Our February Hackathon Roundup: #DevCore & IDHack 2015

The week most people were figuring out the final details of their Valentine’s Day plans, we had the chance to participate in two hackathons with themes surrounding international development goals and the challenges faced by Bitcoin Core developers.

Organized by the Bitcoin Foundation and beginning in Boston, DevCore had its first round of many conferences, in a series of events intended to inspire growth in the development of the Bitcoin Core and provide a space within which to discuss the highly technical aspects and challenges of Bitcoin Core development. The need for new perspectives and new ideas is especially important for an industry that is growing more rapidly than the Internet.

Occurring in the Boston-area on Valentine’s Day weekend, IDHack was intended to unite the talents of computer science students with international development students over a 24-hour period, was happening at Tufts University, in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on campus. While this was not a Bitcoin-centered event, Blockchain saw it to be worthwhile to be present at this event to demonstrate how Bitcoin can have a positive humanitarian impact.

DevCore was a less traditional hackathon, in that it wasn’t centered around a continuous coding period. On their blog, the Bitcoin Foundation describes the purpose of DevCore events as a way to “‘develop the developers’ and make the Bitcoin Core project more accessible for people who want to contribute and participate in the open source project.”

Blockchain developers Kevin Houk and Tim Lee were present at the event; both developers gave a presentation together about Blockchain, during which they explained and demonstrated certain functions of our API libraries. Gavin Andresen presented a reflection on his work with Satoshi Nakamoto in the earlier days of Bitcoin, entitled “What Satoshi Didn’t Know.” Others who presented topics included Marco Santori of Pillsbury Law, author of Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas Antonopoulos and Jeremy Allaire of Circle.

Blockchain joined many other sponsors at IDHack. Our participation included two late-night challenges, where participants competed for cash prizes by demonstrating their use of Blockchain API libraries. Most in attendance were completely or relatively new to Bitcoin; developers Houk and Lee fielded questions from attendees and provided support to participants of the challenges.

Information on all of the projects built at IDHack are available here. *

We look forward to seeing you at the next hackathon!

Originally published at https://blockchain-blog.ghost.io on February 24, 2015.