Page 82 of You Had Me at Hello World
Then she hangs up and I free-fall into panic.
I hurtle through the hallway, trying to figure out where the hell the actual judging room is.
I’ve been through this set of doors before. I’ve passed by this bathroom like three times already. But the mythical final boss room? Nowhere to be seen.
I wave at a random nearby college student. “Hi hi! Do you know where this is?” I show her the room number from the Alpha Fellows portal.
“Oh, that’s on the other side of the building,” she says. “So, the way Stata is designed, there are multiple towers, and youcan’t cross to one from another on this floor. You should take the elevator down to the first floor and then try the west side.”
It’s givingThe princess is in another castle!
She sees my disappointment and shoots me a sympathetic smile. “It’s confusing, but kinda fun?”
We have very different definitions of fun. I thank her and rush toward the elevator, which is just about to close as I dive inside. Inside is a dude and his metal dog that growls at me when my calf brushes against its snout. Lovely. Now even the robots hate me. When the AI uprising happens, I’ll be at the top of the kill list. Me and anyone who’s ever kicked a Roomba.
As the elevator zips toward the ground floor, I check the time on my phone. Already two minutes past ten.
Three minutes later, I breathlessly trip into the room. The three judges, all men, are seated at the front. One of them—a guy rocking a mullet and Birkenstocks combo—gives me a look like I just showed up late to my own funeral.
Edvin Nilsen is chilling in the corner. He grins at me. I smile back, relieved to see at least one friendly face.
“Glad you could make it,” another judge says. “Your app is Hello World, right? Courtney informed us of your teammate’s medical emergency. I hope he’s all right.” His words come out rapid-fire, like he’s mainlined a triple shot of espresso.
“Yep, that’s us.” I get my laptop and link it to the HDMI cable at the podium. Our slides pop up on the screen in fullcolor, and suddenly it all feels so much more real. This is it. The home stretch.
I wish Khoi were next to me. It’d be less intimidating to face down this room of all dudes. He’d be rizzing up the judges, joking about their favorite Elon Musk tweets or fanboying over the latest gadget inTechCrunchor whatever.
But more importantly, he put in the work. Tweaked CSS pixel by pixel, wrestled with API calls, crawled through Stack Overflow rabbit holes. He should be standing up here, too.
But I don’t have time to dwell. The judges are staring expectantly. I clear my throat. “Hi—hello. I’m Charise Tang. I’m from Chinook Shore.”
The Birkenstocks dude frowns. “Where is Shinoo Shore?” He says the name like it’s gibberish. It’s especially annoying because Chinook is an Indigenous word.
“Chinook Shore. It’s on the Oregon coast, an hour or two away from Portland.”
He does this half grunt. “Never heard of it.”
It’s a small town, for sure. The job opportunities aren’t gilded with money and prestige the way they might be in Silicon Valley or Manhattan. But that doesn’t mean that the people who live there don’t dream as brightly and love as ferociously as they would anywhere else.
Iknowthat. But some part of me still wishes I were from a specialized STEM magnet school, or a posh New Englandboarding school, or an intense Bay Area public school. Some place that would automatically let people know that I am smart and tough and capable.
I swallow. “Um, right. So both Khoi and I have immigrant parents. We both know the struggle of finding solid footing in a country that doesn’t understand you. So we decided to build Hello World—an app for newcomers to America to connect with one another and discover community.”
I flip through some of our Figma designs, highlighting my favorite features—the language toggle button, the automatic discovery based on geotagging.
“I don’t know,” one judge cuts in. “It looks cluttered.”
I blink. “Oh. How do you mean?”
“Well, you don’t have that much white space. And there isn’t a lot of attention paid to text hierarchy. You could’ve just used a search feature instead of automatic discovery.”
I want to tell him that Chinese apps don’t look the same as American ones. That search engines in other languages are often hard to navigate. That just because our app doesn’t look like the ones he uses every day doesn’t mean that it’s inferior.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to argue about feedback.
“Um, okay.” I move on to the next slide, which describes our back end. Khoi was supposed to present this part.
It’s this stereotype in tech that girls gravitate toward “softer”design and front-end work, while guys do the more “hardcore” stuff in the back end. But I worked on the back end just as much as he did. I hooked everything up to our databases, I wrote the search algorithms.
