Jay Patel has an impressive resume, having attended more than 65 events as a hacker and mentor and organized more than 50 events, many as the founder of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Technology’s hacking club, Hack Club SVIT. While he only competed in his first hackathon, Smart Gujarat Hackathon (SSIP) just over two years ago, Jay has since grown tremendously as a programmer and given back to the hacker community in many ways. He recently organized Hack SVIT, the first in-person Major League Hacking (MLH) event held in India since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also organized a Flutter bootcamp for fellow SVIT students, aimed at giving students a deeper understanding than they would get from course instruction.

Breaking into the hacker community wasn’t always smooth sailing for Jay. Growing up in the city of Vadodara in Gujarat, India, Jay believes “only 10-15% of students” in the area are familiar with hackathons and the hacker community. After just a few months of learning web development and coding, Jay made his first foray into the hacker community by attending a local Google Developer Group. He was surprised to find he was the only undergraduate student in attendance, with the other group members all belonging to various businesses. Nevertheless, the other members and the group’s organizers encouraged Jay to join. The experience inspired Jay, and he says, “I wanted to join a campus-based or student community.”

While there was not a hacker community in place at SVIT when Jay arrived, he was dedicated to creating one. Jay says his biggest goal in founding Hack Club SVIT was to “provide a platform to the students.” He saw the untapped potential of his fellow students first-hand at his Flutter bootcamp. When the guest speaker asked the attendees to raise their hands if they had completed their first app using Flutter, then if they were a first year student, Jay says he got “goosebumps.” Despite none of the first year students who attended having taken any formal coding classes, the vast majority of the fifteen to twenty students who completed their Flutter project were first years.

Seeing this inspired Jay to help students get an early start on their tech careers. Today, Jay says his club has “25 active developers from their first-year who work with blockchain, MERN, Django, and other stacks.” Continuing to grow, his club now takes on project assignments from both the university and local industry leaders, which Jay believes is a “dramatic” change for his university. “After completing two years of my college, I achieved my dream to make a tech environment in my college,” Jay says. Sharing the hacker community with so many others is Jay’s way of giving back to the community from which he has learned so much. Jay has met hackers from across the globe, grown his professional career in programming, and even learned stronger English by participating in hackathons.