My First Web3 Hackathon Experience

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

My First Web3 Hackathon Experience

(A WEB3CON HACKATHON)

It was a lazy afternoon, one that would have you scrolling aimlessly through your Twitter feed. I stumbled upon a post by(@camiinthisthang)stating that she needed a women's team for Web3 hackathon. I've never been on any hackathon prior to that but I was quite enthusiastic about the thought of working with a team of women in web3. I replied to her post and she sent me a link to a server that would later be converted to @womenbuildweb3's server, a server housing a group of future record-breaking builders.

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DETAILS OF THE HACKATHON

On getting to the server, I was assigned to the last team(Team F) and I got even more excited when I discovered there was a bounty for every team that successfully submits a project

Day One was on the 2nd of March 2022. I lost a little bit of the high morale when I discovered we were just 2 active members and other teams seemed to be flourishing. I(Linda) and Christina decided to work on creating a DAO that would store a deed on the blockchain then create a subgraph using The Graph to index it. Before the day ended We got two new members Ke and Shandora and after their introduction, my morale was up again.

Day Two was a busy one, Christine forked a Moloch DAO framework on GitHub to start making adjustments. A sample deed was added to IPFS by downloading the desktop version. The remix was used to publish the PDF to the Ropsten testnet by following this tutorial using Infura: Click here

//SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.3;
contract IPFS {

string ipfsHash
function sendHash(string memory x) public {
    ipfsHash = x;
}

function getHash() public view returns (string memory) {
    return ipfsHash;
}

}

The above ipfs.sol was added to the forked Moloch DAO repository.

Day Three started with The Smart Contract being deployed Click here

An index.js file was added to the repository and website to be able to view the sample file from the Smart Contract. At this point, we didn’t know where to go with launching the forked DAO and linking it to the sample file we had on-chain so we took a break.

On day Four, The tension was quite high because we had barely 48 hours till the end of the hackathon and we were still faced with the problem from the day before. Everyone was so overwhelmed till Ke found a tutorial on Buildspace to launch a DAO using Replit(a browser-based IDE) and that lifted the team's spirit for a moment. However, when we tried to work through the tutorial, we ran into difficulties after a few steps as the Replit site proved to be glitchy and ultimately we weren’t all able to use it at the same time. The time zone factor was also playing a huge role in our inability to work efficiently as a team, I was about to quit till I saw a text from Christine urging everyone to take a break.

Day Five, The DAO Haus UI was used to Launch (Summon) a DAO. We successfully launched but set it up with an old Ropsten eth address that auto-populated in the setup and we couldn't acquire more Ropsten eth needed to make any votes. All of the faucets used a newer token address.

Dao.jpg

The next steps would have been to Launch another DAO with updated Ropsten ETH or, uses Gnosis -as suggested by DAO Haus community member. Also, the token had to be wrapped but we had little time and our project was due submission,

On day Six, Shandora created a beautiful presentation of our project on YouTube and it was successfully submitted.

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My thoughts on the hackathon

  • I truly enjoyed my first hackathon experience, I had the best team members and my network got expanded (I'm now a part of an amazing DAO).

  • The hackathon reflected areas I had to work on to become a better developer and I've been working on my perceived weaknesses.

  • I use to think Hackathons were exclusive to professionals but my experience taught me that newbies can partake because nothing teaches you better than real-life problems.

  • If you're a newbie and you've been shying away from hackathons, this is the sign you've waiting for!

Will I be participating in more hackathons?

The answer is YES! Everyone in my new DAO has been working tirelessly to ensure we partake in more hackathons and I can't wait to partake in more!

This brings you the end of my article, I'm glad you got to this point and I hope you enjoyed your read. Do well to follow me here for more Web3 related content.

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