---
title: "The prize we gave out was not for the best demo"
kind: hackathon
date: 2026-03-28
location: "University of the Philippines Los Baños"
tags: [hackathon, students, judging, ai, accessibility, career-team, yses]
summary: >
  EXPE21ENCE: The Hackfest, run by YSES at UP Los Baños. Career Team came in as a premier sponsor, so
  I gave a talk and then sat as a judge for our own special prize. We handed the Accelerating the
  Human Condition Award to two teams, and neither of them won it for the code.
photos:
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-opportunity-divide.jpg | 1536x2048 | Me at the front of the lecture hall with the microphone, the Closing the Opportunity Divide slide on the screen beside me"
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-building-for-the-why.jpg | 1600x1200 | The Building for The Why slide up on the projector, three numbered points, while I talk to the room from beside the YSES letters"
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-award-iterate.jpg | 2000x2000 | The YSES award card for the Career Team Special Prize in the collegiate category, naming team Iterate, with the winners and organizers lined up in the lecture hall"
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-award-codeblooded.jpg | 2000x2000 | The YSES award card for the Career Team Special Prize in the collegiate category, naming team CodeBlooded"
deck: "Engineering for Social Impact | PDF | /decks/engineering-ai-for-social-impact | 13 slides · 3.2 MB · opens here on the site"
gallery:
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-codeblooded.jpg | 1600x1200 | Team CodeBlooded with the organizers and judges after the award, the projector still showing their title slide, ACTS"
  - "/media/feed/yses-uplb-hackfest-sponsor-certificate.jpg | 1600x1200 | Three YSES officers handing me the sponsor certificate of recognition for Career Team"
social: |
  Career Team sponsored EXPE21ENCE: The Hackfest at UP Los Baños, run by YSES, so I gave a talk and
  then judged our own special prize: the Accelerating the Human Condition Award.

  It went to two teams, and neither won it for the code.

  ACTS, by team CodeBlooded, takes incident reports from the Facebook page an LGU already has, sorts
  them, and puts them on a map for the people who have to respond. No new app for the public to
  install. It serves people where they already are.

  Pathag, by team Iterate, routes people with visual or mobility impairments around obstacles that
  other maps do not know exist, and turns the same data into evidence for getting the pavement fixed.

  Our own users are veterans, people with disabilities, people leaving incarceration, people without
  housing. Both teams built for someone specific. That was the whole criterion.

  Writeup and the deck: https://tjakoen.github.io/calendar/yses-uplb-hackfest
---

## Sponsor, speaker, judge, all in one afternoon

Career Team came in as a premier sponsor of EXPE21ENCE: The Hackfest, which bought a talk slot and a
special prize with our name on it. I went with fellow team leads Christelle Salceda,
[Jun Bolotaolo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jun-welmer-bolotaolo-b683a01a4/) and
[Beili Cepe](https://www.linkedin.com/in/claizel-coubeili/).

Worth putting the conflict on the table early. I was not a neutral judge. I was a sponsor's
representative handing out a sponsor's award against a sponsor's criteria, and the criteria were
ours. Read everything below with that in it.

## What the criterion actually was

Career Team's platform is Career Edge, and the clients are United States state workforce agencies
and universities. The people at the other end are veterans, people with disabilities, people coming
out of incarceration, people without stable housing. That is the population the whole company points
at, and the shorthand for it inside the company is a phrase that ended up as the name of the prize:
accelerating the human condition.

So the award carried that name, and the question behind it was not whose demo held together best. It
was: who did you build this for, and can you point at them.

## Two teams could

**ACTS, the AI Civic Triage System, from team CodeBlooded.** A resident chats or posts on the
Facebook page their local government unit already runs. The system reads the report, classifies it as
a road accident or whatever it is, and drops it onto a map that the people who have to respond can
actually work from. The app is on the government side. The public side is the page they were already
using.

That last part is the whole reason it won. The reflex in a hackathon is a new app, a new website, a
new account for somebody to create and forget. This team went and found where their users already
were and built behind them instead of in front of them. Serving people where they are is unglamorous
and it works.

CodeBlooded was [Neil Aldous Biason](https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbsn/),
[Christian Naguio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-naguio-b6623822a/),
[Jaren Marcelino](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaren-marcelino-669582333/) and
[Adara Rei Dimatulac](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adara-rei-dimatulac/).

Something I only learned afterwards, from
[Neil's write-up](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/neilbsn_wildcard-podium-finish-last-saturday-ugcPost-7444777276463869952-rFlP/):
they came in through the wildcard round and built the thing in three days. I did not know that while
I was judging, and it does not change the decision, but it does change how the decision reads.

**Pathag, from team Iterate.** Walking routes for people with visual or mobility impairments, in
cities that were not built with them in mind. Computer vision plus community crowdsourcing to map the
obstacles that no routing service knows about: the open hole, the broken kerb, the blocked pavement.
It recalculates a safe route, talks you through it, and then aggregates the same data into what they
called heatmaps of inaccessibility, which is a polite way of saying evidence you can take to the
local government to get the pavement fixed.

That second half is the part I liked. Most accessibility tools help you cope with a broken city.
This one also documents the breakage and hands you an argument.

Iterate was [Galvin Gonzales](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galvin-gonzales-884838375/),
[Aro Caabay](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aro-caabay/),
[Hanna Macasarte](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanna-macasarte-65413016b/) and Rein Matthew Malonzo,
the one name across both teams I could not find a profile for. He is here anyway. A missing link is
a gap in my searching; a missing name would be a person cut out of their own work.

Iterate took the collegiate championship as well, and CodeBlooded took second runner up. Both of
those were the organizers' calls, not ours, and the
[full board across both brackets](https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19M4Tzmhxj/) is theirs to
announce, so it is worth reading rather than taking my two names for the whole field.

## The slide, and the sentence I have been writing for a year

My talk was Engineering for Social Impact: Building Sustainable Careers, and the deck is at the top
of this page. Two slides carried it.

The first was called Building for the Why. Do not build a cool AI wrapper, find a specific community
bottleneck and use the technology to take that friction out. Measure the result by whether it
increases access, improves affordability, or automates something for the people who need it most.
And then the one hackathon projects usually skip: a useful solution only stays useful if it is built
to last. Software that helps people should not be fragile.

The second slide is why I keep coming back to this deck:

> We don't hire "prompt engineers", we hire problem solvers. Don't let AI dictate your architecture.
> We value developers who understand foundational logic and can solve complex problems from first
> principles. AI just helps us type the solution faster.

That last sentence sits about a centimetre from the line at the bottom of every note on this site:
the judgment is human, the typing, by design, is not. Which is less of a coincidence than it looks,
because I wrote the deck. So this is not two sources agreeing, it is one person saying the same thing
twice, and you should discount it accordingly.

The signature is the part I did not supply. Career Team agreed to put that on a hiring slide and
stand behind it in front of a room of students it might actually hire. An opinion on my own site
costs me nothing. The same sentence in a recruiting deck is a promise somebody can hold you to at an
interview.

The same slide adds the part people miss: hiring is going up, not down. The human element gets more
valuable, not less, once the boring half is automated. That is [ten times zero](/notes/ten-times-zero)
with a recruiting budget behind it.

## What I would flag

The prize was ours, the criteria were ours, and I was the one holding them. A special sponsor award
is a company saying what it values out loud, not an objective ranking, and it should be read that
way. The organizers' placements are the ones that were judged on the merits by people with no
commercial interest in the result.

I also saw these projects as demos on a stage, at the end of a hackathon, in the state hackathon
projects are in. Both of them are ideas with a working slice attached. Whether either survives
contact with a real local government or a real user with a white cane is a question the weekend could
not answer, and neither can I.

Thank you to [YSES](https://yses.org), the Young Software Engineers' Society at UP Los Baños, for the
invitation and for the event itself. The Hackfest is part of EXPE21ENCE, their twenty-first year of
this, and running two brackets, a wildcard round and a full day of pitches on schedule is a
considerable amount of work to do on top of being a student. They also fed and watered a room of
sponsors and kept the whole thing to time, which is the part nobody thanks anyone for.

Sitting on that judging panel was a privilege, and the certificate they handed us is on the wall. The
job fair and company talks end of the same programme has
[its own post](/calendar/yses-uplb-fair-and-talk).