The Event:
Over the course of February 3rd and 4th, we held a Developer Challenge in partnership with our friends at Clovyr. Focusing on the amazing chialisp development environment provided by Clovyr, we wanted to see what kind of smart-coin focused project intrepid developers could create over a 24 hour window.
With 74 participants signed up, the event kicked off at 12 noon sharp, PST, on Thursday the 3rd and ran until 12 noon on the 4th. During this time, members of Chia staff were on-hand in a dedicated Keybase channel to field questions and provide advice. We also hosted a 24 hour Zoom call people could drop in and out of as desired to both pick the brains of our experts and socialize with each other. Some folks from Clovyr were also around to provide support and collected feedback on their development environment as well.
We had just over 70 community developers sign up for the event, and in the end we saw quite a few exciting projects! A few of those we’d like to share with you, and who those winners were!
First Place @ $10,000: Icerdesign with “Popchia”
Second Place: @ $5,000: Yakuhito with “Chia Farms”
Third Place: @ $2,500: Karlkim with “Mega Mojos”
Honorable mention: Kronus91 with “Dev Challenge Donation Program”
The Judging:
These projects were judged by a 5 person panel, composed of 4 members of Chia Network, and a representative from Clovyr. We judged the projects on the following criteria in no particular order or weight:
- Use of Chialisp
(breadth and depth of the Chialisp code used, etc) - Functionality
(How complex is it, how much of it is functional and to what extent. While more functionality is ideal, full functionality is not a strict requirement.) - Creativity
(Overall creative concept and design of the project.) - Usefulness
(How much practicality and general usability does it provide to users.) - Quality of the code
(How well documented is the code, how well explained is its readme, and how well formatted and structured is the codebase itself.) - The “Spirit of the Challenge”
(How much did the submission follow in the overall concept and intention laid out by the above guidelines. Were any loopholes in the guidelines exploited or abused?)
One thing we did not harshly judge on was completion. We knew going into this 24 hours was a short time window and the intent was to not make or break a submission on if it was 100% completed and functional. Instead we tried to balance the completion level of what we saw against the body of work completed in that time, the documentation efforts, and the design complexity.
The Results:
Popchia
https://github.com/wizicer/chia_hackathon
We loved Popchia for it’s thematically on-brand timing, being that the Dev Challenge coincided with the start of the Lunar New Year. A common tradition during that time, the giving of red envelopes, was re-imaged by way of creating buckets of popcorn, with varied amounts, and giving them away.
Chia Farms
https://github.com/Yakuhito/ChiaFarms
Chia Farms comes to us from Yakuhito, a finalist in the Hackathon that Sirius Labs ran last fall, and an active participant in our developer community on Keybase. What stood out to us most about this project was the sheer amount of chialisp code Yakuhito wrote during the 24 hour window while learning a vast majority of it on the fly as he went. Anyone who passed around games on a TI graphing calculator back in high school might recognize the overall core gameplay loop of what he designed. In short, it’s a small game where you farm chia, literally, to make money to grow your farm to exponentially farm yet more chia plants for “profit”.
Mega Mojos
https://github.com/kimsk/chia-dev-challenge
Mega Mojos, as the name might imply, is a MegaMillions/Powerball simulation. Jurisdictional legal ramifications of what this entails aside, it allows participants to buy lottery tickets, and when the chain reaches a predetermined block, a winner is calculated and announced. A fun twist to this is that if there is no winner for a given drawing, the XCH pool reward goes to the farmer of that block!
Dev Challenge Donation Program
https://github.com/ytx1991/Challenge2022
As to our last one, we wish to share our Honorable Mention from Kronus91. The reason we want to share this as an Honorable Mention is because it was easily a stand out top finalist in our eyes. However, between the announcement of the challenge and the start time, we entered into discussions with Kronus91 about hiring him to join our team full time (which we have!). As a result he was no longer eligible for a prize but had already signed up prior. However, the judges had seen the results of his efforts before being aware he had accepted an offer, and already flagged him as a finalist. We think his work was notable and interesting and worth sharing as a stand out example even still!
If you are familiar with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, then you’ll get what Kronus91 was trying to do here quite quickly. This was an ambitious project that was not only well thought out and constructed, but was also very well documented and laid out for understanding.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated, and our friends at Clovyr for building an amazing chialisp developer platform. This was a fun, albeit short, event and we recognize folks were heavily time constrained (by design) and were also working with a brand new platform with the relatively young language of chialisp. We’re looking forward to hosting bigger and more comprehensive challenges like this in the future, with even more exciting results!
