Luke Barnard

TADHack Global 2017

At the end of September, TADHack Global was held where almost 150 teams spent their weekends hacking towards the $45k total prize money up for grabs. Luke spent the final day of the hack talking to teams hacking at IDEALondon in Shoreditch, meeting a few Matrix enthusiasts and long-time collaborators.

Out of 10 hacks, 2 of 4 local winners won prizes locally and went on to be global winners alongside 6 other teams using Matrix as part of their hacks. Checkout the TADHack London Wrap-up for details on all of the awesome hacks, especially Aviral Dasgupta's Pushtime and Polite.ai.

https://twitter.com/TADHack/status/915284069046419456

Well done to everyone who took part, and a special thanks to those flying Matrix :)

THE Port 2017

The following weekend was THE Port 2017, a humanitarian-themed hackathon held at CERN, Geneva in Switzerland. Among the 7 teams participating, the Matrix team consisted of a few software developers from Bity including Matrix enthusiast Alejandro Avilés (who very kindly helped us get a team into the hackathon). Luke and Dave from the Matrix London office also flew out to help the cause and by the end had a very stable, working prototype by the end of the competition.

The hack we made was a communications system backed by Matrix for use in refugee camps, an idea that hatched at the start of the hackathon (whereas the other projects were well established ideas up to 6 weeks before the event). Check out the code on GitHub if you're interested in the client-side apps we made over the weekend.

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/916672581473890304

It was another fun weekend for the Matrix team and we look forward to the next one. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming Matrix events!