Hackathon winners interview (the joint 3rd place, ENS girls)

makoto_inoue
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read
Quynh, Marie, and Edit pitching during #enshack

Hi, Congratulations on winning the joint 3rd place. Can you introduce your team members?

Edit(@edit_olah): I work for a digital education company called Tes Global. I am part of the team that builds and maintains websites built in Drupal.

Marie(@B17Anselmi): I’m doing an internship in blockchain and crypto token integration research for Trekea Mobile, a SaaS company in Paris. At the moment it looks like Ethereum has the best infrastructure to use for our project, so that’s primarily what I’m working with. Because my research/development is self guided the company has been outsourcing and sending me to events like this hackathon to help me learn what I need to.

Quynh Tran-Thanh: I am heading the Data Products team at CryptoCompare, I got this job when I was at an Ethereum hackathon 3 years ago. That’s also where I first met you (Makoto) and Nick.

Quynh, you have been in various blockchain related hackathons leading the “girls team”? Let us know more about why you are so passionate about it and how we can help your initiative.

Quynh: Yes, as mentioned, at the Ethereum hackathon 3 years ago I was the only female participant and that was very disappointing. I decided that if I want to stay long term in this industry I need to bring in more women.

Quynh lead another team at the hackathon Makoto organised a year earlier

Marie, you told me that you had to go through all the hoops to register our event via BlockParty because you had to buy ETH from an exchange. Tell us more about your blockchain on-boarding experience, what did you struggle the most and any suggestions to make the process more beginner friendly.

Marie: My problems were with the fiat side of things, not crypto. I bought my ETH on Coinbase, for which there was extensive set up. Then Visa kept blocking my purchases (because crypto looks very sketchy) and once I finally got the bank to unblock it Coinbase was blocking the card because I had tried to use it so many times.

Once I finally had my ETH I just had to follow the tutorial on Medium on how to register. This process was fine once I followed the instructions, although a more intuitive layout on the Dapp would have helped (i.e. a “Resister here” button or some indication that registering on Safari won’t work). But like I said, the fiat side of things with Visa flagging Coinbase was my biggest struggle.

Can you explain to us more about your project “ENS address book” ? How did you come up with the idea? What does it do? Why did you think it was a great way to integrate with ENS?

Beyonce was their inspiration!

Quynh: Generally we thought searching for information in the blockchain space is very hard, we just wanted to have a Google search bar that can find us anything.

How much did you know about ENS before the hackathon, and how did you get up to speed? Are there anything you found difficult about integrating ENS? Do you have any suggestions to make ENS better?

Edit: I have attended a meetup organised by Ladies of Code, where Quynh talked about ENS and blockchain technology. This is where I first saw it demoed through Truffle’s tutorial: Ethereum Pet Shop. Quynh was my guiding light throughout the exercise of building our project. I also found the 2 sessions on Saturday: ‘ENS 101’ and ‘Packaging with ENS’ very useful.

Marie:I had researched what ENS was in preparation for the hackathon, but that’s about it. The level up sessions on Saturday were helpful, and then we followed Makoto’s tutorial to integrate it into our Dapp.

Quynh: I bought an ENS name a year ago. t was fun to follow Makoto’s blog tutorial on integrating with ENS. The ENS npm module could be improved a little, it had a dependency on a certain web3 version and we started off with a later one that caused some issues.

What is next for your project?

Edit:We haven’t yet decided.

Anything I didn’t ask but you want to tell to the readers?

Edit:I am very new to the world of blockchain technology, and find it really exciting. It was a pleasure to connect with the community around it and meet so many lovely people who are happy to share their knowledge. This was my first ever hackathon. Thank you for making it so enjoyable!

The Ethereum Name Service

News about the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) from the team building it. Follow this publication for the latest ENS developments.

makoto_inoue

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http://makoto.github.io/me

The Ethereum Name Service

News about the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) from the team building it. Follow this publication for the latest ENS developments.

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