Do you remember your first hackathon? What was it like? Did you struggle to find a team? Did you hack with friends? Was it in person or virtual? Did you actually build and submit a project or were you a bit confused with it all?

A little over a month ago, I saw a tweet from Cami asking women participating in the Web3 con hackathon if they needed a teammate. I replied to the tweet and the next thing you know I'm staying up all night with a team of ladies I'd never met before and submitting my first hackathon project.

My Journey to the Hackathon

I stumbled into Web3 in early February by registering for Web3con, winning an NFT giveaway and getting into Developer_DAO. At the time, I had so little knowledge about Web3 that I had to ask a friend how to create a wallet because I didn't even know what an eth address was but I needed one to receive my NFT.

I got into Developer_DAO, introduced myself, and scheduled a call with With Heart from developer DAO. I also signed up for the Web3con hackathon because why not?

A few days later I joined a group of female devs from replying to Camis's tweet and formed a team with them. Even though Cami planned to make one team, she had so many women and non-binary people interested and we ended up forming 6 teams of 5 people all of whom registered and built really cool projects

We got a lot of support from people and companies in form of sponsorships, CEOs hopping on zoom with us and a ton of advisors and mentors.

The Hackathon

Day one of the hackathon, involved forming a team and a lot of brainstorming on our project Idea and what we could build. Web3Con hackathon had a list of ideas we could pick from and what stood out to us most as a team was building a decentralized fundraising/crowdfunding app.

With the war going on in Ukraine, and people lacking access to funding, having issues donating and receiving funds from certain restrictions from centralized platforms, we decided to build a solution to that problem. It was also a problem that was very close to home for us with 2 members of our team being from Afghanistan and 3 of us from Nigeria, two countries that have in different ways been cut off from the world by their government, restricted from raising and receiving aid, from protesting, etc.

After picking our project, we discussed how we would go about building it and ended the day sharing resources with each other that would get us up to speed with some blockchain technologies and help us build.

The remaining days of the hackathon went by so quickly partly because I was a bit busy but also because we were learning and doing so much. After experimenting with a bunch of technologies, we settled on using Moralis which was great because we didn't need to write a smart contract and could use Javascript for our application which we deployed on Vercel. Shout out to Tomilayo and Vee for figuring that out🤗🤗 . We then created our slides, recorded a demo, hit submit, and finally went to bed 😴😴

Favorite things about the hackathon

One of the best things about the hackathon was the mentorship I got both officially and unofficially. One of the mentors Cami invited to our discord was John Kim and he ended up being the team's advisor. He was really helpful to us and would even join our meetings by 3:30 am his time (timezone woes😫) and shared a ton of resources with us.

Another mentor was Cami who asides getting us together, supported, and encouraged us throughout. She also hosted a subgraph workshop with Nader for us and got a lot of help, mentors, and even funding for us.

Also, remember the coffee chat I scheduled with With-heart from Developer_DAO, it happened to be scheduled for the first day of the hackathon and he was kind enough to give really helpful advice.

Final Thoughts

I wish I was more prepared or had more time to devote to the hackathon and attend all the other events that were happening during it, but I'm grateful that I did it even though I felt unready.

This experience opened my eyes to the real-world utility of blockchain technology, the importance of community, the vast opportunities in Web3 for builders and women like me, and the role that I could play in solving problems, onboarding more women into Web3, and collaborating with others.

I also made a lot of amazing friends and learned a ton. The hackathon would have gone a lot differently for me if I had never joined that group or met Cami and all the amazing women ❤. Thank you all for making my first hackathon memorable. I can't wait for my second hackathon❗❗

#WomenWhoTech