2025 Cerebral Valley National Security Hackathon
In the weekend of April 26 to April 27, my close friend Dylan Eck and I took part in Cerebral Valley’s 2nd National Security Hackathon in San Francisco. For this weekend, we flew into SF from Colorado and Missouri and right when the hackathon started we met Christina Huang and Loana Munteanu, and decided to form Team Aspen!
Loana's amazing LinkedIn post about our hackathon experience
For the hackathon, there were two possible paths we could have taken. One was to compete in the main project-based hackathon where there was a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place spot. The second was a special challenge where we were tasked with trying to “hack” into one of Code Metal’s solutions as white hat hackers. Surprisingly, the second challenge’s reward money was larger than the main challenge’s prize money. So we decided to divide and conquer. With our team size of 4, we decided to both build a project for the main hackathon but also tackle this special challenge as well. Since we only had 24 hours to do this, we thought this was the best way to help us win this hackathon in some form or another. We were also in a unique position, all of us on the team had backgrounds in software but Dylan had background in software and mechanical engineering, which proved to be invaluable for the 2nd challenge as Code Metal is a cooling company and follows a lot of physical and thermodynamic laws.
Knowing this, during that painful 24 hours, we built both our project and mostly broke into Code Metal’s system. Here are details for our project:
The hacking solution we came up with for Code Metal is closed-source though. So I cannot provide any links/content for that. But out of everyone who participated, we got the closest to doing a severe meltdown in Code Metal’s challenge. Due to this, we won that challenge and a nice $5000 prize money. We did not win the main competition, but the judges were impressed. And after some further digging, they did think our project was valuable but it lacked a lot of the amazing and intelligent solutions we thought of due to the limited time we had and how we stretched the team thin to do 2 challenges in that 24 hours.
But overall, this experience was amazing! Dylan and I got to leave our home states and explore SF a little bit. We made new friends, built a cool project, and took some prize money by the end of it! After having a difficult late 2024 and early 2025 year, this win and amazing experience was really good and gave me hope for the future.
So I wanted to thank everyone who was part of Team Aspen. I’m also grateful for how Cerebral Valley hosted this amazing hackathon for a 2nd time and being so professional about everything. This was truly an amazing experience and I am grateful to have taken part in it with such amazing people!
