Fiona Cai, 19
The Community Builder Shaping Canada’s Hacker Ecosystem
Fiona’s entry into tech began with a pandemic-era burst of curiosity. Driven by a simple desire to keep her friends connected, she dove headfirst into coding with zero prior experience. She taught herself Python from scratch, built her very first Discord bot, and cheekily named it after herself: "Fiona." What started as a whimsical experiment blossomed into a full-scale social media platform. To her astonishment, the bot quickly scaled to over 36,000 users. Seeing that reach proved to Fiona that there was a deep need in the community for what she had created, giving people a valuable way to connect when they needed it most. It was the spark that lit her lifelong obsession with building human-centered software.
Encouraged by her computer science teacher, Fiona attended her first hackathon, YRHacks, where she built a study-focused Discord bot with a team of peers. While they didn’t take home a trophy, the thrill of rapid prototyping and collaborating in real time hooked her immediately. Eager to shape the hacker experience, she joined the organizing team a few months later. Within 10 months, she was named Chair of YRHacks, leading the effort to bring the event back in-person and growing it into one of Canada’s premier high school hackathons.
Her involvement in the hacker community did far more than sharpen her technical skills; it altered her career trajectory. Through the network she built through hackathons with Major League Hacking (MLH), Fiona discovered career paths and opportunities she hadn’t previously considered, landing consecutive high school internships at RBC and Shopify. “The hacker community has had a huge impact on both my personal and professional life,” she explains. “Now, whenever I go to a hackathon, I don’t really feel like I’m attending an event anymore - it feels more like ‘welcome back’ than ‘welcome.’”
Driven by her experience as often the youngest student and one of the few girls in her early computer science classes and gatherings, Fiona took action to build space for others. She founded Codebuds, an initiative that aimed to make tech accessible and inclusive for young women. Within four months of launch, the platform had reached over 25,000 students. Today, she continues to spearhead major initiatives across the ecosystem. She serves as Logistics Lead for the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference (CUTC), builds projects as a Machine Learning Engineer at WAT.ai, and organizes logistics for Hack the North.
At Hack the North, Fiona actively works to evolve the hacker experience by shifting traditional technical workshops toward more interactive, human-centered panels and discussions. Her commitment to human connection also fuels her creative builds, drawing direct inspiration from her passion for singing and playing piano, as well as her weekend performances at a local retirement home. These influences inspired VocalAI - an AI-powered platform built with React, Flask, and MongoDB that democratizes singing practice by turning any song into a custom karaoke track while evaluating the user's pitch accuracy and word pronunciation in real time. This build secured Fiona her very first hackathon win, taking Best Game Hack at JamHacks 7. At Hack the North 2025, her team built Lavoe - an AI-augmented digital audio workstation (DAW) that captured top honors for Best Project Built with Windsurf as well as the Rox: Best AI Agent award.
Fiona's portfolio reflects a consistent mission: building technology that empowers people. This commitment to accessibility is further showcased in builds like Signematic - a real-time sign language translation tool that captured 2nd place overall and Best Use of Adobe API at JamHacks 8 - and TrackBack, a YOLO-based object finder created at Hack the North 2024.
Fiona is the definition of a community leader and remains dedicated to paying it forward. “I love this position that I’m in, where I’m constantly being mentored and also a mentor for others,” she says. “I’ve focused on creating spaces where more people feel like they belong in tech, and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.”
Quick Facts
Fiona Cai, 19
The Community Builder Shaping Canada’s Hacker Ecosystem
Fiona’s entry into tech began with a pandemic-era burst of curiosity. Driven by a simple desire to keep her friends connected, she dove headfirst into coding with zero prior experience. She taught herself Python from scratch, built her very first Discord bot, and cheekily named it after herself: "Fiona." What started as a whimsical experiment blossomed into a full-scale social media platform. To her astonishment, the bot quickly scaled to over 36,000 users. Seeing that reach proved to Fiona that there was a deep need in the community for what she had created, giving people a valuable way to connect when they needed it most. It was the spark that lit her lifelong obsession with building human-centered software.
Encouraged by her computer science teacher, Fiona attended her first hackathon, YRHacks, where she built a study-focused Discord bot with a team of peers. While they didn’t take home a trophy, the thrill of rapid prototyping and collaborating in real time hooked her immediately. Eager to shape the hacker experience, she joined the organizing team a few months later. Within 10 months, she was named Chair of YRHacks, leading the effort to bring the event back in-person and growing it into one of Canada’s premier high school hackathons.
Her involvement in the hacker community did far more than sharpen her technical skills; it altered her career trajectory. Through the network she built through hackathons with Major League Hacking (MLH), Fiona discovered career paths and opportunities she hadn’t previously considered, landing consecutive high school internships at RBC and Shopify. “The hacker community has had a huge impact on both my personal and professional life,” she explains. “Now, whenever I go to a hackathon, I don’t really feel like I’m attending an event anymore - it feels more like ‘welcome back’ than ‘welcome.’”
Driven by her experience as often the youngest student and one of the few girls in her early computer science classes and gatherings, Fiona took action to build space for others. She founded Codebuds, an initiative that aimed to make tech accessible and inclusive for young women. Within four months of launch, the platform had reached over 25,000 students. Today, she continues to spearhead major initiatives across the ecosystem. She serves as Logistics Lead for the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference (CUTC), builds projects as a Machine Learning Engineer at WAT.ai, and organizes logistics for Hack the North.
At Hack the North, Fiona actively works to evolve the hacker experience by shifting traditional technical workshops toward more interactive, human-centered panels and discussions. Her commitment to human connection also fuels her creative builds, drawing direct inspiration from her passion for singing and playing piano, as well as her weekend performances at a local retirement home. These influences inspired VocalAI - an AI-powered platform built with React, Flask, and MongoDB that democratizes singing practice by turning any song into a custom karaoke track while evaluating the user's pitch accuracy and word pronunciation in real time. This build secured Fiona her very first hackathon win, taking Best Game Hack at JamHacks 7. At Hack the North 2025, her team built Lavoe - an AI-augmented digital audio workstation (DAW) that captured top honors for Best Project Built with Windsurf as well as the Rox: Best AI Agent award.
Fiona's portfolio reflects a consistent mission: building technology that empowers people. This commitment to accessibility is further showcased in builds like Signematic - a real-time sign language translation tool that captured 2nd place overall and Best Use of Adobe API at JamHacks 8 - and TrackBack, a YOLO-based object finder created at Hack the North 2024.
Fiona is the definition of a community leader and remains dedicated to paying it forward. “I love this position that I’m in, where I’m constantly being mentored and also a mentor for others,” she says. “I’ve focused on creating spaces where more people feel like they belong in tech, and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.”
