IRL: Hack Night for Tiny Apps
The first hacknight from OPENFORMAT was a low key informal affair which saw hackers in 3 hours build a ticketing system, a fan reward system, an artist tipping system, and decentralised quizzes.
The theme for this event based around the idea of tiny apps, gave us at OPENFORMAT an opportunity to get direct experience of our first release in the wild. We learnt a lot, we laughed a lot, we built cool things. 🌞
The most intriguing aspect I found became apparent at the end of the night while briefly exploring how the different tiny apps from each team could work together to create new constellations. The Tipsy Jar, the fan bounty app (from our very own Henry) and the ticketing app would all work together for a band or record label beautifully - a perfect default constellation for getting a new wave of artists out-there quickly. It really was amazing to see this come together for the first time, disparate apps, disparate developers, disparate ideas all joined together through tokens.
Side note: it appears that all developers want to build for the music industry 😏
It was a great night, lots of learning, lots of ingenuity and lots of smart people - we can’t wait to do more.
General format for the night:
Arrive 5:45pm
6:30 quick announcement and food served (home cooked Vegan Chilli)
6:50 intro from Mark and Andy
7:00 Hack begins
10:00 Hack ends : Teams presenting results
10:20 judging
10:25 prizes and wrap up
We had three prize categories:
Best use case
Most fun
Most complete
The judging wasn’t the most scientific of processes but Bruce and I had a quick chat and picked the following three:
Tipsy Jar
James, Rich, Tim - Apmilla
These guys clearly came prepared (is that allowed? 😉) Tipsy Jar is a super simple Tiny App that (just) allows a user to tip an artist (at a gig). The app really is simple which is why they got so close to a fully finished app.
The interesting thing about this tiny app is that combined with a leaderboard and missions there’s a simple compelling tiered personal membership system here… An artist adds this Tiny App to their constellation (of other apps) and fans can tip (whenever) and the more they tip the more missions they complete and the more rewards (and access) they can accumulate.
Listening Party
Josh, Taavi - Potato
Joe and Taavi were impressive and ambitious from the off. They’d created detailed plans and flows for a ticketing system, that included membership cards, reward tokens for future ticketing discounts, QR code redemption, etc…
In the three hours they’d managed to get a lot of it working bar a nice UI, so lots of console outputs in their demo. But, what they achieved in the time is a testament to their experience and dare I say, the OPENFORMAT SDK - our first release and their first blockchain/Web3 based build. Amazing 🌞
"The concepts of the Reward & Action Tokens and badges took a bit to comprehend, but once we did we both were able to talk about them conceptually (hence the flow we crafted) as it gave us a single vocabulary to communicate through (I being a developer and Taavi focusing on experience design) despite neither of us knowing much about the web3 concepts."
Quiz thing
Ollie - Deckchair, Wes - ???
Ollie, UX designer and Wes a developer valiantly took the opportunity to follow the quiz route - Quizzes are perfect tiny app fodder (see my post on HQ Trivia). Ollie and Wes weren’t the only team attempting a decentralised quiz app, but they did get the furthest with wireframes and working code but the UI wasn’t quite ready for us to see anything.
Quizzes can be manifested in many ways, from a survey, to an onboarding tool, to a full blown gameshow… We can’t wait for some canny developer to create a whole constellation of Tiny Quizzes all working together
Each winning team will be getting a hand delivered £50 note, mainly because we forgot on the night 😂
Thanks to all that came, it was a really great night, and it looks like we’ll be doing something similar on a regular basis so hope to see you there next time. 🌞🙏🏽🔥