Dylan Vidal, 20
Dylan Vidal: The Dedicated Community Architect and Gemini Award Winner
Dylan Vidal (Class of ’27) is the driven and passionate President of Knight Hacks, the University of Central Florida’s largest software development and hackathon organization. His journey into coding began on a whim in high school, but he quickly fell in love with the process of creation after seeing the results of his first HTML and CSS pages. This initial spark has since grown into a deep passion for web development technologies and, more recently, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dylan's first hackathon was at Shell Hacks in Fall 2023. Although initially intimidated, he was won over by the incredible workshops and the innovative, hardworking spirit of the hacker community. The constant upward momentum hackathons foster had him hooked, and he has been deeply involved ever since.
For Dylan, hackathons have been transformative—personally and technically. The projects he's built at these events were pivotal in landing him an internship at NVIDIA as a sophomore. More profoundly, the community taught him what it means to be a leader, to advocate for others, and to foster a tight-knit, passionate group of developers. He devotes much of his time outside the classroom to making Knight Hacks and the broader Florida Hacker Circuit the best they can be. In addition, he organizes Knight Hacks VII and is gearing up to run Knight Hacks VIII. As an Organizer Mentor, he actively helps organize teams at other Florida universities, aiming to revive the state's vibrant hackathon scene.
A crowning achievement and one of his most memorable experiences came at Bitcamp 2025. There, Dylan's team developed a groundbreaking new pipeline for 3D scene generation using Gemini and GLSL. Their innovative work not only won them the Best Use of Gemini Award from Paige Bailey of Google, but also earned them an exclusive invitation to pitch their idea directly to Google Deepmind and invited on th epilot episode of a Google Cloud YT Series. This incredible opportunity, born from a weekend of intense hacking, highlighted the kind of exhilarating potential Dylan now works to facilitate for others in the community. With TypeScript as his go-to language and Discord as his essential platform for community building, Dylan exemplifies selfless dedication. When he's not leading Knight Hacks, you can find him pursuing his other passions: weightlifting, which builds his discipline and confidence, and Dungeons & Dragons, where he channels creativity and collaboration into immersive storytelling with friends.
Quick Facts
Dylan Vidal, 20
Dylan Vidal: The Dedicated Community Architect and Gemini Award Winner
Dylan Vidal (Class of ’27) is the driven and passionate President of Knight Hacks, the University of Central Florida’s largest software development and hackathon organization. His journey into coding began on a whim in high school, but he quickly fell in love with the process of creation after seeing the results of his first HTML and CSS pages. This initial spark has since grown into a deep passion for web development technologies and, more recently, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dylan's first hackathon was at Shell Hacks in Fall 2023. Although initially intimidated, he was won over by the incredible workshops and the innovative, hardworking spirit of the hacker community. The constant upward momentum hackathons foster had him hooked, and he has been deeply involved ever since.
For Dylan, hackathons have been transformative—personally and technically. The projects he's built at these events were pivotal in landing him an internship at NVIDIA as a sophomore. More profoundly, the community taught him what it means to be a leader, to advocate for others, and to foster a tight-knit, passionate group of developers. He devotes much of his time outside the classroom to making Knight Hacks and the broader Florida Hacker Circuit the best they can be. In addition, he organizes Knight Hacks VII and is gearing up to run Knight Hacks VIII. As an Organizer Mentor, he actively helps organize teams at other Florida universities, aiming to revive the state's vibrant hackathon scene.
A crowning achievement and one of his most memorable experiences came at Bitcamp 2025. There, Dylan's team developed a groundbreaking new pipeline for 3D scene generation using Gemini and GLSL. Their innovative work not only won them the Best Use of Gemini Award from Paige Bailey of Google, but also earned them an exclusive invitation to pitch their idea directly to Google Deepmind and invited on th epilot episode of a Google Cloud YT Series. This incredible opportunity, born from a weekend of intense hacking, highlighted the kind of exhilarating potential Dylan now works to facilitate for others in the community. With TypeScript as his go-to language and Discord as his essential platform for community building, Dylan exemplifies selfless dedication. When he's not leading Knight Hacks, you can find him pursuing his other passions: weightlifting, which builds his discipline and confidence, and Dungeons & Dragons, where he channels creativity and collaboration into immersive storytelling with friends.
