Post by Keanu Czirjak

✈️ Over the past two months.. I did two hackathons in two different countries back-to-back! 🇺🇲🇪🇸 1️⃣ I flew all the way from London to Chicago via Iceland, and drove 2 hours with my friends Dylan Kainth, Akshith Alluri and Nirmit Shah to Purdue University to do StarkHacks, certified by Guiness World Records as the world’s largest hardware hackathon. 🤯 Safe to say, this was the craziest hardware hackathon I’ve ever pulled up to. The organisers (big thanks to Riddhi Gupta and Aayan Agarwal & co!) took over the giant ROTC Armory and deployed a farm of 20 3D printers, let you borrow from a 50-page hardware catalog, with anything as small as ESP32s and Arduinos and as giant as robotic arms from the likes of Ford & AMD; and they had 400 hackers from across the US (and Europe) pull up to get tinkering! I saw some really impressive projects, big shoutout to Sherry Li, Apoorva S., Hudson Etkin for their cool Powerwalk shoe project; Ambarish Narayanan, Mehmet Mercan, Avanish Hebbal and Shyam Kumar for their winning OmniGlove project; Jashwanth Bamidi, Aryan Agarwal, Aarav Sureban for their winning VisionVest project; Darsh Thakkar, Gene Kang and Fannie Y. for their cool Rover-Drone project; and especially to Sanjay Tamilselvan and Adam Zhang for their really cool AXI6 DIY camera slider project - super dope!! 2️⃣ Straight after I came back to London and volunteered at the FIRST UK national robotics championships, I then flew to Barcelona to take part in HackUPC for the second time! This edition was special as it was their 10th anniversary, and needless to say I was not disappointed in the slightest. There was some cool sponsors this year like Qualcomm, HP, Pear, INDITEX Tech and others, and I managed to convince 130+ people from the UK to apply to HackUPC, making us the 2nd biggest group by nationality there! I, Nathan Jones, Yash Yadav and Aidan Madge built gittorrent, a prototype peer-to-peer Git backend on the Pear blockchain, with a special git-secret-like integration to safely transmit .env files. In tandem, I was invited onto the stage for winning 4th place in the CTF during the hackathon! 🏆 Several Brits from my hackathon community (iykyk) took the W this year as well. Big congrats to Andromeda Stroev & co for winning the entire hackathon, to Eli Lourens, Terry Huang, Akshat Thapa for winning the JetBrains track, to Yatharth M. for solo winning the Skyscanner track, to Kevin Georges & his team from Southampton for coming in the top 3 finalists also! And big thanks to Dylan Kainth, Faraz Ahmad Ahmad, Ally Bahaei, Arvin Hadidi, Chloe Ho, Ayman Shaikh, Joshua Rodriguez, Toby Chambers, Ecem Guvener, Tanish Patel, Talen Mudaly, Samuel Ratnam for showing up from the UK, and big crazy thanks to Afaq Virk, Emily Yee and Leila Wan for coming all the way from Canada and taking Ws?? Was also awesome to meet you Maiya M. and Amritpal Singh!