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Watson team wins “Most Technical Feat” Award, tops host Cornell at BigRed//Hacks

Trio built a web browser, from scratch, in 36 hours

September 21, 2016

A team of Binghamton University computer science students pulled off the coding equivalent of building a car, with just a three-person team, in a day-and-a-half at BigRed//Hacks at Cornell University on Sept. 16-18.

Working completely from scratch and in a narrow 36-hour window, senior Jack Fischer, junior Nik Vanderhoof, and sophomore Ethan Schoen built “Andreessen,” a proof-of-concept web browser that can render simple web pages.

With the competition constraints, Andreessen may be “rudimentary,” according to Fischer - think Model-T more than Ferrari to finish off the automobile analogy - but the Binghamton team still won the competition’s, “Best Technical Feat.”

“This had been a fantasy of mine for a while and we came together because Nik and Ethan each had the right domain-specific knowledge and shared the vision that it was possible,” Fischer said. “We had a very solid plan and knew what the division of labor would be, but this was abstract and we didn’t really know what we were getting into until the event.”

“Jack brought up a cool idea, and I thought it would be a fun challenge,” Vanderhoof said. “I didn’t think it would work until we debugged the DOM [document-object model, internal representation of a page] while Jack was sleeping. That’s when Ethan and I got super pumped.”

“I was exhausted and began to worry it would inhibit my ability to finish the project. However, after starting to see our individual parts come together I knew I had to finish it,” Schoen said.

The trio beat out teams with members from Cornell, the University of Southern California, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and Purdue University to take the technical title. There were also prizes for the goofiest project, best business prospect, and sustainability-related projects in lieu of the traditional first, second and third-place.

The Binghamton browser was made, “with no libraries. In pure C++,” according to the team’s final competition submission. It was named Andreessen after Marc Andreessen - the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used Web browser and co-founder of Netscape - who was one of the sponsors of BigRed//Hacks.

Other projects included a reptile-tracking app for ecological research, an app to limit food waste by tracking expiration dates, and, “SwearJar” an app that listens to a user’s speech and charges them a fee for each profanity.

However, each of those projects jumped off of previously constructed platforms while the Binghamton project started from just a blank page with a cursor.

“There was some risk in attempting something like [the browser] because you might pour resources into it and come out with nothing,” Fischer said. “We did hit some tough stuff that had to be resolved in the middle of the night just hours before our time ended. I have to say thanks to the other guys because they stayed up working absurdly hard while I had to sleep. I was definitely happy it paid off. We’ve all been to a number of hackathons and I think this one stands out.”

BigRed//Hacks is the oldest student-run, large-scale hackathon at Cornell University, while Binghamton has its own competition in late winter, HackBU.