overview

pretty awesome overall. attending workshops, talking to different sponsors and learning more about what they do, how to get noticed and of course, the freebies. i had an onsite interview with TD Bank for Software Engineer for Winter 2026 and ended up getting the job. this is the first time i got an interview since i started applying for jobs and finally got one because Hack The North made it happen.

sponsors

insane lineup including:

• Amazon (bunch of stickers and some goodies + onsite interviews)
• YCombinator (Hack The North x YCombinator sweater)
• Tech@RBC
• Citadel (T-Shirts)
• Shopify (T-Shirts)
• Intact
• Intuit
• Uber
• TD Bank (onsite interviews)
• Coinbase
• Jane Street
• Windsurf
• Databricks
• and more

Some sponsors actually had private job listenings only for the Hack The North attendees which is pretty awesome. (I secured interview with TD Bank!)

workshops

I camped out at a bunch of talks just to gain some perspective 1:

• Databricks 101 — Power Your Project with Databricks
• Unlocking the Power of Groq’s API
• LLM Routing with Martian
• Engineering the Future: On Our Way with Uber
• CSE Career Opportunities for both Professionals and Students & Workplace Culture
• Multimodal and Reasoning LLMs, Powered by Cohere

food

HTN fed us like champs:

• Pasta
• Overnight ramen
• Walking tacos — ground beef + veggies with some cheese on top of it
• Asian lo mein — noodles + popcorn chicken
• Bento boxes — rice + veggies + meat (i dont even know lol)

goose games

This is something new and it's basically doing quests to earn points so you can redeem for things like hoodie, stickers, posters, key mat, etc.