Meet the Santa Rosa high school student behind Sonoma County’s first youth coding competition

Siya Mehta has loved coding since a young age.

At 16, the young programmer has also now come up with a way to share her love of computer programming with fellow Sonoma County classmates — and other teens across the globe, as well.

“Coding just clicked for me. I enjoyed it and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do,” said Meht, of Santa Rosa.

When she was attending junior high at Rincon Valley Middle School, Mehta began searching online for coding competitions to enter. She competed throughout the Bay Area, but quickly realized that Sonoma County did not have an event of its own.

Mehta wanted to change that.

In 2021, her freshman year at Maria Carrillo High School, she organized a team of students and sponsors to put on Sonoma County’s first youth coding competition, called Sonoma Hacks. Around 84 people participated that year.

Now in its third year, Sonoma Hacks 3.0 drew more than 140 participants over the Feb. 25-26 weekend. Many of the students were from the Bay Area, and some logged in from across the globe — from Canada, India, Nepal and Kazakhstan.

“I knew there was an interest among fellow students here, just no one had taken the initiative to do it themselves. So I organized one here,” Mehta said. “I also knew people were interested in learning, but didn’t know where to start.”

The two-day online competition, limited to high school students, makes use of websites including devpost.com, discord.com and Zoom to communicate, submit projects, receive feedback and more.

Participants have from the first morning until the second afternoon to code and create a useful and functional digital program from scratch, like a website or an app, which is then submitted for judging.

Throughout the event, there are workshops hosted by experts in the field, such as programmers from local tech company Plantery Media, University of California, Berkeley students, and Harvard alumni.

“They teach participants how to make websites, how to make apps, so beginners feel supported and have some advice for how to start on a project,” Mehta said.

Judges honor the top three overall winners, as well as a “best beginner.”

Judges this year included students from UC Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, along with Laura Swart, a software engineer at Keysight Technologies, the Santa Rosa-based tech company.

One of the judges, Samyok Nepal, 19, a student at University of Minnesota, returned after winning first place at Sonoma Hacks with his sister in 2021.

Sonoma Hacks was the first coding competition Nepal entered. His top finish motivated him to leap headfirst into the world of coding.

“Hackathons are super valuable … I would say I’ve learned more at one hackathon than in any of my college classes,” Nepal said.

While still in high school, Nepal created an app for his school district that directly notified students via cellphone when there was going to be a snow day. It was downloaded by several thousand people, Nepal said.

Now, while attending college, Nepal is part of a team of coders that compete in events worldwide. The experience has translated to employment: Last year, he worked at tech startup company Fiveable.

He’s worked on projects that use AI to transcribe lecture notes and created an accountability and attendance app for college students. He’s also created a version of the popular “Beat Saber” game on Oculus for the computer, using a webcam to track hand movement, so that people can still play the game even if they don’t have a virtual reality headset.

Along with judging this year’s competition, he also taught a workshop about taking a gap year before college and how to break into the tech industry.

“I would encourage any high school student even remotely interested in coding or design to compete just for fun,” Nepal said.

This year, Leah Uriarte and Lan Nguyen, students from Lynbrook High School in San Jose and Cupertino High School in Cupertino, respectively, won first place.

There were prizes for winners in each category, which consisted of gift cards of the winner’s choosing, sponsored by Keysight Technologies and Planetary Media. A free subscription to Axure Tech also was raffled off at the competition.

Mehta, a Singapore native who moved to Santa Rosa when she was in kindergarten, now has a team of five students to help her organize the competitions each year. She’s working on recruiting younger students to keep the competition going after she graduates.

She anticipates next year, her senior year at Maria Carrillo, will be her final one putting on the competition, but hopes other students will carry on with the competition.

“I think computer science is really cool because you can have such a big impact,” Mehta said. “I just meant for Sonoma Hacks to help our community, but I ended up getting participants from across the globe. People in Kazakhstan know about Sonoma Hacks and are able to benefit from it.”

Kylie Lawrence can be reached at kylie.lawrence@pressdemocrat.com.