Stuff you don’t need

There were four of us working on Pully at ETHBerlin. 
Boaz (who’s working with me on Monti), Anton, Avichal and I.

Boaz decided to join the hackathon with me back in July. And we flew to Berlin together from Israel. 
We posted our idea on the ETHBerlin team building repo 10 days before the hackathon, and got no response up to a couple of days from the event.

It was a bit nerve-wrecking to sign up to a hackathon, buy flight tickets and tell my mother that I’ll not be home for Rosh HaShana (Jewish new year). 
All without knowing who’s on our team and if we’ll actually be able to convince anyone to join us and the not so clever sounding idea we decided to work on.

I always find this to be the scariest part really.
Putting idea, and often by extension myself out there. To be judged evaluated and potentially rejected by others.

And it’s not that coming to this idea was in any way easy. 
In the case of ETHBerlin I was lucky though. My friend Oleg Giberstein told me how much existing direct debit systems suck (pretty badly FYI) so deciding to focus on creating a viable crypto based direct debit solution wasn’t all that hard.

I remember the relief I felt when Anton and Avichal confirmed they were going to join us.

We had a team!!!

Liberthon was a completly different story. 
Avi and Nataly joined me about 2 weeks before the hackathon. 
The idea however was a whole other story.

I remember the atmosphere of urgency, we were completely unready. Overloaded with work we didn’t have a single prep meeting up to 3 days before the hackathon. We knew nothing about what we were going to do, how, and who will be in charge of what.

We initially had some plans about creating an e-voting solution. But after the preparation meetup which I attended it became clear that about half of the other teams had the same thing in mind. 
Instant turn off. We had to change it.
 
I saw a tweet with a photo of a slide from Glen Weyl’s presentation at devcon4. After an hour of discussions everybody were fully onboard to build NESSI a NEtworked Self Sovereign Identity solution.

We had an idea!!!

Those two things, (the lack of) a team and an idea were my biggest blockers in not going to hackathons before. But I didn’t really need them.

You can join a team online, at a preparation meetup, or even on the day (kudos to those who did this in ETHBerlin).
Same goes for ideas.

Deciding what to build and who with is a lot easier after you decide that you want to build.