Jason competed alongside approximately 1,000 other students, 80 percent of which were college computer science majors and recent graduates. The app Jason developed was recognized among the event’s top 10 best apps.

Hack the North is a 36-hour event that brings students of different skill levels together where they form teams and create a unique software or hardware project from scratch. In addition to great food and camaraderie, Hack the North also featured a number of industry leading speakers such as Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, and Eric Migicovski, the CEO of Pebble.

Jason developed an app he called Elapsed, which uses a technology called iBeacon to allow employees to clock in and out. An iBeacon is an essentially a small Bluetooth emitter. As your phone approaches the iBeacon, it automatically detects the phone over Bluetooth and then clocks you in and out. For example, an employer could put an iBeacon at a desk and in the breakroom. As the employee arrives at their desk, it can automatically clock them in and every time they go to the break room (or just leave their desk) it can clock them out. This system then integrates with the Intuit Quickbooks payroll system so the employer doesn’t have to enter the payroll data directly, reducing human error.

For his Hack the North project, Jason worked with a friend he met in 2014 at a summer program called Launch hosted at MIT. Together they’ve done five hackathons, and Jason’s also done an additional one solo. Jason says, “hackathons are really fun and really rewarding because at the end of them you’ve made a cool project, but they’re also tiring––by the end all you want to do is sleep!”

Jason made a short video illustrating his winning app and has a website detailing this project and his other development work. Jason also serves as the webmaster of Menlo’s Coat of Arms website and was the team captain of Menlo School’s robotics FTC Team 3055 in 2014-2015.