Hackathons Abroad. Aigang’s first sponsored Hackathon.
Have you ever had a chance to attend a hackathon?
Well, if you never heard about it — let me tell you about the perspective from me — a business/marketing guy. It’s a first hackathon I’ve ever attended. It’s organized by The8760 Crew. While the whole team wanted to join the hackathon only 3 members could attend it— Augustas, Darius & me. The hackathon was based in Kiev during the Connect Ukraine Fest.
Day 1. First impressions. Everybody works.
It was difficult to get into the building than go through the airport security. Had to cross the metal detectors and let security check your bag. No booze, no guns, no knives.
Thankful to the security, you could almost feel safe by leaving your bag unattended. When I say almost — we quickly got informed that stuff could disappear and we soon found.
We got here a little earlier, but the scheduled hackathon hasn’t started for the next hour.
Overall, atmosphere was great. Had a chance to talk with a feel people — mostly business guys: either sponsors and talent scouts.
The situation from the dev side was very productive. Everyone who gets here immediately finds himself/herself a table with a laptop open. It’s kind of seemed weird to me. No small talks, no hi’s — got here to work.
Further down, the official night started. Teams presented their ideas in Ukrainian & a little bit in Russian.
I don’t understand either.
Shout out to one team who spoke in English and shared idea about building a bread coin — buy a bread with bitcoin. But… Xapo? Anyway, best of luck to them.
One team wanted to create an ICO over the weekend. That’s a stretch, wonder how it’s going for them.
Day 2. First smart contracts? Check!
This is when things heated up. Although outside was pouring most of the time.
Since it’s Kiev, the security was very strict and didn’t want to let us in. Even if we had the special wristbands. That meant nothing to them.
Place seemed empty at first but things did pickup and more and more people started coming with laptops. One team even brought a TV as dashboard to display the process.
For us, we had to coach people a little bit. Some developers barely knew what a blockchain is.
But Ukrainians are talented — just an hour later everybody knew what smart contract is and how to make it properly.
I guess, thanks Solidity for being a simple language.
After a straight 6 hours of talking with developers and answering their questions we decided to leave and have a look around the Kiev.
Day 3. The Outcome.
It was Sunday. Weather finally cleared up. Me and Darius decided to have a look around in Kiev.
It’s a beautiful city. I actually liked it more than Odessa where we attended BIP001 earlier this month.
Meanwhile Augustas decided to return back to hackathon. Later we met up at the hackathon after walking 14 kilometres (8.6 miles). Trying out some Ukrainian quisines and having a look at Maidan, WW2 Museum and so on.
Yeah, not so much to say when it comes to hackathon — although we’ve returned back at 11AM — the amount of progress done was tremendous!
One team, IoT Hub, had already launched their ICO. That’s an ICO done over the weekend!
The one team we were super interested in and the one that we decided to reward is SmartInsurance. They’ve managed to create a functional smart contract with web interface for Crypto Exchange Insurance over a weekend! Congrats to them!
Needless to say, we look forward to working with them.
And that’s pretty much it.
We had to leave pretty early — our plane left at 3PM their local time and we couldn’t attend the closing ceremony. Overall, it was amazing experience that allowed to see how people evolve in such short period of time — from hearing that blockchain is “a cool idea” to building their first smart contract that functions as intended.
Some links to click around:
More about Aigang — http://bit.ly/AigangWebsite
Aigang Whitepaper — http://bit.ly/2hwAtkt
Aigang on Telegram — http://bit.ly/AigangTelegram
Get Aigang Latest Updates — http://bit.ly/AigangUpdates
