Fork, Merge, Build: Inside the ETHBoulder Hackathon

Transcript

ETHBoulder as “by the people, for the people.”

Yeah. Uh, love love that this app exists. And this app is starting to speak to a little bit of what I want to talk about of the hackathon, which is like kind of what Kevin's been pointing at is that ETH Boulder is really this by the people for the people thing. And so we're all creating it together. That's part of this unconference is that we're inviting all of you to be actively contributing to what we're like building here. And part of that means building for the people here and building with the people here and building from the insights that we have here. So Benjamin spoke a little bit to there's going to be this knowledge graph. You click a button on there and it brings you to this Bonfires AI knowledge graph tool.

The Hackathon Hub & what makes it different

And the talks from this main stage as well as some of the talks in certain Telegram channels are all fed immediately into that knowledge graph. And part of the idea here is we want to have a kind of communal communally sourced graph of knowledge that enables us to all build together. And so that kind of speaks to a little bit of how we're weaving the hackathon. And the hackathon is going to be a place that happens in a particular place as in the hackathon hub and that'll be um just a few few blocks down at 17205th Street. That's all in the Telegram. Um but it's also a place that's woven throughout.

Using AI tools to rapidly prototype

And so what we're really wanting to encourage is for all of you to be in a space of building and learning throughout the entire weekend. So there's going to be insights that are surfacing from every conversation here and you're going to have inspiration. And one of the lovely things that we have now is we have cloud and all these other amazing AI tools is that we can take these insights and we can rapidly turn them into experiments because we really want to cultivate a space of experimentation. So this hackathon will be less of a traditional hackathon. It will not be you form your team at the beginning and you spend your whole like time together with that team building something that you can demo at the end to compete with everybody. If you want to do something like that, that's great.

Why this isn’t a traditional hackathon

and we're encouraging this more open collaboratory space where you're sharing insights, you're demoing regularly, sharing what you're building and then you're forking each other's projects. If something excites you and you're like, I want to take that in a different direction, we want you to feel empowered to take those ideas and see where you want to take it so we can fork and merge and bring things together. So, we're going to be having uh for you, those of you who want to have a focused space to build, we'll have the hackathon hub and we're going to have regular workshops offered throughout that. I'll be teaching some a number of people here will be offering workshops and we'll have the unconference app so that if you want to offer a workshop where you're like, I have a really cool dev tool and I want people to use it. Um, then we

Workshops & builder energy

want to encourage you to use the shelling point app to build directly on it. We're going to have basic AI workshops, claude code workshops, um, experimenting with OpenClaw and other similar tools. We'll have workshops on how to use bonfires directly, how to connect that MCP directly into your cloud code. So, it's going to be a really amazing opportunity to just build and just want to encourage people if you want to have focused building energy. Come and join us at the hackathon hub, but also just a big encouragement to be connecting around this building energy together throughout the course of the weekend. So, keep attuned to the Shelling Point app. There's a few things already posted in there um and then there will be more soon. And I'll just point out that I'm using this Boulder

Using the app & Telegram to coordinate

Bonfire app and I just sent a message to this Telegram bot and I'm saying, "What's happening now?" And it's got all the information directly in there. So I say, "What's happening now?" And it's like, "Oh, well, right now we're live at ET Town Hall." Um, it talks about a few different events. And then it even says, "Oh, there's a hackathon hub kickoff happening at 12:00 at the hackathon hub." So if you want to hack, we're going to have a kickoff specifically at the hackathon hub at 12:00 over at 175th Street. I'll now bring Joshua up onto the stage and I hope to hack with all of you a lot this weekend. Thank you.