David Vorick expressed:  We’ve heard it countless times: “I tried out Skynet this weekend and I’m never going back.” Your application can leap forward 5 years in technology in just 3 days of playing around.

I’m walking away from this hackathon with an endorphin rush and a huge sense of pride. Our community is kicking ass, and I can’t wait for the next hackathon.

The hackathon we hosted this weekend is coming to a close. Some of the apps are still being cleaned up, but I wanted to share some of the cool things that got built. Caveat: all of this was done in one weekend, the list of challenges was not released until Friday.

First off, the rules. There was a ‘bingo card’ of 25 app ideas released on Friday. Hackers got prizes for completing an app on the card, and if people worked together to finish a ‘bingo’, everyone who contributed to the bingo got a payout.

First up: Skynet has a new meme generator. The generator and all assets live on Skynet, this doesn’t use any external APIs.

Next up: An image editor. A decentralized, in-browser app that you don’t have to worry is snooping on your images if you want to make simple changes like inverting, greyscale, resizing, cropping, or adding text.

One thing that stood out was the utility of Homescreen for judging. Hackers would send the judges homescreen links, and then after fixing bugs or issues the hackers could just say ‘try updating your app’ rather than sending a whole new link. All hackathons should work this way!

Next up: collaborative, encrypted text editing. A decentralized alternative to google docs which prioritizes privacy. Everything stays on Skynet, and multiple people can edit the same document at once.

Next up: a skylink explorer. An in-browser utility that allows you to explore the directory/contents of a skylink. This is particularly useful for development and debugging.

Several of the challenge apps were fun little utilities like counting the number of words in a body of text or parsing and formatting json.

Another fun utility: a screen recorder. Grab a recording of your screen, including the audio, and upload the resulting video to Skynet.  Once again, the whole application exists on Skynet.

Encrypted image galleries: Save a gallery of images that you can share with your friends, encrypted for privacy!

Overall the hackathon was a huge success. I like the incredible quality of the finished apps, most of these don’t feel like they were put together in a matter of one weekend but rather like they were built to be full applications.

You don’t even see this level of quality from centralized hackathons, and that’s because Skynet removes so many levels of infrastructure that typically serve as pain points. There is no making a Netlify account, there is no setting up a server on AWS, you just click “upload”.

If you are a web3 builder and you’ve been struggling with things like hosting and decentralized storage, take a minute to try out the apps above, and realize that many of these were built in under 24 hours, often by first-time Skynet builders.