Build things. Ship things. Roll Tide. Walk the Quad tonight: six lights, one room, the build club that meets Mondays, 5–6 PM in Tom Bevill 1066.
Every fall, students arrive curious. They hear about hackathons, open source, the people shipping things at 2am. Then they wait, because nobody told them what the first step looks like.
HackBama is that step: a build, hackathon, pitch, and software-engineering club at The University of Alabama. One room, one hour a week, one thing that runs by the end of it.
Near-peer teaching in two tracks. Beginners go from nothing to a deployed project. The advanced track covers infrastructure, agents, and systems. Members vote on the topics every month.
Front-end and full-stack that people actually ship. React, Next.js, Svelte.. Backends and APIs. Node, FastAPI, Supabase, Prisma.. Directing AI instead of being replaced by it.. Reading a job description and building straight at it.. Hackathon strategy. Scope it, build it, pitch it, before the clock runs out.. A GitHub and a portfolio that survive a recruiter's ten seconds..
HackBama_01 is our first full hackathon: 7:30 AM to 8:30 PM at HM Comer Hall. Two sponsor tracks from the College of Engineering and UA EcoCAR, $1,800 in prizes, teams of one to four formed on site.
No experience bar. Open to college students from anywhere. The only thing you need by 8 PM is a working demo.
RegisterSee the eventMondays, 5–6 PM in Tom Bevill 1066. Mondays rotate on three weeks: a peer-led lesson, a sixty-minute micro-hackathon with two-minute demos, then a community night. Come once a month and you still get the whole picture.
Every sprint runs in one of two modes: unassisted, or AI-permitted at half the time. Alternating them is the point.
Code Golf Night. Speed-Run a Landing Page. Bug Bounty Night. Architecture Teardown. Prompt Engineering Battle. UI Speed-Dating. Roast My Setup. Blind Coding. Terminal RCM. Documentation Roast. Keyboard Modding Night. Fireside Chat.
The big goal this year: campus utilities built by students, for students, faculty, and staff, that outlive the cohort that wrote them. Some start with a faculty member who has a real problem. Others start with us.
Either way, a team of two to four scopes it, builds it, and keeps it running. Two pilots this fall, live with real users by spring.
Tooling for research groups. Lab resource booking. Data-collection interfaces. Course and scheduling utilities. Campus-life apps.
Seventy joined the group chat before the club was allowed to exist, and six volunteered to mentor before anyone asked. Now it is a registered student organization in the Department of Computer Science.
With founding members Alex Gundrum, Kori Russell, and Nikechukwu Okoronkwo.
Vedanta Somnathe, President. Faizan Khan, Vice President. Evan Gibson, Treasurer. Gina Kaiser, Public Relations. Tsion Shamsu, Operations. Dr. Pete Ludovice, Faculty Advisor. Dr. Yi Lin, Faculty Advisor.
No application, no experience bar, no dues. Freshmen welcome. Mondays, 5–6 PM, Cyber Lab, Tom Bevill 1066. Come to one and decide from there.
Or start big at HackBama_01, our first twelve-hour hackathon.
Join the GroupMeHackBama_01Our first twelve-hour hackathon at HM Comer Hall. Two tracks, $1,800 in prizes, open to college students.
Schedule, tracks, and rules