Montana, US
This was a busy week, because of the hackathon submission & judging process, and publishing the RiB July newsletter. Since we started the road trip last week, we spent almost two days on the road.
Each Airbnb we’ve stayed in was great, and I especially like the cabin surrounded by mountains in Montana. It has amazing expansive views from all directions, such that I can see the sunrise and sunset. The changing sunlight enhances the texture of the surrounding mountains, making them big, bright, and stunningly vivid. The sky becomes the sea at night, in which the stars swim and shine.
BigAnnouncement.eth hacks
We finished our first hackathon project by giving the presentation to judges today. I didn’t hack on it more this week.
The work I did was more about the hackathon processes, such as recording a video, and deploying the IPFS website to three domains for consistency:
- 0.8 USD in ETH to deploy on BigAnnouncement.eth
- 1.1 USD in ETH to deploy on BigAnnouncement.crypto
- 0 to deploy on BigAnnouncement.news
“On chain” is expensive, and slow too.
I am so last-minute. We took the demo video just one day before the submission, then edited and uploaded it to YouTube just a couple minutes before the deadline. The video quality wasn’t as great as we expected, mainly because we underestimated video editing time. We will consider replacing it with a better one after we polish the product.
By taking this video, I finally realized how horrible my English pronunciation is. I want to make more videos to practice my spoken English.
I quite enjoyed this hackathon, and I learned a lot from the ETHGlobal team. They managed this online event very well:
- There were systematic weekly tracking, official notifications, and submitting processes for hackers;
- Supportive community chatting channels;
- Well organized information on Notion;
- The organizers couldn’t be more patient from start to finish:
- Trent reminded hackers of important notifications many times – besides email reminders and Slack channels, he also reminded us at the beginning and the end of each workshop;
- Emily helped zoom testing for each team, and she might need to do it for about 200 teams!
- Judges were kind too. I like how they asked interesting questions even though they were probably super tired – I myself was tired just waiting for other teams, and I couldn’t focus on what they were talking about.
Next, we might plan another one-month sprint to polish it and deploy it on the Ethereum mainnet.
RiB community
We published the RiB Newsletter #14 – Are We Smart (Contract) Yet? on Wednesday. I very much enjoy the discussion of the theme for each issue. It forces me to think more in-depth about blockchain engineering and industry trends.
I fixed the bug I previously made in the ribbot. I also added the Job Board page.
I was excited to see Lane’s tweet:
RiB is literally the only newsletter I read regularly, top to bottom. Highly recommend it if you’re not already signed up!
Such high praise gives me a lot more confidence in RiB. And I am happy he talks more in the RiB group too. Same with other contributors.
Readings this week
- Book: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser, who also wrote the classic book On Writing Well.
Random: road trip hikes
We had awesome hikes at each new place we have stayed, from which I have learned about the existence of bear spray: “Be Bear Aware".
To avoid people, and to see the early morning lights in nature, our hiking time is getting earlier and earlier. We still encountered people on the way back, so it seems we should hike even earlier next time.