Hackathons Are The Bestathons – Hero's Journey Into Web3
Recently I took part in the Build Out Loud Solana hackathon, with absolutely no knowledge about Solana and basic understanding of Rust. In the weeks that followed, my journey, in retrospect, resembled the Hero’s Journey, which is the common template of stories that involve a person who goes on an adventure.
| Hero’s Journey | Solana Hackathon |
|---|---|
| Ordinary World | Hacking in Web 2.0 |
| Call To Adventure | Solana Build Out Loud hackathon is announced |
| Refusal Of The Call | Getting cold feet looking at limited documentation and examples |
| Meeting the Mentor | Finding out about Anchor, reading its documentation |
| Crossing the Threshold | Building and deploying a hello-world program on local test-net for the first time |
| Tests, Allies, and Enemies | Reading Paulx’s blog on how to implement an escrow contract but failing |
| Approach To The Inmost Cave | Trying to understand how to store data on-chain, by reading other people’s code on Github |
| The Ordeal In The Abyss | Successfully storing and manipulating on-chain data on an account with a program derived address |
| The highest point | Finally architecting app and writing the contract around PDAs |
| The Ultimate Boon | Realizing that Anchor saves you from a lot of work and pitfalls! |
| The Road Back Home | Back to front-end and get the wallet integration going |
| Master Of Two Worlds | Have your first, true decentralised app deployed on the blockchain |
| Return with Special Knowledge | Convincing my friends about how awesome Web3 is! |