UGA grad makes Major League Hacking Top 50 List, featuring world’s rising technologists
Alex Breazu, a recent mechanical engineering graduate at the University of Georgia, has been named to this year’s Top 50 list by Major League Hacking, an organization dedicated to supporting and empowering the hacking community.
The list represents top new technologists in the MLH community with exceptional contributions and service within technology and STEM.
“It is a high honor to be chosen as an MLH Top 50 recipient as each is selected from a pool of more than 150,000 active community members, comprising 1 in 3 new programmers in the United States (and even more abroad),” said MLH Chief Operating Officer Nick Quinlan in a news release.
While Breazu studied engineering, he discovered a passion for software through his participation in UGAHacks in 2020, where his team brought home the prize for best first-time hackers.
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“When the event was over, I reflected on everything that happened and realized that I really enjoyed the software side of engineering, so I decided that moving forward I would pursue that on my own in parallel to my mechanical engineering degree,” said Breazu.
Instead of enrolling in computer sciences courses, Breazu was driven to pursue coding on his own, teaching himself best practices and important software architecture in his freetime.
“When I first started to learn, I would focus on building little projects that solved some random problem," he said. "It was this feeling of designing and coding something that would actually solve problems that kept me going.”
Following his untraditional start, Breazu went on to become a community leader, serving as the Lead Organizer for Google Developer Groups Athens and the Logistics and Community Engagement Director of UGAHacks 8, organizing events and reaching out to over 1,000 students.
Breazu’s time as a prolific hackathon winner culminated in a prize internship offer with NCR, a software, consulting and technology company headquartered in Atlanta.
“This internship ended up being one of the more pivotal moments in my journey as I got to contribute to a lot of interesting projects while having the support of the professional software engineers working there,” he said.
Interning at NCR for almost two years, Breazu contributed code on big projects and grew his knowledge of the industry, building his launchpad to pursue a career in software following graduation.
Now Breazu’s success continues, recently accepting a position at Bloomberg working as a software engineer in New York as well as continuing work on his startup Plantfi, a tool to help with houseplant care.
“I am proud that my contributions have been recognized to this degree by MLH and hope that my unique story can act as an inspiration for other hackers in the community looking to figure out their path forward,” said Breazu.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Major League Hacking names UGA graduate Alex Breazu to its Top 50 list
