IT Services Junior Developer, Natasha Bigford, attended Avalanche Summit in Barcelona from 22 to 28 March this year. Here’s her wrap-up of the event:
What was this event?
- Avalanche Summit is four day conference, ending with a two day hackathon contest.
- Over the four days I attended talks and seminars with industry professionals on new topics and revolutionary technologies on Web3 and Blockchain.
- I had the opportunity to network with other developers and people within various tech roles, building my connections.
- Based in the historical Museum Poble Espanyol in Barcelona, the event featured live entertainment, food and celebrations.
What did I learn?
- Web3 is next evolution of the internet. How we share our digital identity data will be separate to our web identity, and no longer tracking us. It’s one big concept, with many ideas.
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) means that one big entity holding our data i.e big companies like Facebook, will not hold it any more. Instead many more smaller groups will, like a democracy.
- Blockchain.
- Crypto-currency.
- How a hackathon is coordinated and managed. I was a part of a small ‘hacking’ team of 5 women we had the task of coming up with an idea for an application to be built using web3 and blockchain technology/concepts.
Hackathon project – application concept
We created a responsive match-making web app which matches users through interests and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Users can add their wallet and, with a gamified element, are challenged to find out as much as possible about their matches in order to gain coins. The idea of web3 is that users can take back ownership of their data, therefore they can pick and choose what data to reveal. The more they reveal, the better the matches.
Conclusion
- This experience was my first in-person tech conference. It was a brilliant opportunity to increase my understanding on new concepts like blockchain, that could possibly one day feed into the university infrastructure. i.e I’d like to spend time exploring the idea of having the student grade system on a blockchain.
- ‘Blockchain organises data while maintaining people’s privacy and this can serve as a central component for ensuring secure and credible academic records.’
- It’s important for more women to attend these events to be a presence and champion diversity in the technological spaces.
- The team I was a part of took first and second place, collecting a bounty prize of $2,000!