SAN FRANCISCO —
Among all the applications (apps) on a mobile phone, there is a good chance a few were created by hackers at a hackathon.
With the advent of the digital age, anyone with a good idea and the ability to code can be considered to be a hacker — someone who can produce innovations that were not possible before the internet.
Taking an innovative idea to the next level and ultimately forming a startup, takes a team of people with unique skills. Forming those teams often occurs at an event called a hackathon.
“A hacker is anyone who can take limited resources or be in any type of constraint, time constraint, resource constraint, knowledge constraint, and create something from nothing or something from very little,” explained Sabeen Ali, who considers herself a hacker because of her childhood experience.
An American-born child of Pakistani immigrants, Ali lost her father at a young age.
“I lived in a house with a single parent (and) three kids. We had to figure out how to do a lot of things on our own,” she remembered.
Ali applied her ability to innovate to her company AngelHack, where it holds events, or hackathons, around the world. People with inventive ideas — hackers — can attend, write computer programs and code together.
“Somebody who works in a larger organization 9-to-5, building the same app,…