Blockchaingers hackathon 2018 | The aftermath

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wearetheledger

5 min readApr 10, 2018

It has been one tiresome weekend, but winning the “Digital nations infrastructure” track was absolutely worth it 🏆. You can read about our “self-conscious housing pass” solution in a follow-up blogpost linked at he bottom.

Our founder Thomas Marckx went last year but TheLedger only just started back then. So all the new recruits were eager to join the biggest blockchain hackathon in the world.

The hackathon took place at the old Sugar factory in Groningen, which was an amazing location. We participated as a team of 9 people, which unfortunately due to other commitments shrunk down to 5 at the end. Our team consisted of a nice ratio of business and analysts skills, architects, and developers. This allowed us to divide the work with everyone focussing on their core skills.

The hackathon was very well organized with food, drinks, a relaxing game area and all the Jedi’s you would ever need. A Jedi was a person specialized in a particular field or technology able to assist the teams with questions.

For those new to the Hackathon concept:

hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects.

Before

Hackathons are pretty cool. Working on ideas in a dark area, drinking lots of caffeine, free food and a great atmosphere (also great team-building). The goal of a hackathon is (to think of and) develop something cool in a short period of time. So, that’s what we did.

Thomas had been mentioning the idea of a smart house in his presentations for a while now. But it has always been pretty high level, we didn’t really think much of it. When we were asked to submit some use-cases for the different tracks, that was one of them.

Preparation

A hackathon wouldn’t be fun if you did everything in advance. Especially here, being able to shape our idea based on the actual needs of our track sponsors was awesome.

We had 2 brainstorming sessions with parts of the team to get to an idea, but we weren’t able to find a concrete one to focus on. We left to Groningen with the idea to make a simple history for a house (housing pass) and maybe integrate grants in this. We thought these were both problems in the current system. Technology-wise, we thought about using BigchainDB. But since we would need smart contracts, we went for Hyperledger Fabric. For this, we set up our boilerplates which we re-use and open-sourced. We’ll also be writing a detailed technical article about this later. So make sure you follow us on medium.

Network boilerplate: https://github.com/wearetheledger/fabric-network-boilerplate
Backend boilerplate: https://github.com/wearetheledger/hyperledger-typescript-boilerplate
Nodejs chaincode utils: https://github.com/wearetheledger/fabric-node-chaincode-utils

The hackathon

Figuring things out

After brunch, we found ourselves a booth and started figuring out our stakeholders and flow. We had some crazy ideas. Our main pillar was the housing identity and service history. Some other ideas included dynamic energy and safety labels, neighborhood watch, automatic fines, automatically sending unspent solar energy back to the net.

Once the hackathon started, we immediately secured a booth with our track’s sponsors to bounce our ideas off them. They gave some nice insights which made our eventual flow more concrete.

Let’s code 💻

A couple of hours and some more discussions later, we divided into teams and started coding. Coding wasn’t the only thing. We had another big deliverable, the impact board. The impact board is a way to display your product’s features, future, ideas, impact, roadmap. It’s a large board which should translate your idea to the person reading it. It should be clear what you’re building and where you want to go by reading this board. Our board and idea will be discussed in a following blogpost which will be released tomorrow. There will be a link at the bottom.

Final ceremony 🎉

The final ceremony was as well thought out as the opening ceremony. Giant showbiz factor! Great organization on DutchChain’s part. Unfortunately, our track was the second to last one. Congrats to all the other teams, but we were pretty much falling asleep thinking about our 4 hour drive back to Belgium. Even tho, we didn’t sleep crazy short hours, it was a tiresome weekend nonetheless.

Conclusion

It was an awesome event. +1 would do it again. It was awesome to see so many cool ideas in so many different areas. Everyone has their own view on blockchain and how it’s going to change the world. Being able to develop something with big players in these different areas is really awesome and it shows that they are ready to innovate and disrupt their industry using blockchain.

We came to develop something cool, but winning was also on our mind. We coded a lot and we made a lot of progress in only 48 hours. We thought our solution was awesome, but hearing it on the stage was something else.

Unfortunately, we had to head back to Belgium as soon as the ceremony ended. We still had a long drive ahead of us. That’s why I just want to thank all the people who helped to organize this event. And also our track sponsors from the Chamber of Commerce and the Kadaster who put time and effort alongside us to improve our idea and this solution.

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