The event, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., in the Richard and Moonyeen Anderson Engineering Building, was part of the worldwide HackDay, organized by Major League Hacking, a national collegiate hacking league. The USU event was organized by HackUSU, a club started in the last school year that allows students of all skill sets to learn more about coding.

“If there’s one sentence to sum up local hack days, it’s a 12-hour mini hackathon that unites the hack community in Cache Valley, university students and high school students,” said Alex Lutz, founder of HackUSU. “We all connect into this mainstream where we learn from industry professionals about these types of technology and then are given time to build something cool during the event.”

The hackathon’s objective was teaching attendees how to code their own computer apps. It featured mini workshops and YouTube video presentations from Major League Hacking.

Steven Jones, a HackUSU organizer and “mentor” for the hackathon, is a landscape architecture major who wants to go into virtual environmental design. The hackathon was his first time mentoring young students.

“For me, this is about sharing with the next generation of hackers,” Jones said. “I got started with computers when I was 13, and I want this to be as cool for them as it was for me.”

HackUSU and the hacking perception

HackUSU started last spring with Lutz, who worked in IT in Salt Lake City before coming up to Logan to study management information systems.

“There were a lot of tech clubs on campus but we found there wasn’t a club that was a grassroots club,” Lutz said. “Every club is typically associated with a professional organization; our vision was to get together from nothing and have total autonomy.

“The idea behind it is, let’s teach each other and learn about technologies we don’t get to learn about in class,” Lutz said. “Our professors are awesome, but it is hard to keep up with the technology even in the industry.”

That technology includes AngularJS and ReactJS — applications increasingly used by companies.

“These big companies are building their own languages and saying, ‘hey, come build stuff with this,’ and we want to know what that is; we want to build those applications,” Lutz said. “Imagine the amount of success that could be obtained by knowing it and hitting the ground running from the get go when you start. If you go into an interview or a career fair and you show someone you know JS and Angular and all of these other technologies, you will be ahead out of your competition. Companies are building their products with these technologies.”

Lutz said he hopes HackUSU and its members “change the tech culture at USU and in the valley.”

Lutz and Travis Randall, a HackUSU organizer and senior majoring in management information systems, talked about the general public’s often negative perception of hacking. Hacking came to the forefront recently when it was reported that 35 million users of the adult cheating site Ashleymadison.com had been revealed.

“They think, ‘oh, breaking into computers’ — that’s not what we’re about,” Lutz said. “We’re about teaching everyone what our definition of hacking is. It’s a new process of learning; it’s about building something cool or innovative to challenge ourselves.”

Randall added, “when you’re taking a problem and turning around and making a solution, you’re hacking that problem. … I like to think of hacking as hatching new ways to fix problems.”

Lutz noted another hackathon HackUSU members attended recently and ended up taking home some prizes. They created an app called “R Time,” allowing people to connect with their friends and watch movies together.

“Hacks aren’t that organized,” Lutz said. “The end product is not polished. In some hackathons, the end product of your hack is a quick and dirty demo of the software idea.”