Tungsten Hackathon: All Systems Go for Developer Network Launch

The 48-hour internal hackathon demonstrates how quickly developers can write and deploy apps on the Internet Computer.

At DFINITY, creating a seamless developer experience is paramount as we aim to restore an open internet by radically evolving the architecture of the cloud — an effort that’s all the more crucial as the Internet Computer’s public release schedule progresses.

This series of releases started last November during SF Blockchain Week, when our Copper release introduced the Motoko programming language and the first public version of the DFINITY Canister SDK, followed by the Bronze release of our demonstration network in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Our momentum grows with the unveiling next week of the Tungsten release (aka “Developer Network”), ultimately culminating in the Sodium and Mercury releases that will introduce the Internet Computer as an extension of the public internet later in 2020.

Read more: Copper, Bronze, Tungsten: Tracing the Internet Computer’s Rapid Progress

For all of us on the DFINITY team and our global community of more than a quarter million supporters, the Tungsten launch event on Tuesday, June 30, is especially momentous. It’s the first time we’re giving third-party developers an opportunity to gain early access to the Internet Computer, enabling them to build and deploy infinitely scalable apps across a decentralized network of data centers.

We wanted to channel the energy and excitement of our internal engineers in a fun way while also assessing our developer workflow ahead of the Tungsten release of the Internet Computer — so we organized an internal hackathon!

Overview

The Tungsten Hackathon took place over a two-day period in mid-June. Almost half of the entire organization participated, with 13 registered teams across five different time zones. Our panel of judges included Dominic Williams (DFINITY Founder and Chief Scientist) and Andreas Rossberg (co-creator of WebAssembly), alongside other staff leaders and experts.

Objectives

Our objectives for the hackathon were threefold:

1. Create sample apps: We wanted to build apps for the Tungsten release so that the public can see examples of what’s possible on the Internet Computer.
2. Vet our external-facing resources: We wanted feedback on the clarity and efficacy of our SDK and external developer documentation prior to public release.
3. Cultivate a builder’s culture at DFINITY: We wanted our internal developers to bootstrap on the Internet Computer in order to ensure that the platform resonates with external developers.

Submissions

There were three broad categories of use cases that arose organically:

1. Marketplaces: Submissions included a dating app, an open publishing app, and an app that matches at-risk members of society with volunteers who can help them with daily errands.
2. Games: These included retro games, a social app for gamified self-improvement, a random generator app, as well as a quiz-making app.
3. Enterprise: We saw a very interesting use case of an open video conferencing app.

We have curated some of our favorite apps and projects from our 48-hour hackathon in our newly-created awesome-dfinity repo.

Here is a brief selection:

Magnify

Magnify is a secure video conferencing application with authentication for participants using WebRTC. The team was inspired to build Magnify because the recent increased usage of other video conferencing platforms has exposed their various privacy and security flaws. Hasty attempts to patch these latent vulnerabilities made the user experience suffer. Reliable, high-quality video conferencing has become essential for business operations and connecting with family and friends. Magnify would strengthen this reliability by preventing unauthorized guests from sneaking in and disrupting meetings.

Dual

Dual is a social app for creating, completing, and tracking various challenges that allows users to share the experience with friends and family. Users can create challenges for themselves and others, and accept and complete them in turn. These challenges are tracked and displayed within user profiles. The app’s speedy and sleek development benefited from the team’s ability to use auto-generated interfaces to work on the API and its implementation in Motoko while separately developing the UI/UX.

Shield

Shield is an app that connects at-risk people with nearby volunteers who can help them with their daily errands. Users can use Shield tokens to reward helpers for completing requests. As social relationships and interpersonal dynamics have changed dramatically due to the Covid-19 pandemic, elderly people and people with underlying medical conditions are faced with the sudden difficulty of shopping for their own groceries or completing everyday tasks. Shield demonstrates an entire branch of DeFi applications that can thrive on the Internet Computer blockchain.

Hero

Hero is a random generator app inspired by the Wu-Tang Name Generator and the Change-O-Chart 2000 from the Captain Underpants children’s series. The purpose of Hero is to help developers generate a killer app idea for the Internet Computer, each of which is matched to a UN Sustainable Development Goal as well as a superpower of the Internet Computer. The nine-year-old daughter of one of our developers also contributed to this app, making her the youngest-ever Motoko developer!

Bookworm

Bookworm is an open publishing application that was partly inspired by China Literature, a Chinese website where writers contribute fiction, often releasing a series of story chapters to an eager audience of subscribers. While some popular writers are able to make a living through China Literature’s current subscription model, recently proposed contractual changes would do away with the paywall in favor of an advertising model while giving the platform sole ownership over the content. It’s another attempt by a dominant platform leveraging market share to compel its users to accept exploitative terms. Bookworm is an example of an open internet service that offers a fair and viable alternative, allowing members of creative online communities to freely distribute their content on their own terms.

Outcome

Based on the feedback from our internal developers following the Tungsten Hackathon, we were able to triage updates to our SDK and documentation prior to the Tungsten launch event on June 30. We were also given a glimpse of the vast creative potential of the Internet Computer. As one participant noted: “The dev workflow is highly productive. You could conceivably write *and deploy* an app in a single day.”

Read more: How Software Developers Build Better on the Internet Computer

Everyone was struck by what their colleagues were able to build in a brief span of time, demonstrating that the Internet Computer really does empower developers to build a new breed of applications faster than ever. Participants of the Developer Network will be able to run their app’s code directly on the Internet Computer, efficiently creating secure systems with data persistence while operating without the constraints of having to depend on the costly layers of the legacy IT stack.

We can’t wait to welcome you to the Tungsten launch event on Tuesday. There are so many ways for you to get involved and play a leading role in rebooting the internet.

Apply now for access to the Internet Computer’s Tungsten Developer Network at dfinity.org/tungsten.

Join our developer community and start building at forum.dfinity.org.