Mantas managed to find and hone his passion for programming through a tumultuous childhood, and upon discovering hackathons, he quickly found a supportive and welcoming environment that became a perfect community for him to practice and get excited about coding. Mantas first started studying computers at 11 years old, finding his love for ML/AI and game theory at the Vilnius Computer Academy in Lithuania. The many possibilities of these fields appealed to him and fueled his hunger to learn more. After some personal problems, he decided to move from home at 12 and attend V16 Gymnasium - the only Lithuanian school in Germany. Finding himself in a new country surrounded by a foreign language made him feel isolated and like an outcast, which led him to search for gaming and programming communities online. Communities such as HackerRank and CodinGame were welcoming to his curious and competitive nature, with young hackers to motivate him as well as older hackers to provide feedback and support. These communities were not only an escape from the unpredictable outside world, serving as a well-defined space of syntax and algorithms, but they also motivated him to keep learning and improving his coding abilities.

These communities helped him through two more school transfers over three years. Eventually, Mantas’s German skills were good enough that he became ready to venture back into the outside world again. Searching for communities passionate about tech, teachers, and professors from the local university helped him enter as many competitive programming events as he could manage. In two years, Mantas won over 20 programming and algorithm competitions, including 1st place at RoboSchool and 1st place in the Saxony state algorithm competition. Mantas is also proud of a scientific paper he wrote in 12th grade on various ways of potentially solving the Beal’s Conjecture, which won 1st place in Germany’s region-wide project competition Jugend forscht (Youth Researching).

Jugend forscht was the first hackathon-esque event Mantas attended, but the first real hackathon he attended was HackaTUM 2018 after finding a poster advertising it in Munich. He applied without a second thought and went on to win a 1st place prize at the event with his team’s project: Alexa Eye Doctor. The mobile app uses convolutional neural networks and other machine learning algorithms trained on facial image databases to detect and diagnose eye problems by examining the user’s eyes, and the app can even send this data to the user’s doctor. With home Amazon device integration the app supports a doctor visit scheduling tool, live consultations for urgent problems, displaying of a patient’s medical history and previous diagnoses, and more! Since then Mantas has continuously scouted for and attended hackathons with every free weekend he has, traveling to various countries such as Germany, Lithuania, and Slovakia.

Mantas made certain to emphasize how important the hackathon environment and community are to him. From a childhood deprived of positive social interaction, Mantas learned how to channel his passions into competitive excitement at events like hackathons. He finds so much energy and joy from collaborating with others and loves reaching the tipping point where a million-dollar-idea clicks to create a unique solution. He is a driving force in generating an energetic atmosphere, with an aura of motivation, competitiveness, and positivity that boosts team morale and creates positive memories through successes and failures alike.

Feeling so comfortable at these events has allowed Mantas to make many international friendships, and he loves the feeling of running into old teammates and friends at events. As cliche as he knows it sounds, he says that the most beautiful part of the hackathon journey is the forging of friendships along the way. This social aspect has had a strong positive impact on improving his life, especially as someone who moved over 10 times across various countries and struggled to find their community.

Mantas’ favorite hackathon project was Reinvent the wheel! from TechFest 2019 in Munich, where his team was tasked with building a vehicle capable of turning its wheels 180 or even 360 degrees to best maneuver through an obstacle course. Mantas’ contributions typically revolve around coding, and his projects tended to start around coding needs and then considering other necessary skills. For this project, however, programming was completed within a few hours, and most of the time needed to be spent on engineering and construction, so Mantas became an impromptu electrical engineer while his teammates constructed wooden and 3D-printed parts. He describes the process as a logistical catastrophe, and yet it reminded him why he loved hackathons—tackling a unique task and figuring out how to surpass shortcomings with creative solutions and create functional prototypes. The project won 2nd place, but ultimately showed him that he would never get tired of the hackathon experience.

Mantas recently started his first IT-related job as a DevOp at BMW, and he is extremely grateful for not only the skills he learned at hackathons but for the great resume material he picked up along the way. Spontaneously learning new skills while working on hackathon projects is a valuable skill, and he even learned AWS and Azure services purely from their use at hackathons (both critical tools for his current job). Mantas notes that he sees his future self taking on higher positions where he will have to decide which technologies, frameworks, or libraries will be used for projects. Attending hackathons continues to expose Mantas to a wide array of tools and firsthand experiences that will be useful in his future career.