Excitement filled the air at the Golem Hackathon on May 8th, where developers from various locations converged for a weekend of rigorous coding, inventive problem-solving, and groundbreaking innovation. Taking place in Estes Park, Colorado, the event attracted more than 70 participants, all enthusiastic to demonstrate their abilities for the top awards.

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What were the winning solutions?

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FIRST PLACE

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First place won: an Alienware 27-inch Gaming Monitor.

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After careful deliberation, the judges announced the grand prize winner: John Anderson with a realistic, complete, and useful solution for a key-value store, with all functionality exported and made available via Golem’s API and API gateway layers.

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John’s work included several tests, taking advantage of a Durable State, and implementing key-value stored in memory, which helped showcase one of Golem’s many strengths.

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Excellent work, John! Thank you for showcasing a great example of durable execution.

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SECOND PLACE

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Second place won: an iPad.

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The judges awarded the runner-up spot to Daniele Torelli, developing an SBT Plugin that can take different steps involved in making a WebAssembly component for Scala, and turning it into something simple: an SBT component that was not only exported but also deployed on Maven.

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Daniele shared, during the award ceremony, that he had a pleasant experience during the Golem Hackathon. One insightful thing he mentioned is that when dealing with tooling, you must take the burden off of the user, which means you have to take the burden on yourself. The ultimate goal is to jump over all the hurdles, so that it’s an easy and smooth experience for the user.

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Although it took some time, Daniele provided an outstanding outcome.

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Great work, Daniele! We enjoyed seeing your hard work.

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THIRD PLACE

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Third place won: a Gaming Mechanical Keyboard.

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Although it was a tough decision, the judges awarded third place to Ziverge’s Scott Weaver, for his complete and excellent work in taking advantage of the Durable State and showing how there isn’t a mandatory need for a database in his solution. 

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Scott also spoke about his experience in the Golem Hackathon. He mentioned that since the hackathon was in Colorado, known for having many amazing national parks, Scott thought it would be neat to use that as the theme for his hackathon project. He chose Rust as the language for his component, as Rust has first-class support for WASM, and he wanted to get a little more experience programming in Rust.

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He had written one or two simple Golem components in the past, but for this app, he wanted to up the challenge and have his component interact with external web services. He shared that The National Parks Service in the U.S. provides a feature-rich API for getting information on parks, which makes the task of getting that information relatively straightforward.

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The final submission allows a user, via golem-cli, to initialize a worker for any state in the U.S. and then subsequently pull back that state’s park information as a list of entries.  Additionally, there is a “more info” operation that allows the user to pull back more detailed information on a specific park.

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Fantastic work, Scott! We’re proud to have witnessed your work.

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FOURTH PLACE

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Fourth place won: a set of collectible Golem swag.

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While supporting several teams at the Golem Hackathon, Adam Hearn’s came in fourth place. Adam worked on heading up the efforts to get Fetch working in a JavaScript environment. The judges would have loved to see this project go all the way to deployment, but are truly excited to have witnessed it nonetheless.

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Thanks for participating and collaborating with so many teams, Adam!

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SPECIAL MENTIONS

Beyond our four winners, Golem Hackathon would like to acknowledge two honorable mentions, one for a participating team, and another one for the man who helped make it possible.

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Special mention to the team led by Adam McCullough, placing fifth. Their team worked on a game session that leveraged memory over storage, which is yet another strength of utilizing Golem.

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We also want to give a shoutout to Kaur Matas for making Golem’s timeline work with Golem’s APIs. Thanks for your hard work, and we can’t wait to see you present next time around!

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Huge thank you to everyone involved in making this happen. We were stoked to be able to host the Golem Hackathon and are already ramping up our gears for LambdaConf 2025.

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