Clarkston High School junior Nathan Dimmer was selected as one of the Major League Hacking (MLH) Top 50 Hackers of 2020.
In addition to being the only one selected from the entire state of Michigan, Dimmer, 16, was also the youngest ever selected.
Dimmer founded a coding club at his elementary school when he was 10, taught himself his first programming language, Python, at age 11, and by 13 he was helping to teach others in classes at his local library.
He attended his very first hackathon in the fall of his sophomore year, altogether attending 11 hackathons over the past year and a half. He won a total of 19 awards in eight of them, including two second place overall finishes.
In addition to attending hackathons, he hosted an MLH Local Hack Day at the Clarkston Independence District Library (CIDL) in December 2018. Local Hack Day is part of one global hackathon on the same day in more than 200 locations around the world. More than 25 students attended the one at CIDL and learned new skills such as creating Alexa Skills and games.
“Hackathons have given me a place to test my skills, learn new tools, and meet incredible people,” said Dimmer. “They have allowed me to practice programming in a fast-paced environment, and have enabled me to grow as a programmer more than any class could.”
MLH is the official student hackathon league which each year sponsors over 1,200 weekend-long invention and hackathon programming competitions that inspire innovation, and teach computer science skills to more than 100,000 students around the world. Hackathons act as mini internships, where students go through the whole product design process, from the idea and the research, to the programming, to the final pitch to the judges.
To learn more about the MLH Top 50 Hackers of 2020, visit Top.mlh.io/2020.