It’s not every day you get to fly out to Toyota Motors North America (TMNA) Headquarters in Plano, Texas. So when the opportunity presented itself to compete in the Toyota Global Hackathon, I was in. The last time this event had been held in person was pre-pandemic in 2019, long before I joined the Toyota family. While the purpose of the event was to hack away on cool new innovative ideas, it provided much more than that such as meeting other colleagues in person for the first time and networking with new people.
Unfortunately, I can’t go into too much detail on what our project was, but it had to do with optimizing traffic flow in the passing lane. Funny enough, our team name was “Arene Reloaded” (yes, homage to the Matrix), but due to a glitch in the opening ceremony of the hackathon, our project name was chosen instead. Therefore, we were introduced as PLANS.
The PLANS team from Woven Planet 
This should be a stock photo 
Photo with my coworker from the Palo Alto office, Andrew Kim 
Photo with Erin Jackson, Olympic gold speedskater. She knows my cousin Casey (also an Olympic speedskater)! 
Photo at TMNA HQ with a 2023 Supra 
Buddy the elf in July? 
TMNA HQ Campus inside view 
The demo for our pitch ft. Barbie 
TMNA HQ Outside View 
Presentation pitch with Toyota Connected CEO Zach Hicks on the far right
We ended up making it to the 3rd round out of 4. Not too bad for our first go around. Better luck next year? Still, It was a great experience coming to Texas and hanging out with work colleagues. Looking forward to future company events. 🙂