Cheers to an amazing weekend!!

Carrying my excitement along with its speed, the train to Banglore(10hrs of journey= a hell lot of time for self-reflection..yay!!) marked my maiden solo journey to my first-ever offline hacker house. It was a few weeks back when I received my invitation mail for this event. As a person who has always loved to code and continuously develop my skills, I felt intrigued just by knowing the event agenda.

“BLR Hacker House — Agenda: This is The Phoenix Guild’s first-ever female Hacker House in India! Happening in Bangalore, India for 2-days(September 3rd-4th). This hacker house will be filled with workshops and mentorship sessions for women looking to get into the web3 space and build something.”

At the last moment, my friends couldn’t make it to the event. Though I felt upset, I didn’t want to miss this opportunity (Thanks to Kunal and other amazing hackers for being an inspiration). I felt a frisson of excitement and fear.

By 6 am I reached the destination-Kormangala, Banglore.

The place had a self-energising aura to it. It felt amazing to be there with many other tech enthusiasts from different states of India. The organisers gave us a warm welcome. We had our breakfast and went for our first session by Sweta Shaw, followed by intriguing sessions and workshops by Sneha Mishra, Madhavan Manolan, Gnana Lakshmi, Prashant Maurya, Chetana Desai and Heather Swope(she is a Senior Blockchain Engineer at Boson Protocol. Yes! You read it right !).

The morning sessions were about exploring the Ethereum ecosystem(Ethereum is a platform for creating, connecting and monetising smart contracts and decentralised applications) and deploying Solidity Smart Contracts. After lunch recess, we had sessions on L2s (Rollups & ZK) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs( it’s a SECRET ; ) ). By evening we had formed various groups and brainstormed an idea for our project. All the mentors were extremely supportive. We worked on our project and presentation until early morning. Had a great sleep and a healthy breakfast(breakfast+lunch to be specific). We had sessions on the alt L1 ecosystem(Examples of Layer 1 protocols are Ethereum, Solana,Bitcoin) and about alt ecosystem projects.

Our project presentations began at 4:30 pm. Until then we all worked on our project. We faced issues deploying our contracts. The mentors helped us with the different other issues that popped up during the compilation of our code. There were a lot of great projects including DAPPs for organisations, securing pieces of evidence of a crime, organising and building resumes etc.

By 7 pm we winded up the event with a lot of smiles and poses for later LinkedIn posts and Twitter tweets. The next day I flew back to Cochin with a bag filled with goodies and a heart brimming with good memories. There wasn’t a single moment of this journey that I would want to change. Every moment was exciting and informative. I learned a lot and developed a passion for web3. A big thanks to The Phoenix Guild and the collaborators (StarkWare, Hedera Team, Near Protocol, ETHIndia, Devfolio, Spheron Protocol, Filecoin Foundation, Chingari App, IPFS) for providing us with such a fantastic opportunity and to those great girls I met there. Thanks to my family for funding this whole journey ;).

It was indeed an amazing weekend!!