KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. -- Three Airmen from the 81st Training Support Squadron here competed in HackState Sept. 23-24 at Mississippi State University and won first place for the best safety hack.
Staff Sgts. Christopher Pineda and David Campbell, 81st TRSS interactive media developers, and Staff Sgt. Joseph Hartsfield, 81st TRSS curriculum developer, participated in the competition.
Teams had 24 hours to design, build and present their product to judges.
“This was one of the shortest hackathons we’ve done with it only being 24 hours,” said Pineda. “There was a lot of pressure to build, test and iterate it very quickly.”
The team won top honors for the best hack that involved safety.
“For our project we had to look into a lot of Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards and what were reportable incidences,” said Pineda. “We also had to look into how International Paper reports industrial accidents and what their goals were for their safety program so we could tailor our project to what they’re working on.”
Pineda said the information he learned when going through technical training at Keesler in 2011 contributed to their success.
“The fundamentals taught at Keesler and are still being used at all the different programming assignments out there and are still relevant to modern programming,” said Pineda. “It just takes a little extra to see how they’re applied.”
Pineda said these types of events are a great way to learn new things and apply it to the workplace.
“Being able to find a problem, come up with solutions and work toward those solutions with limited time and resources in a team setting is absolutely relevant to a lot of the work we do as Airmen day to day,” said Pineda.