Unleashing the Heroes
For three days, over one hundred and fifty strangers worked together to form twenty-two great teams and demonstrate shared ideas in working form. Gathering at Draper University’s Hero City, this was Developer Camp’s 20th event, and it brought together our most diverse group of participants ever.
Our goal is to bring gender equality to all technology communities, and we achieved 31% female participation, which is unprecedented in the blockchain developer space.
We chose Hero City because that co-working space is the genesis of our host Zūm, and a place where startups are born and incubated. This proved true once again.
Alumna and successful cofounder Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path and Luxr, the former Chief Product Officer of Bionic gave us all some perspective on what it means to be successful in the fast-moving world of startups and entrepreneurship. We all must judge success for ourselves, and pull strength from the moments and people that challenge us.
After pitches from each member of the audience, teams formed organically. Days of hard work resulted in three-minute demonstrations which showed us that Janice is right.
The best ideas, backed by teams that can execute, are born in the toughest of circumstances — as long as we have the support of a diverse community.
Awards
Most Revolutionary
Game Stor
Barry was the one of the first to arrive at the event. He ended up going first during demonstrations, and wound up first to receive his award. You gotta hand it to a person who breaks ground like that.
He fully demonstrated a video game distribution and hosting platform, built using TODA, and the Mimik Edge SDK. He showed us a working game using blockchain via Mimik services running on his phone. He used Python, Sphere, TODAQ, and, get this — he developed it entirely on site.
Revolutionary, indeed.
Most Motivational
Little Buddy
This two person team, who demonstrated their work by passing the mic back and forth, gave a clear description of the problem: we each require slightly different motivations in order to achieve our goals. Some are competitive, some are supportive, and some are collaborative when it comes to progress.
They showed a wonderfully designed virtual companion that promotes motivation and personal growth, using three different personae. They plan to pursue it at their upcoming One Medical hackathon, and so we just had to cheer them on.
Best Open Source
Rank Choice
Of all awards at Developer Camp, none is more sacred than Best Open Source. Open Authentication (Oauth) and PhoneGap came from this category, among many other projects like iUI, and TouchCode. We are a community built on top of open standards and open source code. It is our responsibility to give back as individuals.
This year, two of our most distinguished alumni joined up with two new attendees to deliver a clever, simple implementation of rank choice voting. Built using TODA blockchain, ethereum, and Swift, the team created a service and opened it up using the MIT license. They even demonstrated it live using the audience as subjects.
Kudos to this impressive team and their ambitious goal to allow rank choice voting in any context. Kryptonic is proud to stand alongside these creators and offer them the chance to imagine how far their talents will reach.
Best Game
Loot Quester
Nothing appeals to the audience quite like parent-child-based teams. Pair that with one of our founding competitors, a wizard out of NASA who won our contest years ago and sold the result to one of our sponsors, and you have a formula for success.
Loot Quester promises to “end boredom by allowing you to play games as you change classes” at school. Using a TODA / Swift API that they built, and a set of unit tests that they open sourced, this game provides bragging rights, along with traceable transfer of ownership for digital assets. This is a blockchain-based location adventure game, and it had the crowd yelling.
Freely available using the MIT license, check l00tqstr.com for future details. The team received an offer of incubation by TODA, and were invited to pitch their business to Kryptonic.
Best New Developer
Fred’s Coffeshop
Delivered via live demo in the iOS Simulator, this app features group chat, cross-platform features using Flutter, and utilize Kintone as their database. In a limited amount of time, they even managed to learn Dart.
Fred’s Coffeeshop is more than an app, however — it’s an experience. The concept is to give customers a place to work in peace, share moments, share cannabis, and meet friends. This group is self-taught and highly motivated, with a vision. We can’t wait to see what is next from them.
Best Student Developer
Unicorn Catch
Daughter of our host company’s CEO, sister of our winningest young alumnus, you would expect great things from this fourth-grader. Knowing this, you could not have been more proud watching her demonstrate her work in front of the crowd.
Built using Scratch, this is “a game that you can play if you are bored.” Animated with custom artwork and written using Scratch, Anusha’s game is live and playable right now. Her poise and preparation beguiled the audience and showed her to be a true “unicorn” herself.
Coolest
Geeky Jacket
What do you do when you’ve been helping out every other team on site, have only a few hours before demo time, but you have a super fun idea? You get yourself to the fabric store, whip out a circuit board, and hit the stage Project Runway style.
Beginning their demo with party music, the Geeky Jacket team proceeded to “connect to my jacket, as one does.” Using Google colors and bling, with custom stitching, this team added Flutter to clothing. Distributed using the MIT License, this project has been blowing up Twitter ever since its debut.
This was definitely and immediately the coolest demo we saw, but you don’t have to take our word for it.
Hustler Award
PCSA
PCSA stands for private car sharing application, and it was built using Kintone on windows in the early hours before our showcase. Shown in a live demo, its fearless creator took on one of our most successful alumni companies without realizing it.
Instead of being critical, the crowd encouraged her to find a niche where Getaround cannot win. Her unflappable response earned her our new Hustler Award for the participant with the most ambition and personal drive to learn.
Best Sacrifice to the Demo Gods
Clipboard Share
Occassionally, a programmer attempts a feat so insurmountable that it actually fails on stage. When this happens, that person can either crumble or stand tall and discuss what they learned. Peer Dampmann, an experienced Developer Camp winner, chose the latter and showed not only courage but also grace.
He was attempting to use Flutter and Firebase to share a clipboard between platforms. He wasn’t able to get this to work over the weekend, but did reveal some flaws in both systems that turned the imagination of the audience to support his idea.
It happens every time: someone has to make everyone else look good. We celebrate ambition and persistence, and so we awarded Peer with the encouragement to keep trying.
Best Design
Untangled
A multiple award-winning pair, a user experience graduate student, a healthcare expert from out of state, and a resident entrepreneur met on day one and stuck like glue. From that moment, they dedicated themselves to the problem of staying focused. The result is a project that helps creative people stay on task, demonstrated across platforms and the Web.
Driven by user research and built using Flutter, Firebase, and React, this team showed the audience how great design starts at the kernel and flows outward. A cross-platform, live demo, this project looks ready to ship an alpha. It showed how to fully sync across the Web as well.
Billed as “a simple to use tool to help creatives add, share and easily update todo lists that uses technology to improve their workflow,” you should CheckUntangled.com and see for yourself why they won yet again.
Best Developer Tool
imgMARK
Led by a grand-prize-winning Camp Counselor, this team showed a working web demo, served using localhost, and built from scratch over the weekend. Using Flutter and AWS, and hoping to become an open standard, imgMARK is an image rights protection service that enables high quality unmarked images to be displayed on authenticated sites. The system automatically watermarks any unauthorized downloads.
You know you are onto something when people come up to you afterwards with suggestions on how to improve it. This team got all of the developers in the room talking.
Concept Award
Ground Truth
While helping the Deep Waste team (see below), Bilahari somehow found time to demonstrate the integration of TODA and TODAQ to crowd source queries for ground truth and incentivize the sharing of information.
In the best tradition of Developer Camp, their work may be found at: https://github.com/bakkiraju/groundTruthTODA. Although still in early concept phase, we loved the vision and always support a team that helps other people.
Cross-Platform Award
Inventory
Our sponsor, Kintone, put out a challenge to any team that fully utilizes their platform, pushing it to levels not yet reached. The Inventory team showed a working demonstration of a POS system using Flutter across platforms.
Inventory is available now at https://github.com/hemonserrat/Inventory under the GNU license. The team was awarded a cool two grand for their professional pursuits.
Most Educational
Binaroo to the Rescue
Once in a while, a person’s pitch comes to life so fully over the weekend that you actually learn something just by watching their progress. This team, led by a certified expert in special education, showed us all exactly how to take a physical tool and scale it up using software tools and technology.
Binaroo to the Rescue is a kids computer programming tool, driven by a fun story that had us all engaged. Using Flutter, Kintone, a custom (patented) bitboard reproduced for iPhone—and a poster board—this team left no doubt that anyone can learn binary.
Most Inspirational
InspireLab
InspireLab helps middle schoolers and high schoolers make an impact through experiential learning. Building with Raspberry Pi, one of our favorite platforms, this team had a strong user flow and selflessly donated all of their work to the public domain: https://github.com/AbelRR/InspireLab.
Never stop.
Most Organized
Navi
This pair of sisters showed up at Developer Camp on a mission. The Murillo girls immediately dedicated themselves to finding a team that could take advantage of their coding skills. They found four interaction designers and together built a feature that should be a part of any navigation system: multi-stop routing.
Navi is a mobile navigation application that allows the user to enter multiple places of interest or tasks then automatically generates the most time-efficient route from beginning to end. Using Swift and the Google Places API, Navi straight up worked on stage. Not only did this team show prowess, they showed us all how we can organize ourselves along the way.
Simplest
Succeeding
One of the tenets of Developer Camp is that simplicity sells. To do something better than the competition, sometimes all you need to do is remove a few steps from impulse to action.
Working in the iOS simulator and built using Swift, “Succeeding” is simple task management by priority. Check it out at http://www.succeeding.cirne.com.
Props
Loly
Beginning with a strong design for her own dating app, Adryenn was a woman with a mission from moment one. Undaunted by setbacks, she focused on the problem of disincentivized user behavior and clearly defined a niche for herself.
Loly.io is a blockchain-based dating application in partially-working form. Although the results were inconclusive, its creator deserved some recognition for continuing the pursuit of safe fun.
TODA Corporate Challenge
HyperLocal
Our marquee sponsors, TODA, set out a specific challenge that dared participants to use their blockchain to empower social interactions. Many tried, but one man learned it all and showed us how such a tool could be used in an emergency.
Using Mimik Edge SDK, Campbell designed the “Hyperlocal Impromptu Community” to discover people and make valuable local connections. Using TODAQ, a user could even put down a bounty to incentivize group behavior. The Mimik team awarded him the latest MacBook Air for his efforts, and the TODA team granted him $2000 worth of TODA Note cryptocurrency on top of that.
No wonder he looks so stoked in that picture.
TODAQ Corporate Challenge
User Friendly TODAQ
Our partner TODAQ, a portfolio company in the TODA Network, offered another corporate challenge. Niye Turner, Linux Mint in hand, accepted that challenge and shipped it to open source.
He created “storage for anything, an interface for the TODAQ protocol” and you can find it at: https://github.com/NiyeT/Todaq
He won his own stash of $2000 in equivalent Toda Note crypto. It feels like nothing can stop Niye, and we look forward to his continuing success.
World Changer Award
Deep Waste
He started winning Developer Camp showcases when he was nine. That was five years ago. Now he is organizing high school hackathons of his own. We expected great things, and we were not disappointed.
Yash began by demonstrating the scale of the landfill problem, and how human trash poisons our environment and oceans. Once we were hooked, he hit us with the “why” of the problem: sorting trash is difficult and confusing.
Then, he demonstrated a solution that uses the phone to identify recyclable material—and it totally worked.
My project, DeepWaste, is an easy to use mobile app that provides instantaneous feedback to users on how to accurately dispose of waste. DeepWaste applies deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify waste into recycling, compost or landfill.
The audience gasped. Yash is fourteen, and he gave us all a glimpse of the future once again. The world is changing, and perhaps for the better with kids like him forging ahead.
Runner Up
Helpful Award
Livi showed up early and immediately dedicated himself to setup and registration without being asked. Throughout the event, he looked for ways to help others—all while working on a team of his own.
Livi is someone we can see holds great promise as a Camp Counselor. He was awarded a Ledger Nano S, and a standard titanium cryptocurrency wallet to hold its backup key phrases.
For someone so dedicated this early in his career, it seems inevitable that Livi Poon will accrue the kind of currency that requires an industrial-strength wallet. Keep it up, Livi!
Grand Prize
Most Helpful
Jeremy began by coordinating with Amazon and Rent the Runway for some stellar prizes. Then he flew himself out from New York, put himself up, showed up early, and stayed late every day.
He worked registration, and helped out on numerous projects, always offering to have people work alongside him while they figured things out over time.
We can safely say that this event would not have been possible without our good friend Jeremy Johnstone. An expert coder (server-side and client-side), a distinguished organizer, and a winning team member, he proved once again what it takes to be a Camp Counselor.
He was awarded a Cryptotag Starter Kit, a high-quality titanium cryptocurrency wallet to symbolize his strength, resilience, and long-standing value that grows exponentially over time. Thank you, Jeremy!
