hacker – Rafaela Azevedo

As always lately, I have been constantly behind with my posts here on my blog 😭 BUT today is the day!

So, I just wanted to share my experience as a mentor at the ETHGlobal Hackathon this past March. It was super fulfilling, and I highly recommend that everyone join, maybe not as a mentor but definitely as a hacker at least once a year.

To check the projects we had on that day, check this link.

My favourites are:

HackerScore – A social network for developers looking to showcase their skills ⭐️
0xmedusa-zt3is – Open source web3 commerce infra for Eth protocol integrations into Web2 infra.
GeoNouns – Collect Nouns across the world and mint them Pokemon Go Style.
OffBlocks Pay – Open Banking for Web3 – an account-to-account experience for e-commerce ⭐️
Monitrum – trustless and permissionless transaction monitoring solution along with support for Forced Inclusion on Arbitrum.
Tensor Royale – Incentivized on-chain AI collaboration platform, enabling permissionless upload of training data and computational AI models.
DataCat – We are a decentralized data labeling platform and marketplace to gamify building unbaised datasets. ⭐️
Forge World – Create characters, gather resources, explore diverse worlds, and level up your abilities. Your journey to forge legends begins now!

I always recommend my mentees to join these events at least once a year, independent of their current situation.

In this last hackathon I met this guy who joins Hackathons as a hobby (wins most of them) and he even goes with his daughter. Really inspiring !

Also met other founders that were there as Mentors like Adam Spiers who created this free private onchain address book and previously Panther Protocol, Damian Rusinek who created Composable_sec – Smart Contracts Security Audit, Madalina who works at Vega Protocol and many others !

If you are a hacker, you probably code as a hobby like me ❤️

Get that direct access to new ideas and innovation by experimenting with new technologies and building prototypes
Expand professional network and discover career opportunities
Learn new technical skills like programming languages and tools
Achieve recognition and awards for innovative solutions (Always good to get some credibility)
Feel a sense of accomplishment by completing a challenging project within a short timeframe (Real dopamine here)

Now for the companies that are sponsoring or just visiting the hackathons 🏢

You can brainstorm and get new ideas for products, services, or solutions by tapping into hackers’ creativity
Foster innovation and problem-solving and bring it to your company
Promote cross-functional collaboration and knowledge-sharing
Save time with the recruiting as you will have direct insight about the developers performance, commitment and soft skills without those long and inefficient tests

It is always a win-win, independent of the side you are (Hacker or Mentor). Also, you can expand your network, update yourself, see what others are working on, chance to win a prize and learn something new.

The projects were 🤯 and I was able to help some hackers (Felt useful haha) ! Keep smashing you all building the future !! 🚀

…and check my POAP

This month I quickly attended the AWS Summit 2023 and here are my highlights from the conference:

The Data Metaverse Experience

The metaverse is relevant to businesses, with several concepts and technologies already being utilised, like PWC is able to see what is the best place to start a coffee shop as they have enough data to show where the competitors are, business around where people go out for lunch, nearest public transports.
Enterprise applications, such as employee training and simulating operations, are currently leading the way in metaverse adoption.
The metaverse may experience cycles of boom and bust, similar to other innovations like AI and the internet.
It’s possible to separate the reality from the hype and take practical steps to meet your company’s metaverse needs.
The metaverse promises a realistic 3D digital world with persistent elements and decentralized control.
Business implications include virtual reality visualization, enhanced customer experiences, and parallel production in physical and virtual environments.
Companies are already using the metaverse for employee recruitment, collaboration, digital twins, customer experience enhancement, and marketing/selling virtual products.

DON’T TRUST ANYONE

First, just sharing some worrisome statistics, so you can understand how security is important:
- There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds.
- Russian hackers are the fastest.
- 300,000 new malware is created every day.
- Multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.
- You can become an American citizen for $6,000.
- The average cost of a data breach in 2022 was $4.35 million, an increase of 2.6% from the previous year and 12.7% since 2020, according to the 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report by Ponemon Institute.
- The cybersecurity budget in the US is $14.98 billion.
Hashicorp, showed what is the anatomy of a breach, how long a hacker might spend to get access to your system and how.
Be sure you limit humans interactions so you remove the errors.
Frequent rotate your tokens and make sure you request for the access in between stages.
(This was not in the talk, but nice tip) If you are curious about how social engineering is able to by pass access easily in companies, I recommend The Art of Deception book, it is unbelievable how people are so eager to help others and not be a burden they just give information away even if it is not following the protocol.

Make business and tech people happy

Community practice is extremely important, so if you are delivery lead be sure you promote regular knowledge sharing sessions, so people can contribute and also advocate for it.
All the teams need to follow some standards so they can move faster and the learning curve is not too long.
Tackle the tech debt to prevent and reduce inefficiency.
Promote webinars among the teams and also demos so people feel inspired to adopt and more aware of the updates.
All of these points will create a continuous improvement culture, were people feel they can take initiatives and feel more satisfied with their work.
Align strategic technical improvements with business goal (This is kind obvious 😂 Try to make everyone happy and find a middle ground)
Continuous process to have technical challenges in the team. You know software engineers love to learn, this is what drives most of us.
Measure and prove impact of each technical improvement with metrics, and make sure it has minimum or zero impact on BAU.

And of course free lunch and coffee !! Joking, I didn’t even have lunch on that day 😂 Couldn’t watch all the talks I wanted, but was amazing to connect with like minded people, refresh my mind and learn new things!

Tag: hacker

ETHGlobal Hackathon London 2024