As a high school senior, Justina struggled to find classmates at her school who shared her passion for programming. When she started her internship at State Farm, Justina wanted to find other communities passionate about software development. That’s how she stumbled upon her first hackathon, Windy City Hacks. 

Despite Windy being the first hackathon for most of her all-female team, they were determined to complete a minimum viable product of their app Habit@, which allowed users to track sustainable habits and see their environmental impact. Many sleepless hours later, they pitched their project to the founder of Hack Club and won best overall at Windy Hacks.

Justina works to advocate for equitable computer science education to bridge the gender gap in the tech industry. She is actively involved in all-female and non-binary communities as a Stanford she++ fellow, GirlCon organizer, NCWIT awardee, #BUILTBYGIRLS advisee, and TechTogether Boston ambassador. She is also the Congressional App challenge winner. In addition to this, she is also the founder and executive director of HAX, a non-profit helping students organize hackathons through mentorship.

Justina intends to major in computer science in the fall when she begins college. She loves the creative medium through which she can build anything and solve problems.

Her favorite hackathon project is from Technica where her team and she worked on Secure the Bread, a web and iOS app that aimed to combat food insecurity and food waste by connecting local restaurants with leftovers to communities in need. They pushed themselves beyond their comfort zones by implementing APIs for the first time and coded in Swift. This was a topic the team was very passionate about as they have witnessed first-hand food insecurity in their respective cities and amongst their friends. Justina cannot wait until she is in college to continue learning how to code and help communities with the solutions she creates.