JS Hacks 2017 - The Blockchain Edition

1st of April, 2015. That’s when the story began for our JS community in Bucharest.It was after attending a lot of meet-ups across Europe that I decided to start the JavaScript group/meetup in Romania. Everywhere I went, from London to Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris and even Sofia, there were these City-JS type of meetups and I wondered if something of that sort existed in Romania. I was excited to learn about the guys at FrontEnd Bucharest that started a developer community focused on … well, front-end development 😃

This inspired me to start BucharestJS, a group/meetup focusing on JavaScript development, allowing us to invite speakers that could talk not only about the client-side part, but also go into the server-side aspect, mobile development or even IoT. That’s why, for the very first meetup we had two super interesting talks:

• Choose wisely by Tiberiu Popovici, Senior Software Engineer at Zitec

In the sea of JavaScript tools you might want to “catch them all” but you should always remember your main goal in a project: you have to deliver.

• Poking a “Meteor” with a stick by Valeriu Paloş, Software Architect

You may have heard about it but let’s see for ourselves what we get when we mix beer with the Meteor framework for 30 minutes. A short, hands-on tale about a piece of software that saved my time, kept my sanity and restored my faith in web-programming.

I didn’t expect the amazing response that followed … in just a few months time, BucharestJS became the go-to place for anyone interested in JavaScript development. What started as a way to meet and interact with fellow JS developers in Bucharest, shifted into something more profound that positively impacted me on a personal level — suddenly I realized the meaning of a word that, to me, sounded empty until that moment, that quickly grew to the point of generating value to those who built it: COMMUNITY.

By the end of 2015, we grew to almost 1,000 members (Facebook + Meetup), a milestone that was celebrated by printing our own BucharestJS T-Shirts with the help of some awesome sponsors (VisionMobile and EveryMatrix) that understood the importance of community building and supported us ever since.

By mid 2016, throughout Romania there were 29 meetups where JS was a topic of discussion:

• Bucharest (8)
• Cluj (8)
• Timisoara (5)
• Chisinau (4)
• Brasov (3)
• Iasi (2)
• Targu-Mures (2)
• Craiova (1)

Just to put things into perspective, worldwide there are over 4,000 JavaScript meetups bringing together ~2,000,000 members.With all these JS groups/meetups popping up everywhere, there was clearly a sign that more and more JS developers wanted to meet, interact and learn from other JS developers.

How could we, as meetup organizers, facilitate this collaboration that would allow JS developers to continue it even beyond our monthly events? How can a developer from Bucharest, interact with one from Cluj, Timisoara, London or New York and together build something amazing?

With that in mind and with the contribution of some visionary developers and meetup organizers (Andrei Antal, Constantin Dumitrescu, Andreas Fruth, Nicoleta Iliuha, Diana Miron, Valentin Tureac), we started JS Hacks — a JavaScript community-driven hackathon that took place on 21–23 October, 2016 in two locations simultaneously: Bucharest & Chisinau.Over the course of the weekend, over 80 JS developers with the help of 23 mentors built 19 projects that were presented in front of 8 jury members. 9 incredible sponsors awarded 10+ prizes to the most promising teams.

More details on http://2016.jshacks.io/

JS Hacks was unique in the sense that 6 JavaScript Meetup Groups joined together to make this community event happen: Angular JS Bucharest, BucharestJS, Frontend Bucharest, JavaScript MD, jsGirls, Meteor Romania.This JS hackathon managed to accomplish a couple of things:

1. It demonstrated that organizers across different locations or within the same location but managing different groups/meetups can work together for a bigger purpose.
2. Community leaders (mentors) got really involved in guiding developers with their projects. At one point we didn’t even know who was a participant, a mentor or an organizer — everybody was coding like there was no tomorrow!
3. JS developers united into solving real problems, building potentially viable products and, most importantly, continuing their collaboration beyond the event. I’ve seen teams that formed during JS Hacks attending other hackathons in the same formation. And others that got invited to continue their projects as part of bigger initiatives.

Considering the impact we had last year with JS Hacks, we were encouraged to repeat the experience this year as well, 20–22 October. This edition's theme is “Blockchain” and we're getting together to solve challenges such as

• Payments, micro-payments and peer-to-peer lending
• Enable content producers to be paid for what their work
• Reliable digital identity system
• Prove ownership of an asset
• Smooth the shipping process
• Run a decentralised marketplace
• Register music copyright
• Developing e-voting machines for state and national elections
• Maintaining a national register of land ownership
• Manage healthcare records
• Prediction platforms
• Online gaming
• Digitalization of documents and contracts
• Internet of Things and development of smart systems

We're sponsored by the likes of Ethereum Romania, Ark.io, GoPro & others and we have around $5,000 in prizes. More details and registration here: https://bucharest.jshacks.io/

Being a novice user of Steemit.com myself I thought of sharing this information here in the hopes that some of you might be interested in joining.