Nigel Brown, 30
Nigel saw that access was a problem for many of his classmates. It was taxing for a student to keep up with coursework, apply, and travel to far off competitions. This realization inspired Nigel to put together one of his own local events.
With the help of a few of his friends, they started a club at their school and got to work planning their own event, Local Hack Day. Nigel brought in speakers from their network and brought together tech enthusiasts from his community. He was given the opportunity to speak about those experiences at Hackcon and even offered a role as GitHub Campus Expert.
Nigel has since hosted a Local Hack Day, spoke at Hackcon, and has become a GitHub Campus Expert. He won an award from IBM that led to an internship and eventually, turned into a co-op. Nigel was asked to intern at one of their upcoming hackathons on his campus. He stayed afterward to mentor other hackers. This excitement about teaching others inspired him to leave the University of California, San Diego, to work as a Developer Advocate at IBM which he had been referred to by one of the mentors that day.
His favorite project that he has worked on was Safety Net. This idea was meant to help people, like Nigel, that had struggled with mental health, to better monitor their mood using IBM Watson’s Speech to Text and Sentiment Analysis APIs. If audio detected that a person’s mood was continually low it would send a notification to the streamer that it appeared they were in crisis and give them access to resources.
Quick Facts
Nigel Brown, 30
Nigel saw that access was a problem for many of his classmates. It was taxing for a student to keep up with coursework, apply, and travel to far off competitions. This realization inspired Nigel to put together one of his own local events.
With the help of a few of his friends, they started a club at their school and got to work planning their own event, Local Hack Day. Nigel brought in speakers from their network and brought together tech enthusiasts from his community. He was given the opportunity to speak about those experiences at Hackcon and even offered a role as GitHub Campus Expert.
Nigel has since hosted a Local Hack Day, spoke at Hackcon, and has become a GitHub Campus Expert. He won an award from IBM that led to an internship and eventually, turned into a co-op. Nigel was asked to intern at one of their upcoming hackathons on his campus. He stayed afterward to mentor other hackers. This excitement about teaching others inspired him to leave the University of California, San Diego, to work as a Developer Advocate at IBM which he had been referred to by one of the mentors that day.
His favorite project that he has worked on was Safety Net. This idea was meant to help people, like Nigel, that had struggled with mental health, to better monitor their mood using IBM Watson’s Speech to Text and Sentiment Analysis APIs. If audio detected that a person’s mood was continually low it would send a notification to the streamer that it appeared they were in crisis and give them access to resources.
