Though Dav Glass has spent the last decade working as an engineer for Yahoo, for the past six years he's been based in Marion, Ill., a town of 17,000 about a half hour outside of Carbondale, nearly five hours south of Chicago.
He says he often gets messages from Silicon Valley recruiters, asking if he'll move back to California. That's why the first line in his LinkedIn bio reads: "I will not relocate so please don't ask!"
Glass grew up in West Frankfort, Ill., about 20 minutes from Marion, and moved back to Southern Illinois in 2010 so his kids could be closer to family. Since then, he's not only built products for Yahoo, he's been building the infrastructure of a tech community in southern Illinois.
The highlight of these efforts is HackSI, an annual hackathon that brings together regional techies to build products and create community. The third annual event will be held this weekend at the Dunn-Richmond Center in Carbondale, Ill.
Glass launched the first HackSI in 2013, as a way to bring southern Illinois' disparate tech community together. There were local tech shops, home-grown IT companies and computer scientists at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, but they didn't have an event to rally around. "As I started poking around I found a whole lot of them here, they’re just not together," he said.
Last year's winner hacked a Star Wars Force Trainer headset to power Christmas lights using brain waves.
So Glass, along with several other members of the tech community, put together a hackathon hoping to get a few people from the community together in a room. 140 showed up.
"It blew us out of the water," he said. "We didn’t expect that many people to arrive. When they were done, they asked for more."
So they've turned it into an annual competition. HackSI brings together roboticists, engineers, computer scientists and students to work on any tech project they can imagine, over the course of a weekend (on very little sleep). There's no previous tech experience required, and Glass said they see an age range from six years old to 60. Previously they've seen projects ranging from apps to drones to robots--last year's winner hacked a Star Wars Force Trainer headset into a tool that could power Christmas lights using brain waves.
They purposefully sought out local businesses as sponsors, who have in turn have connected and also recruited hackathon participants. During their first year, an introverted high school student who presented a solo project won third place, and the next year ended up working for his school district as a part-time IT worker. One of the hackathon's organizers went from working at a hotel's front desk to working as a software engineer after showing off his technical expertise.
Students are well-represented at the event and it's a demographic that Glass was hoping to reach. He advocates improving tech education in his community and coaches a local high school robotics club. He said students in the area aren't as likely to have tech mentors who understand how their tinkering can lead to a job. Being in a tech-focused environment helps them gain confidence: "They want to do more, they want to build more and make more things," Glass said.
That's especially important as students head into an economy that will be more driven by tech jobs than ever before: A recent ISTC study found over the next ten years, STEM jobs in Illinois are expected to rise 12 percent (compared with 9 percent for the nation overall). "Tech is everywhere," Glass said. "Tech isn’t always in the big cities. Everybody uses it, everybody has to use it, we all live by using it."
However, there are challenges to innovation in the region. "The people who build stuff here, they have to take into consideration slow bandwidth," he said. "They have to take into consideration that your phone may be the only form of Internet access you have, and you don’t have gigabit internet flowing into your house."
But with constraint comes creativity, he added.
"The types of things that [we] do are a little different," he said. "And I like that. It’s the outside of the box thinking that make it a little interesting."
