Introduction

This week I had the incredible opportunity of attending the 2019 Capital One Software Engineering Summit in Richmond Virginia. For those who do not know, the summit is intended for freshman and sophomores in college to get them started with internships at Capital One and introduce them to recruiting and software engineers. In order to apply for the summit you must complete a challenge, this year it was a bike sharing big data visualization challenge. I created a ASP.NET MVC web app using google charts to plot my data and a SQL database to store data, it is live here, https://bikesharevisualization.azurewebsites.net/. I should mention that it is completely paid for by Capital One and all travel and meal related purchases are reimbursed. The trip was from January 5th, to January 11th. It was amazing.

Sunday

I think I was the earliest person to arrive at 11 am on Sunday. I checked my bags into the hotel and went to explore the city until the dinner reception at 6 pm. I went to the fine arts museum and saw the incredible paintings and artifacts. After the museum, I was recommended to visit the pipeline rapids walkway. It is what it sounds like, a walkway above a pipeline that runs over the rapids, giving you a great view of the rapids and the intense sound of water rushing below you, shaking the pipeline. Later at the reception we all met each other. I was not too surprised to see a number of attendees coming from high level institutions like Harvard and Princeton and I enjoyed being able to network with people from there and compare classes.

Monday to Thursday

During the week we all attended workshops designed to give us insight into development tools and even hardware. Workshops included, React, IOS and XCode, Android, APIs, and Hardware. The information we gained was valuable and the connections made with the presenters and engineers even more. It was my first time playing around with hardware and it was incredible to imagine the different things that can be done with just a couple of pieces. I am definitely going to incorporate hardware into future hackathon projects. The west creek campus for Capital One was incredible as well. Nearly as big as a university campus, and bigger than some. It felt just like I was back in school but without the stress of due dates and exams. And finally… the food! Capital One reserved a full restaurant for us to eat at every night and every day we had breakfast and lunch served at the campus itself.

Hackathon

After the week of workshops and introductions, we participated in a hackathon with the theme of changing banking for good. The project I pitched was Loan Shark. A micro lending company where users can create funding campaigns and other users can lend to fund a campaign. Eventually the person borrowing that money pays it back. To differentiate us, we allow users to set their own APR (interest rate) and repayment plan. The target audience is those who are unbanked and college students who are still building their credit. We did not win first place but were did fairly well for the time given. We learned a ton about Materialize and Ajax and Javascript. Next hackathon I plan on using React to give myself a challenge.

Conclusion

I highly suggest anyone considering doing the Capital One Summit Challenge to put the time into doing it. You never know if you’re going to actually get accepted, I didn’t think I would. The reward of getting accepted is definitely worth the work. The organizers were great and they really cared about how you were doing on the trip.   Feel free to send me a message for any specific questions.