder, Pebble
– Mike Kirkup: Director, Velocity
– Ariel Garten: CEO, InteraXon
– Andy Yang: COO, 500px
– Kathrina Manalac: Partner, Y Combinator
– Jeff Kaditz: CTO, Affirm
– Vitalik Buterin: Co-founder, Ethereum
– Eric Diep:Co-founder, A Thinking Ape
– Sue Khim: Founder & CEO, Brilliant
– Andrew Miklas: CTO, Pagerduty
– Michael Litt: CEO, Vidyard
– Albert Lai: Co-founder, Big Viking Games
The goal is to have 1,000 students engaged and up to four people can be on a single team. No indication yet of the prizes that up are up for grabs.