Week 36: My First Hackathon in Estonia

This weekend, I attended a hackathon in Palo Alto Club located in Telliskivi. Telliskivi is like an accelerate place for start up companies. This hackathon aims to recovery Ukraine.

I was registered as an individual developer. The competition need at least 3 people to team up. Luckily I found two awesome Chinese guy who is making a start up in Estonia. They are using an AI model to analyze the bitcoin to find the dormant wallets. They will use these coins as unmovable assets, like the gold in the banks. Then they will use these coins to make interests. To make sure the accounts are truly ownerless. They will send a message using Odin protocol.

So, technical part is easy. The problem is, can we use the coins? The answer is the government may be.There are many laws about governments or banks for handling dormant assets. It is not a communist thing. And in some country, if some one occupied a house no one claims for long enough, they can own it.

The first day of this hackthon was like a battlefield. Different kinds of mentor asking tons of questions. They are elites in a lot areas. They can answer you fast and quickly asking super sharp questions. In the afternoon, everyone of the team was tired. There is a lecture about distributed machine learning, it is not my major, but it is fun to hear.

The second day, we finished our slide shows. There was a mentoring about how to do presentation. I learnt a lot from the mentor. Firstly, they ask us to choose one guy, to introduce my project in 15s. Then the other guy will explain how he understands it. The mentor introduced a lot important thing of a startup presentation, you need to describe your team more, try to do body gesture but only do movements when it is necessary, and don’t let the audience loose focus on you. Try to make friends with the technical. I learnt so much of him.

Finally, we didn’t win any thing. The top prize was given to a team that using YOLO to analyze damage in Ukraine. They have the most top technology and nice design. They already provide a business plan. The second prize was to an information collecting database, kind like an excel, but it works during the hard times, especially like COVID times. The third prize goes to a AI chatbot to help parents handle children’s emotion. There are some good ideas, There is a team made an app kind like a tamaguchi, a digital pets. It is like a children spy, the children will response emotions to the pet, and the pet will collect the emotions to their parents.

The hackathon is super fun, Sadly, I lost my ear phone T.T, not a good news for my podcast.