Yes, you read that right. Everyone should join these hackathons. There are a slew of reasons to participate in a hackathon and those reasons should not be understated. But there is something extra special about blockchain/smart contract hackathons.
You non-techies out there may have already glossed over this, but I hope my emphasis on everyone has kept you here. There’s so much more to a hackathon project than just coding. While a pure software engineer may be a monster at coding, they may not have all the tools needed for a successful project. Idea generation, research, marketing, and industry-specific knowledge are all pieces that can make a project shine or plummet. Not to mention, perhaps you’ve always just been curious to learn more about this wild smart-contract idea.
If you still need to know why smart contracts and blockchain are life-altering technology, check out this video which explains blockchain and smart contracts at a simple level and how it’s becoming stronger and more essential to us today.
1. Learn Bleeding Edge Advances in Smart Contract Technology — Right From the Source
Image from https://chainlinkecosystem.com/factsheet/
Often, the best way to learn something is to jump in. For most hackathons, the draw is that it’s a dedicated time to set aside from your normal life to jump into an exciting new world. You can have no idea what you’re doing — you may simply be interested in the technology — but after a weekend, a week, a month, or however long the hackathon is, you can come out with some amazing tech skills.
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Blockchain especially has tools to get you started. From simple documentation, tutorials, to just asking the source of the technology. How awesome would it be if node.js experts were available at every hackathon? You’d no longer have to spend years searching the web for your npm error, when probably all you needed to run was npm install again or something!
There’s often a Discord with every sponsor or technology ready to answer any questions that you have and help get you set up for success. Remember in college when professors had office hours but you never went because it was across campus? Well, imagine those office hours being right at your fingertips, looking to help solve your project in any way they can.
Plus, if you enter a hackathon with the Chainlink project, you get to talk to me!
Once you learn even a little about smart contracts/blockchain, you instantly join the elite group of engineers who are known as blockchain engineers. In 2018 the number was about 105,000 in the entire planet.
That is about 0.6% of the 18.2 million software engineers on the planet. Essentially, you instantly join a top percentage of software engineers!
You don’t even have to finish a whole project. You can just show up, join the community, learn, build something fun, and leave all the wiser.
#software-development #hackathons #ethereum #programming #blockchain
