A mechatronics engineering student who wrote code that displayed live election results on Facebook during the 2016 presidential race is Waterloo Engineering's co-op student of the year.
Baraa Hamodi's work reached millions of people worldwide during the
Hamodi, who joined Facebook at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California as a front end engineer intern, was also a part of Facebook’s Messenger team. As a team member, he worked to bring new features such as group video calling and group polling to life. He made Messenger more accessible to users who are visually impaired by implementing components that screen readers can access.
Hamodi was recognized for his co-op achievements along with the other campus-wide recipients at a ceremony held March 30. The annual University of Waterloo Co-op Student of the Year Awards honour students in the University's six Faculties for their contributions to co-operative education and their community. This is Waterloo’s top award for students in a co-op program.