Hack your life in 48 hours | Dave Fontenot | TEDxTeen

my name is what my name is who my name is Chicka Chicka Dave Fontenot hi hi I'm Dave fontanel and I'm here to tell you about the craziest drug it gives you infinite concentration an explosion of creativity and it allows you to do things that you never thought were possible like stay up for 48 hours straight now this drug can get you an internship next summer at snapchat SpaceX even Google and the best part about it is that you and your friends can do it later today and it's free no it's not what you're thinking it's a hackathon so play the video so I want you all to do me a favor real quick and close your eyes if you've ever had an idea for an app now spend a few seconds just imagining what it would be like to use use this app how the world would be changed now what if I told you that you could build it in a weekend that's what thousands of students are doing all across the globe every weekend at hackathons at these events people are coming together to turn their ideas into reality and at its core hackathons are really simple you're just setting aside time to focus on just one thing and that one thing could be a painting it could be an original song it can even be the most hilarious snapchat story your friends have ever seen heck I've even seen people build a table but most commonly at hackathons people build things with software hardware and artwork and you see all these people come together in this collaborative environment instead of just worrying about building their own hack instead of just worrying about their own project you see people especially the best developers running around and helping a bunch of teams actually turn their idea into reality so I'm going to tell you about a hack that that's actually my favorite hack of all time that combined all three of these things software hardware and art I was at a hackathon called bit camp at the University of Maryland just a few weekends ago and and at the expo and the Expo is pretty much this Science Fair at the end of a hackathon where people share their projects with each other I'm walking around the expo and I'm checking out these hacks and I feel like I'm in the future I'm playing virtual reality games I'm trying the newest social network and then out of the corner of my eye all the way in the corner of the room I see the most beautiful hack it's it's a sunset and so I immediately rush over there and the girl who's building was hack her name is Steph Cohen and I go Steph you know like how what and uh and and she she starts telling me the story and just a few months before she had gone to Colorado on a road trip with some friends and right before she left she was they were looking over a mountain range and they saw the most beautiful sunset and Steph had just started coding a few months before going to this hackathon and bit camp was gonna be her first hackathon so she was spending a few weeks just thinking of ideas thinking of ideas thinking of ideas the sunset idea just came kept coming back in her head but she said no that's really difficult how can you build a sunset so you said I'm gonna do that over the summer and then and then she just couldn't think of like any ideas that really caught her attention so after a while she remembered something her friends had told her about hackathons that anything is possible at a hackathon and she said you know what I'm gonna try to build this hack instead of in three months I'm gonna try to build it in three days this weekend so Friday night she gets a canvas and she pretty much just starts painting she hadn't painted in so long probably like since she was a little kid but she starts just just making different strokes and by the morning she's finished this painting of the mountain range and she's happy with it since she goes to the store and buys LEDs and starts rigging them up all sends all day rigging these LEDs up under the canvas and then it's Saturday night and she needs to start coding and actually making making this sunset happen and I know how to code and I have no clue how you code a sunset so so she's actually even even before figuring out a code of sunset she's struggling even get the lights to react to her code and after about three hours of just being really frustrated she slams down on the table and says does anyone know Arduino and the person right behind her stands up and says yeah I do Arduino and and this person actually ends up leaving their hack and joining her team for the rest of the hackathon and right before the expo that they got it working and I can tell you I wish I could show a picture I wish I could show a video but it wouldn't do it justice it was just so beautiful and you're probably saying right now you know Dave like that's cool and all but I don't know how to code I don't know how to paint I don't know how to rig up LEDs and I didn't either neither neither did Steph and there's this this common misconception that you become a hacker and then you go to a hackathon but but it doesn't work that way actually um uh that that's that's backwards you go to a hackathon and you come out a hacker you you start painting and you become a painter so so all these things you have to learn by doing so when I went to my first hackathon I had never built anything before III didn't even have a computer actually I just showed up and I was this little freshman with a fire red mohawk and an idea and I walk into this hackathon and I start sharing this idea with people and it's actually not even a tech idea at all I just need a website to like sell this this product that I'm making so most people just kind of you know like oh that's like cool cool whatever if they want to work on tech ideas and actually the best developer in the room John Beals he says oh you know I like that idea I want to I want to work work with you um so we spend the whole weekend working together and at the end of the weekend we have this website that's like super simple but like but like I built it it was like so cool and I can send a link to my mom it back in Florida and and she can go on the internet and she could use this website I think do anything but like she could use it it is awesome and and I mean as you can tell after this first hackathon I was addicted me and my friends we started going to hackathons like every other weekend and back then this was just a few years ago hackathons weren't that popular so we were having to travel just about every other weekend to go to one of these events so after going about a dozen hackathons we we landed at the first what I consider mega hackathon owes it was called pen apps at the University of Pennsylvania and and actually yes this hackathon was so crazy or 300 people there and the energy at this event what was insane everyone was helping each other out people it almost like instead of people just sitting on computers there's like people running around with computers it was it was crazy and when we got back to Michigan we were just so blown away that we said we have to bring this back to Michigan we have to so three months later we started em hacks and with 521 hackers it was large hackathon in the world at the time we really wanted to open this hackathon up to two people who didn't get to be who had never been exposed to a hackathon so we had students from over 50 schools attend and the hackathon was great but what was even more important wasn't what happened at the hackathon it's that the hacking didn't stop on Sunday it was it was almost like it just started on Monday this we had a Facebook group in all these people who had met at this hackathon they just kept hacking they went back to their schools and they started instead of starting like a big hackathon event they started hack nights where it just started like just one person who had come to the hackathon and their group of friends they're like oh let's let's build stuff together on Thursday night and all these schools then start started their own hackathons and you know I just couldn't believe this this community that was that was rising up out of this is something that lived on past a weekend this community of people who were not just dreaming of ideas not just talking about them not just writing them down they were actually building them and in all these people I didn't know how to build it before they built it they were googling they were they were just figuring it out and nothing was going to stop them so I dropped out of school to actually spread these hackathons full-time and I spent about 17 months traveling to over 40 different colleges in err bein being and couchsurfing everywhere just just spreading this this hackathon movement and in real quick I just I just want you all look look at the person to your right now look at the person to your left these are the types of people that you see at hackathons now yeah so I drop out I'm running around we're spreading these hackathons we're getting all these people to go to them and and the big thing I realize is that these hackathons are almost like a gym for your mind I know that sounds really weird but you know I'm a really small guy as you can tell so and I never really go to the gym because I don't feel like I belong there you know but if I never go to the gym I'm never going to get big right um so so hackathons are the same way if you want to build an app there's no like just like becoming an app developer the only way to do these things is by actually just doing them just throwing yourself in there by saying like hey I'm not qualified but I'm just going to dive in I'm just going to dive in and in 10 to 15 years ago building an app was difficult for one you didn't have hackathons but two is just actually 10-15 years ago I don't think the iPhone existed so that would that would complicate things and and in what it really made me realize is that you know there's there's no painter who was born knowing how to paint Mark Zuckerberg he wasn't born knowing how to code all these people just just learned by doing and you might not believe me that you can that you can do this too but last year 50,000 students attended hackathons and 25,000 of them had never built something before this is this insane just just to give you some sense of the scale there are fewer than 20,000 CS grads every year so over the next four years this is a prediction these hackathons are going to produce more tech talent than every CS program in the u.s. combined you go off to college there's most likely going to be a hackathon at your college but even if there isn't you can just start one and it doesn't take the largest stadium in the u.s. it doesn't take 1,200 people it can just start with you and some friends saying you know what we're we're so excited about an idea that we want to set aside some time and actually create this this thing so this this brings me to a quote that my friend Mackenzie told me just the other day like two days ago she told me that you know a lot of a lot of people we were talking about this talk and she said you know a lot of people tell young people like be passionate but but what is being passionate mean actually one tells you to get passionate what they really mean is get obsessed get obsessed with a sunrise or a sunset or an instrument or you like a ukulele or freestyle rap it doesn't matter what it is just just be so obsessed with something to the point that nothing is going to stop you that you're going to Google and you're going to figure it out that you're just going to start doing it that you're going to dive in so I challenge each and every one of you set aside a weekend come up with an idea you're obsessed with invite your friends and create something awesome thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 141,043

Rating: 4.7872529 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Technology, Art, Coding, Cooperation, Hack, Motivation, Personal education, Personal growth, Social Entrepreneurship, Youth

Id: 6VakF2hZFPQ

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2015