The hackathon fast track from campus to Silicon Valley

New York

SHARIQ Hashme squints at his laptop screen as he scrolls through hundreds of lines of computer code. "I can't even make sense of it right now," he says with a grimace. The long string of numbers, symbols and letters would usually be intelligible to Mr Hashme, a 21-year-old computer science major at the University of Maryland, College Park, but at this moment, he's having trouble even keeping his eyes open. In the last 27 hours, he has slept just two.

It's 2:37am on a Sunday, and he is toiling alongside 671 young software engineers who are camped out in and around a 6,000-square-foot ballroom in Stanford's alumni centre. The space resembles an oversize dorm room during final exams: temporary workstations are cluttered with computers, electronics cables, half-eaten doughnuts, and empty cans of Red Bull. As hundreds of students type feverishly at their laptops, dozens more are passed out in sleeping bags. Meanwhile, an overhead sound system blasts bass-heavy songs - think Kanye West.