"YH4F encourages young students to be brave and resilient"
Youth Hacking 4 Freedom would not be possible without the amazing
teenagers who join this contest, our incredible sponsors and donors,
whose support is vital, and our expert jury, who evaluate the projects.
One of these jury members is Brielen Madureira, who talked with us
before the participants have to submit their projects.
16 professionals with a different focus on Free
Software come together as the Youth
Hacking 4 Freedom (YH4F) jury. They cover a wide range of technical
aspects –
from a focus on large language models, to leading major Free Software
projects and kicking of innovations in their field of expertise. This
diversity ensures that, regardless of the type of project submitted,
there is always an expert available to review it and offer valuable
feedback to the participants.
We have talked with one of our jury
members, Brielen Madureira, a Doctor in Computational Linguistics from
the University of Potsdam, and interested in evaluation and ethical
considerations of language technologies… and birds!
FSFE: Thanks Brie for talking with us. What inspired you to become a
jury member for this competition?
Brie: The fact that it is an amazing educational
initiative. It encourages young students to be brave and resilient,
gives them an opportunity to use and improve their knowledge while
building useful software and, in the end, rewards them (and us) with a
trip and tasty food : )
Based on the jury’s scores, the six winning projects receive a cash
prize ranging from €1,024 to €4,096. The winners are invited (with all
expenses covered) to the award ceremony held over a weekend in October
in Brussels.
FSFE: What do you enjoy most about being involved in this
kind of event?
Brie: Witnessing how bright young programmers are,
how much they learn during the process (even on their own!) and the
amazing, well-articulated projects that they can develop.
FSFE: If you had to choose only one, what would be your favourite
thing about this competition?
Brie: It gives visibility and networking
opportunities to the participants.
FSFE: What skills do you think are most important for participants to
take part in this competition?
Brie: Knowing how and when to look for help and
resources in order to overcome problems in coding, being able to change
gear and reshape the project when needed, having the ability to think
beyond the code itself and be aware of its benefits and limitations in
relation to future users.
FSFE: Have you seen any common mistakes or challenges among
the participants?
Brie: Lacking documentation. It is very
disappointing to open a repository that may contain an awesome and
well-developed idea which is not well communicated or explained. It gets
harder to judge its quality and usefulness without knowing how it works,
what it can be used for, how to install it and so on.
FSFE: What impresses you the most in a project?
Brie: Seeing it has an outstanding documentation and
that it provides a solution to a problem that can potentially benefit a
whole community. Even better when the views of that community directly
influenced the development of the solution.
FSFE: Why do you think this programming competitions is
important for teenagers?
Brie: In school, we learn how to read and write in
our own language and possibly in other natural languages, but not
everyone has the chance to learn a programming language from early on.
This competition is an incentive for young students to seek that
knowledge and see that it can create great things. Besides, it is
important to incentivise the principles of Free Software among young
programmers.
FSFE: What advice would you give to young programmers who
want to improve their skills?
Brie: Refactor your own code, review other people’s
code and contribute to Free Software repositories. Learn the best
practices and the native style of your preferred programming language.
Stay up to date with the latest developments in the community. Talk to
and get feedback from the users of your tools. And always document your
code well.
The 2025 edition of Youth Hacking 4 Freedom started on 1 January, with the programming phase now in fullswing.
Visit the YH4F website for more details about the competitoin, the sponsors
and the previous winners.
Support FSFE