Pinay hackers bag int'l honors for mobile app

Their team had the distinction of being the only all girl team in the competition, beating out 60 other teams to land in the top 10. Michie and Rubi were also the only Filipinos at the event, with other developers coming from as far as Australia to join the hackathon.

 

In a chat interview with Michie and Rubi, both women said they got the inspiration for $hootN$ell from Rubi’s flair for design.

“I wanted to pursue ($hootN$ell) coz I love to design and with this app, I'd be able to showcase what I can do,” Rubi said.

 

But as developers and consumers, they also know how tedious and time-consuming it is to promote merchandise across different social media sites.  So creating something that could automate the entire process and make everything easier would be a game changer:

“The idea in the app itself is being able to utilize these social networking sites in promoting your items. Diba sayang naman di tau nakakabenta ng stuff using twitter, considering na it is one of the fastest ways to spread information,” Michie explained.

 

Hacker girls

 

All three women wear the badge of "hacker" proudly, despite the oftentimes negative connotation that comes with the title. For them, being a hacker means more than just breaking into a website.

All the girls know how to code, and it's one of the things they believe helped them win. But being a hacker means more than just having programming skills and showing them off by defacing a website: it's all about being creative and finding new ways to do things.

“being a hacker is really cool. Because it means I can create something innovative that can change somebody's life, whether it has a little impact or a big impact to the world,” Michie says.

 

Gender: Not an issue

And that confidence in their ability code as well as—or even better than—the boys really shines through.

Both Michie and Rubi are encouraging other women and even girls to enter this exciting field.  

“I think we can be equal (with boys) since the task at hand is not a physical task but a mental task. It's all about using your knowledge in building something. If your passion is innovating things, then being in the (software development) field is awesome. There are so many developer groups in the Philippines that are encouraging us women to actually code. Sali lang nang sali. Because you'll learn a lot from these people and you never know who you might meet,“ Michie said.