Cambridge is hosting its second ever Hackathon this weekend. The event is a 24-hour long programming frenzy fueled by free coffee, computers, and brilliant young programmers from across the world. Teams of around four are unleashed to create whatever they dare to dream up. Mentors will be present to help with any technicalities, but the team is responsible for a program’s inception and creation. To understand a little more about the event, I’ve asked Jared – a co-organiser, designer, and developer for Hack Cambridge 2017 – to talk about what this event is all about and how he sees the future of programming.

Jared became interested in programming around 2008, when the App Store was first released. “I started by reading intimidating PDFs that required ample prior knowledge. Turned out they weren’t particularly helpful, the best information for newcomers is online. There are so many great online courses now. I followed a course that Harvard make available for free online and it really helped me find my footing.”

As a second-year student, Jared has quickly got involved in organising one of the biggest computer science events in Cambridge. “I think it’s something that Cambridge has been lacking. The ‘hacker’ scene has grown significantly over the past 10 years or so, so it’s partly just that we don’t want Cambridge to be left behind. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone builds in their 24 hours at Hack Cambridge. This year we have more workshops for people to learn from during the event and I’m excited to see how this fits in, what works and what doesn’t.”

Although the hackathon is not themed, there is a zeitgeist surrounding programming that highlights the vastly powerful artificial intelligence. Jared explains the concept in terms of “learning techniques trying to find patterns in data” noting that “we shouldn’t be too surprised that they’re everywhere. The ‘learning’ is the focus of a lot of techniques used in practice across all sorts of applications. They power the voice recognition in your phone’s virtual assistant, they produce those ‘Discover’ playlists in your Spotify account, they figure out what advertisements you are most likely to be attracted to and serve them to you on your Facebook news feed.”

The interview concludes with Jared’s view on the future of programming, something that is becoming ever more accessible and driving innovation. “The UK computing curriculum continues to develop and more tools continue to make programming seem less like an activity for geeks and more like a very useful and employable tool for many fields. Programming is a skill like any other, I think many people can benefit from the way of thinking that a programmer employs.”