Ryan Ning @itsnotryan

✦ SWE intern @Uber (SF), incoming @AWS | prev @Shopify ✦ 8x hackathon wins ✦ CS & AI research @uoft linkedin.com/in/ryan-ning ryanning.com Joined November 2025

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Satyam @KlausCodes

2 hours ago

I have done 51 hackathons since 2022 and won 41 of them. I would never recommend anyone doing that. I didn't start in hackathons for the love of tech, I started as a mean to survive (below is a picture of me from 2022 lol, completely malnourished), done with high-school but no clear path to pay for college so I had to take gap years. During the first couple months I had no idea what I was gonna do, I was doing some copy-write work for rs. 2-4k/month. I was interested in tech and then a friend of mine recommended me to watch a video of a guy named "Kunal" on YouTube, watched that and went into the rabbit-hole of tech influencers, a lot of them talked about hackathons, and 1 day I decided that I'll try them out. Did my 1st one without knowing sh*t, somehow ended up winning, loved that feeling, I thought if I can win prizes worth $200+ then I can figure my way to college as well, that was the hole goal, kept doing hackathons, won a lot, bought my own 1st laptop with that (I still keep it with me). Things were not always working out, there was a point where I lost 4 in row, that means no money for an entire month, was kind of losing hope then I met 2 kids in a hackathon from Canada and US who were in their high school and we somehow ended up teaming up, 1 of them was "Eduard" and the other "Ayush" the smartest people I know, they showed me how to "think" and how to "figure out" a solution for any problem. I still think that weekend changed the trajectory of my life, and how I think in general, I got better, started winning again, got my 1st internship and by the end of it a return offer and couple more offers from companies through this platform, eventually decided I'm gonna try to apply for university again, and will do more hackathons to fund my way through it (this was 2023 so it was around a year of me in this industry), and that's exactly what I did. Now to come back to my 1st statement, I would have rather done 1 hackathon a year or once in 2 months or something instead of doing every weekend, even though its not meant to be that but it was my mean to survive when I didn't have anything and I think I can never be grateful enough of that. Now that I'm building again something of my own, for the love of it, to solve a problem, I'm happy and couldn't have asked for a better story than this