Students Get Hands On at SOA Hack Night

By Lizzie Clark, Sr. Tech Recruiter

Students snatched pizza, guzzled energy drinks and fervently pecked away on their laptop keyboards during a service-oriented architecture (SOA) Hack Night at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology on March 26. One week later, the scene was much the same on the campus of Purdue University. Each Hack Night captured the curious minds of software engineering talent as they worked to build a series of small apps and integrate service APIs.

This kind of event is an example of the type of campus hiring initiative and branding effort Enova uses to attract top talent. We’re always thinking of new ideas and unique events to host at various universities. In the past, we’ve hosted Hackathons, Tech Talks, Coffee Booths, and other events on campus; but this year we wanted to try something completely new. We wanted to combine the technical emphasis of a Hackathon, with the informal atmosphere of a Tech Talk. We also wanted the students to learn something that is used in the industry, but not taught in school.

To that end, the Recruiting and Software Engineering departments teamed up to host these Hack Nights. During the two events, more than 60 students built a series of small apps by using IFTTT to tie Twitter, Reddit and Heroku. This relaxed, informational forum allowed students to mingle with each other as well as work alongside our engineers.

It should come as no surprise then that the response was one of roaring laughter when a RHIT student accidentally took control of Lead UI Engineer Pete Brousalis’ Twitter account. The error caused more than 200 automated tweets from Reddit to be sent from Pete’s account! Needless to say, he had a lot of questions to answer from his Twitter followers.

Stay tuned for news of more campus events in the future!