The question "What should you do after Hoon School?" was previously asked, and answered with 'participate in App School Live'. This is half the answer. The other half is 'participate in the Urbit Foundation Assembly 2022 Hackathon', an undertaking designed to give new Hoon programmers and Urbit app developers an opportunity to sharpen their skills on a concrete project idea of their own chosing.
The hackathon will run concurrently with App School Live, with an official start time of July 15th at noon PDT immediately following a 'Team Formation' call hosted by ~lagrev-nocfep and ~taller-ravnut from 10:30-11:59am PDT. During this call, details of which will be provided in ~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse, participants who are not yet part of a team or project will get a chance to brainstorm project ideas and meet potential teammates. Ideally, project teams will consist of two to three people, including frontend, backend, and product/UX skillsets. Single person teams may be accepted, but collaboration with other contributors is encouraged.
When it comes to the project idea itself, the only constraint for entries is the ability to answer 'yes' to the question: Have you built something that the community likes? Implied within that parameter is a project will cover something that can be crafted into a presentable form prior to Assembly Miami, but be it a useful CLI tool, a game with collaborative interaction, or a powerful set of agents that connect your urbit to the old web, the specifics of the projects are entirely open ended.
Selection of winners will happen in three parts:
- Projects should be in a shareable state by September 16th for preliminary review by a panel of judges. The top four submissions, as selected by the Urbit Foundation will get the chance to deliver a 20 minute demo (including Q&A) on September 24th.
- It is by this demo, and distribution to the network of the app (if appropriate) that Assembly attendees will select their favorite submission using Holium's Ballot app. Voting will conclude on September 25th, giving app developers time to separately demo their app to voters, get helpful user feedback for ongoing development efforts, and interact with potential future contributors.
- As not all developers are able to attend Assembly Miami, for teams that cannot have at least one member attend Assembly in person, a separate set of prizes are available and will be distributed to the winning project as judged by network participants.
As a bonus, hackathon entries are not only eligible to be awarded address space for the winning entries, but each project also eligible to get funded as a proposal through the Foundation's Grants Program. Funding is determined according to the usefulness and ambition of a project, plus the experience level of the project contributors and approval by a Mars Invisible College Champion. Follow the instructions here to submit your hackathon project for funding by the Foundation. And if you are already working on a grant and wish to participate in the hackathon, all you need to do is sign up below. Grants Program participation does not necessitate participation in the hackathon, and hackathon participation doEs not necessitate participation in a grant proposal but if you can do both–why not?
Sign up here if you are interested in participating in the hackathon.