No One Stopped Me (ETHBelgrade Hackathon)
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I went all the way to ETHBelgrade for my first hackathon. I didn't ship a dApp. I don't code. I learned to program in LISP at university, which has given me a phobia of unclosed parentheticals but not much in the way of practical relevance. For reasons that I don't think I can adequately explain, I decided that I wanted to take part in a hackathon anyway. I figured I'd spend 48 hours writing weird, Ethereum-aligned fiction. I even created KPIs:
I submitted a Taikai application that made my plan extremely clear. Four days later, I was accepted, along with a flight from ETHPrague and the promise of free food during the build. I took this to mean they understood and approved of my plan. This was my first mistake. I spent most of the two days and nights surrounded by unnervingly clever young men and women working in intense little teams, competing for €60,000 in bounties. I didn't want a bounty. I just wanted to finish something that I could share; partly for professional pride, mostly because I'd staked 0.05 ETH for a wristband and a place at the table, which would only be returned if I submitted a valid project. Valid was doing a lot of heavy lifting, here. I wrote directly into a GitHub repository, every thought committed in real-time to prove that the stories were conceived and written during the event. I lived on the (surprisingly good) conference buffet. I stayed at the venue until midnight the first night and got up again at 4am; my anxiety-driven insomnia finally useful. I challenged myself to include the Hackathon bounty givers, tagging them on my project notes. No one noticed. Still, I had great fun tucking a story into iExec code templates about a guy writing a heartbroken letter to his ex, passively-aggressively formatted as software. I called it Breakup as a Service. I spent a ludicrous amount of time formatting the code to look just right, even though it didn't do anything. Another was an intentionally ridiculous letter written by a Hackathon participant who's absolutely certain that cleaning whiteboards and offering positive energy makes them integral to a team that hasn't noticed them.
It was very meta. But to complete the hackathon, I didn't just need to submit a project; I needed to present a five-minute pitch of my product. My pitch, I decided, would be to read this story aloud. I've done a lot of readings and I was pretty sure the story would take about four minutes, leaving me one minute to introduce myself and explain what I was doing. If I spoke quickly, I might even get ten seconds on the importance of fiction in tech. But this is shoved into the pile of things to worry about after I've submitted my project. By the evening of the second day, the other teams were in tense discussions to get their apps working and filming polished demo videos in odd corners of the Sava Centar. I created a pretty PDF of five stories that I decided were complete, another word doing some very heavy lifting, and wasted two hours making a pretty cover. At the last minute, I included a page of completely pointless project metrics.
That night, I discovered that the demo video wasn't optional: it was a requirement for getting my stake back. I retreated to my accommodation, sleep-deprived and muttering. After a few hours of fitful rest, I made a loom video of the PDF with a voice-over that sounded like I was slowly disintegrating. I submitted it with fifteen minutes to spare. This was about the time that Taikai crashed, which I'm choosing to believe wasn't personal. It sounded like the conference center was chaos so I stayed in my room. I was supposed to pitch this thing, like a real product. I needed an introductory statement. I needed to rehearse reading the story. I probably should've made PowerPoint slides but there was definitely no time for that. Somehow, I had to explain my art to a crowd who were expecting to check if my code would compile. The easy first step was to practice my story so that I would know how long it took to read. Before I began, I glanced at the official Discord channel. My heart sank. The pitch sessions would start an hour after submission deadline, it said. I’d already blown half of that on spiraling. Someone posted a spreadsheet with all the teams. I was 7th. I grabbed my stuff and ran to the Sava Centar, arriving at five past. The spreadsheet showed team number three as “in the room”, which I took to mean pitching, giving me twenty glorious minutes to grab a pastry and cobble together an intro. But then the status line vanished. I abandoned the coffee queue and marched up to the desk in front of the conference hall to ask how I’d know when it was me. They scanned the spreadsheet and told me I should just go in and wait my turn. Right. No pastry. No coffee. No prep. But at least I’d get to hear other people’s pitches and work out what I was supposedly meant to be doing. I walked in to find clusters of people all over the room. Some were sitting at small tables facing the wall. A small crowd huddled near the stage; I assumed they were the team currently pitching. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and whispered the format: I had five minutes to speak. She’d wave when my time was up so that we could have three minutes for the Q&A. I nodded and asked in a whisper where I should sit. She pointed to a table where two men were engrossed in their laptops. There wasn’t much room but I sat down across from them, pulling out my notebook. I settled in. I smiled politely at the two men across from me. One, a friendly looking man with a thick beard, smiled back. The other never looked up. I leafed through my scribbled pages and began rooting around in my pockets for my pen. About ninety seconds passed before the friendly one with the beard looked at me and spoke at full volume, as if we weren’t in a room full of people nervously pitching their projects. “So,” he said. Rude, I thought. A brief pause and he continued. “Do you want to start?” I blinked and then froze in horror. “Is this my pitch session?” Both stared at me and nodded. Yes. Yes, it was. I opened my mouth and closed it again, hoping the floor might swallow me whole. I mumbled something incoherent about fiction before closing my mouth again firmly. FriendlyBeardGuy asked me if I had a Github repo. I did! I spelled out t-w-e-l-v-e-m-e-a-t-b-a-l-l-s and they each pulled up my repository on their laptops and began rummaging through my files. That flicker of relief vanished: This was exactly the wrong place to start. I tried to explain that the repo was full of stories. They looked up from their laptops and then down again. Mr Serious broke the silence. “So you have no code?” A tiny shake of my head. “Is there an app?” Another tiny shake. He glanced at his screen, as if retracing the steps that had led him here. He looked like a man who’d arrived at the wrong meeting, the wrong building, possibly the wrong profession, but was too polite to say “What the hell is this?” I stared at the floor as I explained that I was going to read them a story. Heavy silence, as if I were a cat offering them a dead bird. I fumbled for my phone to find the file, which I had not yet actually ever read aloud. I tripped over the title like it was a loose paving stone. Both men stared at my repo as if a user manual might appear. I took a deep breath and read the next line, where the story was addressed to the judging committee. FriendlyBeardGuy looked up, puzzled. Was I talking to him? At least he was listening. I kept going, half hoping the floor would reconsider. As I got to the bit about the participant wiping the whiteboard that no one had used, Mr Serious glitched, his face shifting into something that might have been a smile. That tiny spark was all I needed. I kept reading, my confidence growing. The woman from the start walked over, hovering behind the men. She held out a flat hand, lifting it up and down. I stopped, stared at her in confusion. She made a wavey motion. Oh shit. I was reading competently, finally, which meant that I was using a public reading voice for an easily-distractable audience. My mother would have called it my outdoor voice; meanwhile other people were in there doing their own pitches, probably wondering what the hell was wrong with me. “I’m so, so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be so loud.” “No, no,” she said, looking almost as confused as my judges. “Just your five minutes are up.” That’s it? I looked at her and then at the men. This was the signal for the three-minute Q&A, a nightmare from which I might never recover. Maybe one of the questions would be “How does the story end?” FriendlyBeardGuy smiled at me the way you smile at someone having a psychotic episode and said, “Don’t worry” in a soothing voice. I took this to mean I should keep reading. Somehow, I made it to the end of the story. “Thank you,” I said in a gravelly voice. Both of them stared at the middle distance without a word. I could only have made this worse by offering to tell the whole story in interpretive dance. The floor beneath me remained disappointingly solid. Mr Serious lifted his laptop and turned it towards me, showing me my repo. “I found code,” he said. Breakup as a Service glowed on the screen. I gritted my teeth and attempted to speak through them. “It’s a story about a guy who is trying to use code templates to write software but he’s lying to himself and really just writing to his ex-girlfriend.” This did not help to clear things up. Excerpt from Breakup as a Service He scrolled through the file. “So, this won’t run?” “No.” Right now, this was the only thing that I was confident on. “It’s pure vibe coding. I wrote it with AI. I showed it to a dev friend to check the syntax but he refused.” FriendlyBeardGuy nodded in sympathy with my unknown friend. ”There’s a PDF,” I said. “Of all the stories. That’s probably easier to read than the Github repo.” They both nodded pleasantly. They were never going to read the PDF. ”That was a very enjoyable story to hear,” said FriendlyBeardGuy. We were finished. I stumbled out and started laughing. Someone turned to stare, but after the last ten minutes, it barely even registered. It was over. At least for me. Mr Serious was probably still staring at my code, hoping it would eventually explain itself. In that regard, he and I had a lot in common. — This one's a bonus article, because I love you. And because EVMavericks funded my trip to Prague, which made Belgrade possible. Without them, this story (and five pieces of fiction and my lingering trauma) wouldn't exist. If you've enjoyed these dispatches, support the Mavs and their commitment to public goods and independent journalism. I'm already scheming my next event, so if you've got conference recs or funding leads, let me know! submitted by /u/Twelvemeatballs |
