Growing & Sustaining Developer Ecosystems

Transcript

[Music] all right good afternoon I'm qz I hailed from Angel hack and it's been my sixth Force Asia actually I remember coming here back in 2018 uh back at the lifelong learning learning Institute in Singapore so I'm glad this is my first time in Hanoi it's been beautiful the weather is so much better than Singapore so today I'm going to be talking about different approaches to Growing uh and sustaining developer ecosystems I think that this is somewhat relevant to the open source Community uh ultimately it's developers that keep our software alive and what we do at Angel

hack is that we engage and grow different developer ecosystems I think some of you might have heard of Angel hack for quite a few years ago back in 2016 and 2018 we used to do a lot of hackathons around the world some of them were at Saigon um we had some folks here that were mentors at Angel hack and you know on behalf of Angel hack I like to thank you for participating all those years go so a bit about angel hack oh it's a bit laggy okay so what do we do uh as the name suggests we do hackathons and over the years we have

done quite a lot of hack on uh and thousands of projects have come out of them and so I think our experience uh running different hackathons across the world has given us uh quite an interesting view of this Paradigm of engaging developers uh in our vocabulary we call them uh developer activations uh and today I'm going to share a bit about a different taxonomies of hackathons uh each of them have different outcomes and as a student or as a community leader or as a developer relations uh team member um you might want to consider designing your heckadon for the kinds of outcomes

that you want so here's a quick taxonomy of heatons right uh in my opinion there are three General types of heatons uh and as a student uh you will kind of move through different types of heatons um I personally have been at all three different types uh and I think we'll start with the first one so the goal of an education type hackaton is to lower the barrier of Entry to the product or to the ecosystem that you would like to engage and generally what we do is that I mean we are Asian right like competition is in our blood but that is

kind of against the goals of an education hackathon what what we have done over the years is that we would create uh multiple Bounty so that more people can win so that more people are motivated to participate and to try the different uh developer tools and products that uh people would like you to use during the hackathon so as a student um when you go for heatons and you're here to learn right I know it can be very daunting can be very scary you know like oh this is like my first time going for a hecaton I only learned to code in python or JavaScript like four weeks go not sure if I'm going to win right we've all been through these anxieties and so education type padons are meant to be friendly and when you

are getting started these are the best types so what do you see in this education heatons right primarily you will notice that there are many many different small price pools right there might even be educational bounties where you know you get rewarded for trying some of the developer tools that you get to do there's a lot of uh somewhat handholding in a sense where uh they might be more t uh kind of like protracted onboarding processes where you might be onboarded slowly to figure out like oh say you know how to do this programming language and you're a designer but you might not know uh like ux or something right or you you you might have to figure out how to do

some kind of team matching all of these are actually supposed to help you right and these uh processes are actually uh helping teams form and this is kind of what makes education heatons very fun you get to meet new people you get to work on new things and hey you might just win something right so that's the first archetype right an education hackaton the second type is what I call social heckadon uh and what's interesting about them is that well the truth is you know working in Tech uh especially after covid can be somewhat lonely right like we are very used to working in distributed teams decentralized teams where you might only see your team lead like once a week for

the stand up or something right and that is even worse when you look at developers across the entire ecosystem um that can be very difficult for different communities that want to sustain their developer ecosystems especially in open source projects right uh social heatons uh such as the one that occurred at Force Asia I think two weeks ago um it's a good way to bring together developers across the space more senior Developers can play the role of being a mentor right and you might be mentored by incredible people that you feel just amazed to be basking in the Limelight with uh and for new people right this is a good chance for you to meet other developers that you might form a lifelong friendship with and so I

think social heatons are generally a little better for people that have like some kind of working experience or who have gone to hackathons before um that being said some people are just naturally social right and so uh if you come across a heckadon where there are many like side events where there are lots of like social mixers um that's a good time to meet people generally these hackathons tend to be paired together with conferences so it's a really good chance for you to also go for the conference meet new people and the best way to make friends is to build something together right to bring out that tinkerer in you so that's social hackathon in my experience at Angel hack

we have done something called um recruitment hackathons uh as this name suggests its goal is to find Talent a lot of projects actually do this as part of like succession planning it's actually really difficult to figure out like um firstly culture fit and also skill fit right and so what's the best way to figure out whether a developer or group of developers might be perfect for your project well I mean just getting them to build something tends to be the best method and so recruitment hackathons are something that we have done for quite a few clients um especially Banks uh they tend to use this as part of their recruitment process um as a student actually it's a really good opportunity for you to

practice I mean ultimately you got to go for coding interviews right um but there's no better way of getting a foot in the door by showing a project that you have built using the software stack that uh that your target bank or your target uh team or company is already using right so that's actually a really good chance for you to get a foot in the door so here is our overall taxonomy of hackathons um but I'd like you to take a pause and think about it a little differently right uh over the last two days or three days when I've been talking to students and people I think generally you kind of see heatons as a competition right it's like a chance for you to compete and win right to try and like do well and to stand out amongst

the crowd um maybe take a chance to think about it more of as a learning experience something that is a part of your developer journey and so I think a better way to look at heatons is to see them as Community touch points right now it's important and I think for us as a generation that has survived and gone through covid uh we truly appreciate being there in person physical Community interactions are things that I think previously we didn't appreciate as much but after covid we have realized that it's something extremely important and I'd like to encourage even students to even try running your own hackathons right it

might seem daunting as a kind of like an event organization perspective but actually it can be pretty fun right it's like hosting a party uh where you get food and you get drinks and you hang out and you build something together right um as Angel hack I think that's kind of our bread and butter we host heckadon in really interesting places with really interesting projects uh and companies uh I remember years ago we did one in Malaysia at the floor of one of the larger shopping malls right like that's really interesting you know you get to put developers at the Forefront that's something that we absolutely love to do so from uh project perspective let me

change the frame a bit uh what does this t do for you right I think when you look at these three things they help you achieve different outcomes especially from a developer relations perspective um the first one being an education hackathon um the goal is to really help to lower the barrier of Entry especially for new technologies right there is a a Time tradeoff opportunity cost right you could be doing literally anything else than learning something new um and that can be challenging right especially for new and upcoming Technologies where the tooling might be uh broken or just like half done right all that can be exhausting education hackathons are really good it's two ways right you get to learn about the shortcomings in your

product something that your developers can focus on that can help you with your product road map your feuture road map for uh user perspective right it's a chance for you to put yourself at the Forefront right and use new Cutting Edge tools right like two weeks ago we did a hackaton with uh open AI credits right now that was something that I didn't feel I didn't didn't expect myself to have a chance to do but the attendees of the hackaton were absolutely amazed for this opportunity to use the open a API to build something right the second one is for social hackathons I think for that from a project perspective uh you do need to maintain some kind of momentum for your project uh it's kind of like this old phrase about love right

like a a moving candle or moving flame W won't go out right so I think that's kind of like a good analogy for this Community needs love right and you need to make sure that you see each other and you have constant interaction if not it's going to be very difficult to be top of mind for the last one is a bit more obvious uh in this day and age Talent is very hard to find it's very hard to figure out uh what what kinds of modalities to engage talent in a way that stands out Beyond just some kind of LinkedIn post or job board and hackathons are actually a pretty good way for doing this uh it's kind of like a fun way for Recruitment and a good chance for you to figure out uh your own recruitment processes even so for us uh at Angel heck we' have

come up with different modalities to engage the community uh the first one is something we call learn and earn where projects uh can put up bounties or true boot camps and people like students or developers can come in and do things and they get rewarded for trying something new right for social hackathons this is a bit more straightforward uh we do hacker houses and typical physical hackathons for recruitment uh for that it's a bit more focused uh and a bit more like Venture is and so we do things like incubators and accelerators now I'm going to take the chance to share some old case studies that we did at Angel hack uh it's it's been a while but I think there still somewhat relevant so recently uh I think uh the

Defcon team has been at for Asia today so I wanted to pull up this uh example where we work together with Google Cloud to teach people how to run ethereum validator noes right and basically 397 people participated in trying this out um what's a similar parallel right if you have new hardware for example that you want people to use this is one modality for you to try next at Angel hack we work together with the Singapore government to help out during covid and so what we did was to work closely with the industry to figure out what are some industry needs and then match them with like learning needs

and we had a really high placement rate through this kind of like semi boot camp that we ran now like I mentioned about new technologies we work with IBM to get people to try different uh Quantum Technologies this is something that is super Cutting Edge right and to have 700 people trying out Quantum Computing for the first time I can guarantee you in six years right I will be able to see some people come up to me at conferences and be like this was the first time I use quantum Computing and now I'm a researcher and that's the kind of impact that you can create in the space lastly this is something that I find quite interesting we work together with NASA to run a hackaton um with uh the open source Rover challenge to

figure out how we could help with the different Mass Rovers um so I have 30 seconds left and I know that the next speaker is somebody that highly anticipated so I'm going to quickly move on to to the last piece um which is actually what we're here for the last thing is that actually Angel hack is hosting an event at hoim Min City on the 27th to 28th of April uh and I'd like to encourage people to sign up and come for the event because this is going to be a large education and social hecaton and for that we have very graciously put up a $180,000 price pool uh for hackers and so I'm just going to leave a q code here for as long as I can but please scan it

and sign up for the hackathon uh this one has a discount code so it's free for you uh but if you want a shot at winning the $180,000 prize pool uh please scan it and I will leave it as long as I can okay so thank you so much I'm qz uh you can see me nearby uh and I'll be around okay thank you you