Here at Gala… and throughout any part of the tech world, we sometimes forget that the language we use in the course of business is… well, definitely not how normal people talk. We’ve come to terms with this on a personal level, but we want to make sure that nothing ever gets lost in translation with our community
It’s not embarrassing to not know things. In fact, it’s quite normal! We want to help break down some basic jargon and concepts that are thrown around in the development world in this new series. Welcome to DevSpeak!
A lot of concepts may be oversimplified here, but this is just some basic information to get everybody without a technical background some basic knowledge. Enjoy!
With our registration open for the March 20-21 GalaThon event during GDC, we’ve been talking a lot about hackathons this week! We suspect that there are quite a few people out there who smile and nod when that phrase comes up without really understanding what it means.
That’s OK! Not everyone is a developer or knows their jargon. Today we’re going to go over the basics of hackathons for those who may not have ever participated in one… or even heard the word before!
Hackathon Defined
A hackathon, in its most basic sense, is an event where developers and enthusiasts can gather for collaborative programming. This is an idea born out of the open source community, with decades of nuanced culture and variations.
While collaborative work has existed since long before the computer era, the first event called a “hackathon”, is typically agreed upon as the OpenBSD Hackathon in Calgary, June 4th, 1999. This was a semi-spontaneous gathering of 10 developers all working towards the goal of creating a program that would allow two devices to communicate with each other using an infrared port.
This right away set one of the standard cultural norms for hackathons – that there would be specific goals and parameters that participants were working towards. Often this takes the form of building up a particular piece of software or building tools to accomplish a specific task. In the case of our upcoming hackathon, the parameters are to build on GalaChain using the recently released SDK.
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As the idea of hackathons grew into the mainstream, an entire culture sprang up around them. More and more hackathons saw amazing results from their unbridled creative collaboration, more and more hackathons popped up. Now there is a robust circuit of hackathons happening all year long all over the world.
While in-person hackathons are still widely held, remote tools have allowed even more people to enjoy these short development sprints, leading to more innovation across the world of hackathons!
We’ve put together an amazing prize pool with a total value of $1m for our upcoming GalaChain Hackathon. This is a frequent feature of major hackathons in the modern day.
While not every hackathon goes as overboard on the prizes as we did, it’s pretty normal to see multiple awards with prizes at the end of development. These prizes will usually be decided by a panel of judges after reviewing the work from each team versus the criteria of the hackathon and the requirements of each prize.
Why Hack?
While prizes are cool, they’re not the biggest reason that people usually want to jump in and participate in a hackathon. Don’t get us wrong, there are some serious devs out there who are professionals on the hack circuit winning prize after prize… but there we see the real reason that a hackathon is an amazing experience. Getting to work with people like that.
The development world is not a place where you go to school, know everything, then stop learning. Tech is changing all the time, and hands-on experience is a huge advantage to both veteran and novice developers. Self-taught devs often hone their skills at hackathons, and those with the benefit of a development education get priceless real-world experience.
Sometimes hackathons are a great way to try out brand new systems and tech (GalaChain anyone!!!), sometimes it’s just an opportunity to work alongside devs who may have more or just different experience than you. A fresh perspective is often where the best innovations start.
Often in hackathons, people will be open to new teammates for their project as well. This is a great opportunity to get in and network – meet new people with obviously shared interests and maybe find future collaborators and fellow hackers.
Last, it’s just plain fun! Development is work for a lot of people. Hackathons represent a chance to actually get out and do something you love without long-term metrics and bottom lines to worry about. At a hackathon, you can build things that never would be built by a company and you may not have time for as a hobby. Creative development and building for the sake of building can truly flourish!
Come One, Come All!
Don’t take our word for it though! If you’re even remotely interested in development and coding, a hackathon is the time to take that passion to the next level! Anyone can join!
A hackathon is a free way to get in and get your hands dirty in the industry. Most hackathons will welcome amateurs, and will provide robust documentation so that anyone can come in and learn! Even if you don’t win in a hackathon, there’s no way to lose. No one’s efforts “aren’t good enough”. The only way to fail is to not try!
While we’re pioneering web3 tech to prepare for the incoming masses, one of our most important long term goals has always been ease of access. We want to make the projects built on our blockchain shine, and that means making it easy for developers to create here, regardless of their level of web3 expertise. This is where the Gala Creator Portal comes in.
Our Creator Portal is an innovative and highly user intuitive self service platform that simplifies the incorporation of blockchain tech via GalaChain for creators and developers, no matter the complexity or ambition of their projects.
Ease of Use
The Creator Portal offers a user-friendly interface to anyone who creates or manages projects on GalaChain. Currently, this includes music and film artists and game developers with in development or live titles. With no complex blockchain coding required, devs can upload tracks and other files, create NFTs, or even deploy tokens onto the GalaChain network.
Live game devs use the creator portal to manage NFT sales, database items and more.
Dev Flexibility
Using the recently released GalaChain public Software Developer Kit (SDK), developers who wish to go a little deeper also have the option to customize as they please, writing their own chain code in Typescript. If the more standardized and streamlined approach suits their needs, they can simply use the Creator Portal.
Accessibility
Most importantly, this portal is designed for all types of developers, whether or not they are familiar with web3 tech. This is a big deal because blockchain development has previously been gated behind a wall of prerequisite knowledge and most developers are most comfortable working with systems they already understand. Essentially, the Gala Creator Portal lowers the entry barrier to get started with blockchain tech, inviting a much more diverse range of creators to leverage the benefits and abilities of GalaChain.
If you have an idea that lends itself beautifully to web3, or if you’re an innovative developer who has been hesitant to jump into the web3 deep end so far, this is your chance–We’ve made it simpler than ever.
In the spirit of democratization of some of the most cutting edge tech in the world, we’re extremely excited to offer this Creator Portal to current and future GalaChain developers. We can hardly wait to see your genius ideas come to life, and we’ll make sure you’ve got the decentralized web3 power to make it happen.
We’d like to share our vision as we move out of the early days of Gala’s development and into the future of GalaChain
Five years ago, we hosted one game. This was when GalaChain was, at best, a distant dream. Now here we are with over a dozen independent projects running on our own L1 blockchain. We’re not slowing down either… more projects are continuously releasing.
We will always be Gala Games, but we’re also so much more now. GalaChain is the fabric that ties together everything that we do, and we’re planning for a future where it is at the forefront of our strategy.
Building for GalaChain
GalaChain exceeds performance metrics on similar blockchains. This is primarily because it’s been forged in fire, so to speak. Gaming is one of the most demanding activities on any tech, and the fact that we’ve built GalaChain to not only accommodate it but also excel at it is a HUGE strength.
This is the need we saw when we started working on GalaChain. Nothing out there really held up to the level of demand required by popular, high-end games. It wasn’t easy, but we optimized the chain and we made the tools.
Now those tools are huge assets to us that can be converted into tools for other developers. It’s not just games either… these tools are tested for development. Many things we’ve learned under the pressure of games translates to all kinds of development.
Building for the Future
Our chain has another vital asset that we can’t ignore– our Node Network. The Founder’s Node network itself is a massively powerful tool and one of the largest decentralized node networks in the world. Even more importantly, however, we have streamlined the creation of independent node networks on GalaChain.
This means a new developer could come in and use our tools to spin up a node network to support their project. They could utilize tools that we’ve crafted after learning hard lessons. They could utilize our existing pipelines to create new and exciting things… even better than we could have ever dreamed of!
We dropped the first version of our public facing SDK, empowering external developers around the world to build on GalaChain.
Whether you’re a dev degen with a web3 obsession, a business owner with a big idea, or a philanthropist with a plan that can revolutionize an entire industry and empower the world, this is the news you’ve been waiting for.
We’ve touched on the awesomeness of our native L1 blockchain, several times before, but none of us have really witnessed its full potential yet. Get ready for a new era of GalaChain, one that decentralizes the game like never before, brings new utility to the GALA token, and empowers developers to think beyond entertainment.
We used games, music and film as the first applications of GalaChain’s user-first empowerment because entertainment makes it incredibly simple for everyday consumers to understand what web3 can do for them. It creates the potential for actual digital ownership, allowing our users to trade their game items, earn rewards for supporting an emerging musician, experience a deeper involvement with their favorite films, and much more.
Now, external developers can build their own projects using all the same ideas and applications of web3 tech that Gala has already demonstrated with our core brands. They can mint NFTs, customizing drops, allowlists and distributions to their heart’s content. Developers can even build Node networks to power their projects, distributing rewards to operators in the same way that Gala Founder’s Node operators receive GALA as a reward for operating their Nodes. Creation of these various features will continue to become easier (requiring less assistance from the GalaChain team) as we continue on this journey of GalaChain expansion.
When you look at Gala’s core examples (Gala Games, Gala Music and Gala Film), it’s only natural to start thinking outside the box, allowing your imagination to pioneer into new territories, beyond the limitations of the web2 world. Smart contracts, tokenization and distributed networks have the power to change everything for the better, and that includes your industry. So it’s time to get creative and build some apps that the world never saw coming.
One of the most important things about the tools that we have on GalaChain, is that most anyone can hop in and get building right away in straightforward typescript. With other chains, you need to relearn the basics to get started, but we’ve totally streamlined the process with GalaChain and this SDK. No need to learn highly complicated and convoluted languages like solidity, no need to be a master of web3 infrastructure. Just get in and get building… Whenever you’re ready to up the difficulty, GalaChain can handle that too!
Introducing the GalaChain SDK
We’ve spent years hard at work building a robust and versatile L1 blockchain, and now it’s open for business. We’re proud to announce the first publicly available Software Development Kit for GalaChain.
Developers– Take a look now on Github through the link below:
For full access and more information, just reach out to us through GalaChain.com by clicking “Start Building” and we’ll get you empowered to build right away.
We’ve been around the block with web3 developments, so trust us when we say that the innovation will not wait for you. If you’re thinking about that great idea but not acting on it, you better get moving.
If you hesitate on that world-changing idea, then we guarantee someone else will develop it first. We’ve been talking for a long time about mass adoption like it’s a distant ship on the horizon. Thanks to GalaChain, the tide has changed and that ship will be here before you know it.
We can hardly wait to empower your brilliant ideas. Welcome to the future.
