“Beyond financial support, Mozilla offered connections in the network — a way to meet other people working on the same kind of initiatives.”

 learning what other people have done and how they have gone about doing it. It’s inspirational and educational to hear about what other people are doing in tech or whatever field that they’re working in

I know Mozilla has initiatives for education and open internet and code-learning initiatives and stuff like that. Hearing about all those initiatives and all the people who have made those initiatives would just open me up to more opinions and more backgrounds and more ways of thinking.

But Mozilla offered us not only sponsorship but also connections in the network to meet other people who are doing the same kind of initiatives, so we could grow our spot in the education technology space. That was crazy. It’s been awesome.

Although that’s very specific to social media — that aspect of connecting with people — it’s something that the open internet fosters. It’s a sense of community. Not just a community — a space for people to network and find common ground or debate or just to interact with each other in some way, even if they’re not in the same country or place.

where there’s collaboration, where there are pages for a lot of people who are discussing and editing each other and calling each other out and correcting and learning from each other — that’s what I think the open internet is.

Even though teachers have told me not to trust Wikipedia, I have grown to learn that Wikipedia is probably one of the more accurate parts of the internet because it’s controlled by so many people that, if you’re wrong, someone is going to call you out on it.

My confidence also has come from the people I’ve surrounded myself with. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of honors programs in schools and worked in engineering and coding programs. I’ve also been a part of so many communities that are all full of determined, articulate, well-educated people who want to support each other and learn from each other. Because of that, I have grown to absorb some of those qualities myself.

I’ve definitely learned, through being a part of Girls Who Code and through having multiple jobs in tech companies, how to present myself and how to interview well and how to best represent myself.

Related was the challenge of trying to assert ourselves as two very capable females in tech who wanted to organize a hackathon. When we reached out to potential sponsors our capacity was overshadowed by the fact that we were high school students — they assumed we didn’t know what we were doing.

It definitely fosters a community, especially for people who weren’t originally in the technology community. They’re now open to new pathways that they probably hadn’t seen before. They’re opened up to new communities on social media and to other hackathons and stuff where — even if they don’t necessarily interact with the people they met at def hacks() — they’re interacting with more people in the community because of def hacks().

It creates more of a community because you get closer to someone once you’ve spent a solid 24 hours working with them. It’s definitely experience to be had.

We designate a room. We’re like, “This is the sleeping room. If you want to fall asleep, we turn off the lights, and you just go to sleep there.” It runs from noon to noon.

Seeing them feel proud of themselves for having made something is really rewarding. Also it’s rewarding to see them produce something that allowed them to push themselves a little further.

Listening to all those stories from high schoolers — freshmen to seniors — and seeing the various levels of experience is really rewarding. Especially when you see someone who’s at their first hackathon. They’ve never coded before, yet they’re able to work together with their team and make a website or make a functional web application — and they’re proud of it.

The reason I created def hacks() with my friend, Emily Redler, was because we wanted to create a hackathon environment that was specifically receptive to high-school students, because typically this group is overlooked when it comes to hackathons — college students are more welcome because they have more experience and they’re a little bit older. We wanted to target high school students because — at the time — we were high school students. Also this group is important because they are younger, which gives them more flexibility to learn.