Dessa Tickets

Two tickets to see Dessa with the Minnesota Orchestra.

Membership To The Coven

One month membership to The Coven.

Frontend Masters Licenses

Three one year licenses for all Frontend Master premium content, valued at $390 each.

Tech Community Prize

At Demo Day (January 27th) each person in the audience will get a voting token and the #MNTech community will vote for their favorite project and decide which team wins the proceeds from ticket sales. Cash prize!

🏆 Awarded by Empower Equity; decided by the community audience.

Twilio Unicorn Prize

For the most creative/surprising/ambitious/audacious hack, Twilio will present the "Unicorn Award"

Plush unicorns 🦄 for every team member, Twilio credits, and more!

🏆Awarded by the Twilio team.

SPS ‘Thirst for Growth’ Award

The group that takes a risk and tries something brand new will be awarded a prize to truly quench their ‘Thirst For Growth’ – which is a guiding value at SPS. Prize will include SPS camper mugs and coffee shop gift cards… plus some other trinkets. 📈☕️

🏆 Awarded by team members from the SPS Diversity and Inclusion Guild and Women in Tech groups.

Aneela Idnani

Aneela Idnani is Cofounder & President of HabitAware. HabitAware created it's Keen smart bracelet to help people “Retrain The Brain” from detrimental behaviors to positive ones. Having grown up with hair pulling disorder, Aneela is now an outspoken mental health advocate, raising awareness of these very common yet unknown conditions. Aneela is a HAX hardware accelerator alumnus.

HabitAware recently received a research grant from the NIH to improve their device and validate Keen as a treatment for these disorders. And has been featured as a TIME Magazine 2018 Best Invention, BuzzFeed, SELF Magazine, The Washington Post, Prevention Magazine and was also the 2018 MN Cup winner.

Sarita

Sarita Parikh is focused on growing businesses that do good and do well. She started her career in software engineering, took a windy path through different industries and roles, and is now Director of Consumer Experience and Strategy at GED Testing Service, a business focused on helping more adults use education as a path to the middle class. She is also on the Board for the Wedge and Linden Hills Co-Ops and Ellevate Twin Cities.

When Sarita isn’t thinking about consumer behavior and analyzing cost-benefit ratios, you’ll find her training her children in the art of the pun, working on her daily step count, or unrolling her yoga mat..

Samantha Grumdahl

Samantha Grumdahl has spent more than twenty years in the realms of network and security. She is currently a Lead Engineer at Target on the Network Data Insights and Intelligence team.

She will happily geek out with anyone about astronomy, tea, and video games. Her volunteer efforts are focused on increasing interest in the STEM fields, especially among women and minorities..

Grow it.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Ian Coldwater

Ian Coldwater is a DevSecOps engineer turned Red Teamer, who specializes in hacking and hardening Kubernetes, containers and cloud-native infrastructure. They have spoken at numerous national conferences about Kubernetes and container security, including DerbyCon, O'Reilly Velocity, and DevOpsDays MSP. In their spare time, they like to go on cross-country road trips, participate in Capture the Flag competitions, and eat a lot of pie. Ian lives in Minneapolis and tweets @IanColdwater.

Adrian Rocke

Adrian Rocke has been developing web applications for 4 years. He got his start programming for a physics education startup in high school and then graduated from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in December of 2018. Now he is a freelance developer in Minneapolis and is excited to jump in and see the tech community in Minnesota grow.

Joe Karlsson

Joe Karlsson is a Software Engineer from the frozen tundra known as Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes code, builds teams and gives tech talks. He is the creator of feminist software, including bechdel.io which tells you if a movie script passes the Bechdel Test or not. 

Tamara Temple

Tamara Temple is seasoned software developer with a lot of experience in web development, server software, devops, and testing. She has always been passionate about helping people learn about and improve their skills in programming, tooling, and organizing. Tamara currently leads a weekly drop-in study group for women learning how to code. Tamara attended two Hack-the-Gap weekends as a participant, and is looking forward to mentoring teams this year.

Eric Austin

Eric joined the tech community in the summer of 2017, graduating from Prime Digital Academy in October of 2017. He has been happily employed at CH Robinson in Eden Prairie since January of 2018 working primarily in C#, .NET, and ServiceStack. 

In his free time he chases tornadoes, races cars, and spends time with his wonderful fiancee Sabrina and their yellow Lab Irma..

Adeel Ahmad

Having graduated from the University of Waterloo with an electrical engineering degree, Adeel has been an engineer, startup entrepreneur, and advisor. After 15 years in San Francisco, he is now based in St. Paul working as an engineer manager for the new Caterpillar Digital Labs. Using his experience running multiple startups and side projects, he has presented a popular talk at Minnebar for the last two years: "Side Projects for Fun and Profit".

Aaron Ackerman

Aaron is a principal software engineer and problem solver. He specializes in building web services and single page applications with JavaScript/Node.js and aspiring to solve problems with machine learning.

JESSICA ZEHAVI

After playing on her dad’s Commodore 64 as a child and hacking online multiplayer games as a teenager, Jessica discovered that she had much more fun programming than playing! With over 15 years of experience as a Software Engineer, she is versed in a variety of web biaccessibility standards and has a strong background in multiple coding languages. When not basking in the glow of a computer, she can be found romping around with her standard poodles, Jasper and Gideon.

Casie Sikeman

Casie Siekman is a software developer based in Minneapolis. She graduated from Prime Digital Academy in July of 2015 and went on to work there until September 2016. She has been with SDG ever since. She is passionate about making the Minneapolis and Midwest tech community more diverse and accessible to all.

Magdalena Cassel

Magdalena Cassel is a senior engineer with Etsy. Before that, she was a traveling consultant and learned a different tech stack for every project. Her favorite things to geek out about include React, Agile practices, and knitting.

Ben Demare

Ben is a software engineer working on things from UX to Unix, often in Python and React. Known to get excited about distributed systems and software quality, and also getting back into cross-stitching this year.