The Hackathon started officially this week, but you can still sign up! Create an issue on GitHub to register a project, and join Gitter to chat with other participants about project ideas, find teammates, and ask questions.

Many of you are just getting started, or starting to get started. That’s cool. It’s always a good idea to have a brief look before you leap into something. Read a bit more about what you need to know in “Dive into dApps: a Crash Course”.

You can also get a good general overview of Colony from the Colony Documentation, which includes both high-level descriptions of general concepts in Colony, as well as the technically-focused stuff, like a colonyJS colonyClient API. Some teams have also found it helpful for their projects to read the whitepaper.

When you’re ready to take the leap, we have something to help kick-start your building: A Hackathon Starter Kit!

WTF is a hackathon starter kit?

If you’re working with the colonyJS library for your project, there are a few things to set up before you can get coding. All of these steps are outlined in the Get Started page of the docs.

The Get Started page is a great way to learn by doing; you get to see what’s going on in each step and configure everything to your liking. But we know that some of you want to get started now. Like, right now.

For you, we’ve packaged up all the initial steps into a pre-configured repo that has everything you need to get started with colonyJS immediately. You can clone the hackathonStarter repository on GitHub, run a few commands, and it should Just Work™.

The hackathonStarter kit includes:

Pre-configured dependencies for installing ganache-cli, trufflepig, ipfs, and more with a single yarn command.

command. The latest version of the colonyNetwork contracts.

colonyJS, and a few example scripts to reference.

No worries about configuring your ganache-cli, or getting the right packages added to your project. Just a simple point to begin building something cool — We can’t wait to see what you create. Happy hacking!