Throughout the night, besides doing my duties to help the ETH Global team, I walked around, spent time with developers in the trenches, and interviewed them, really trying to get into their heads.

Peter Abilla and Loi Luu from Kyber Network

Day 2

Day 1 and Day 2 seem like a blur and indistinguishable from each other. I didn’t sleep much, but when I did, I slept under a table.

Besides workshops and more #buidling, nothing eventful happened except for this: Vitalik Buterin handed me a fork and a napkin.

Peter Abilla + Vitalik Buterin

I know what you’re thinking: “Pete, you should’ve said a ‘Fork’ pun or joke when you had the chance”. Believe me, I kicked myself for not having done so afterwards.

Lesson #3: Wifi needs to be super fast. Despite several announcements, many hackers still downloaded large files and some probably downloaded the entire ethereum blockchain.

Lesson#4: Needless to say, before attending a hackathon, make sure the hackers have any large files on their local machine and do not, if at all possible, download the entire blockchain. Send reminders to the hackers with suggestions of which large files should be on their machines before the hackathon.

Who Goes To These Hackathons Anyway?

Here’s a quick cross-section of the people I met and their backgrounds.

I met a Peter Thiel fellow. She asked me to watch her backpack while she went to the bathroom. Her project had something to do with medical records.

I met several people that flew to San Francisco just for the hackathon. I met people from Turkey, Czechia, Germany, London, Canada (plenty of Canadians), and other places too — just for the hackathon.

I met a guy that was a 62 years old game developer. As expected, his project had to do with a game — the non-fungible token kind.

I met a designer from Denver.

I met a mechanical engineer who works at Google, interested in learning how to develop on the Ethereum Blockchain.

One thing I noticed, which seems really obvious now but not at the time, was this: there aren’t very many females here.

Lesson #5: Variety and different backgrounds matter. Make sure attendees are developers, designers, and other backgrounds also (but they must know how to code) and make a really concerted attempt at recruiting females to attend the hackathon.

Day 3, Judgment Day

All code had to be submitted by 10AM to be considered valid. All the project teams were also placed into sections where each section had 3 judges. Then the teams were to write down a short description on a placard for the judges.

Large index card to write down project description for the judges

I was fortunate enough to sit in on the the judges training — yes, they trained the judges on how to judge. Very thorough.