Algohub Hack just gone – other hacks coming up
Over the last couple of months I have been participating in a Hackathon organised by Algo Hub in conjunction with Reach Language. I had the pleasure of working with Sean Slack, a recently graduated Programmer from my old university, Deakin.
We built a working prototype of a decentralised messaging app as part of a wider project we are hoping to continue working on together. It’s fair to say that we were a little surprised when we were voted into second place by our peers in the first round of judging.
You can watch an interview here of our experience in the program.
Through a lot of hard work, a lot of late nights, and with great support from our Mentor and the community in the Reach Discord Server, we were able to create a working prototype within the time frame given to us as participants in the Reach Hackathon
Our prototype messaging dApp allowed us to send messages from person to person, as well as create groups for group messaging opportunities.
For both of us, there were some nerves at the beginning of the project. There was a lot for us to learn in a short period of time. This was combined with a high level of excitement as we were both embarking on our first Blockchain project – our first project building with Reach and on the Alogrand blockchain.
We were both passionate believers in decentralised Social Media so both were excited to get our hands dirty.
Given how much we needed to learn, The first couple of weeks was mostly reading the Reach documentation, going over the rock paper scissors tutorial a few times and looking through the project examples on the Reach github to get a better understanding of how everything worked together in the building environment. The support of our Reach mentor during the hackathon was invaluable. When we got stuck he helped guide us further to areas of potential research. Two examples here were API participants and events.
Sean wrote some pseudo code as a starting point and our mentor Nimi was invaluable with providing improvements and advice with a lot of the smart contract code.
The support of the Reach community on Discord was invaluable. Before embarking on the Hack, we had to submit code for the Reach Rock, Paper, Scissors tutorial. Sean took the heavy lifting for our team by working on this tutorial. During this process he was having some issues and getting some errors. He reached out to the Community and was supported quickly. It seems many others were having similar problems and he was able to help his peers by putting this question out there.
Similarly, the community support was first rate as we were developing our Hack project. We first reached out in the discord when running into issues attaching to the contract on testnet which was due to a new update on the Algorand blockchain. Hamza and Amir from Reach offered help and directed me to the reach github where a discussion on how to fix this problem had already happened.
Further, for many of the issues I ran into when trying to understand some of the concepts of Reach I was able to search the Reach discord and would usually find someone previously having asked the same question with an answer from the Reach community.
For us, the biggest challenge was needing to learn 2 programming languages that we had never used before (Reach for making the smart-contract and interacting with it, and React for the user interface) as well as learning more about the Algorand blockchain.
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We had not met prior to the Reach Hackathon – Hamish had the idea and Sean was looking for a project to help finish his university degree. Having enjoyed working together, the intention is to continue exploring ways to work together and expanding on the project – including microblogging, audio support and further “social media” features.
The Reach Hackathon was a great opportunity for us both to start our building journeys, to network with the wider Algorand community and to explore further a future supported more fully by Web 3. We are both grateful for the opportunity.