Issue 45: Week 4 at Edge City Patagonia

Building blockchain solutions for Argentina, final demo day and fly to Buenos Aires [11/10/2025 to 11/16/2025]

Intro

This is a weekly recap of all the most interesting things I did and thought about in my life as a digital nomad, developer and founder. Think of it as a letter to my future self or a report to someone that is curious to know more about what I’m up to in the world. This week was the final week of the Pop up city Edge City Patagonia.

Building Augmi at Argentina Onchain Residency

Since Monday I joined the Argentina Onchain program around designing and prototyping a blockchain app in response to one of a few prompts from the local Argentinian communities. In the first day I joined a group, we worked together on brainstorming solutions and project ideas for the local education system. I was happy to connect with a crypto app builder I had met four years before and that was the founder of a successful startup, wujiwuji is a legendary founder of “Interface” a social crypto trading app.

I continued my education solution project on my own and designed how it would work. It is an open source project that organizations and individuals can download and run on their own private servers, preserving their own data and privacy from large corporations which can be used against their interests. I showed the project to a local teacher, walked her through creating her own AI twin and talking about how the students would use it to have one on one personalized tutoring on the specific knowledge that the teacher input into the digital classroom. The response was very positive, that it would be good for High School kids and teachers that specialize in technology.

On Thursday we demoed all of our projects in a Science Fair style setup for the public community. I explained the app to a parent and her two young kids. She really was amazed by it and signed up for the waitlist. I showed them also a short 60 second AI video that explained what it is and the impact it can have. To a group of teenagers around nineteen years old I went more in depth on the code base, how we write code with AI and how LLM’s work and techniques like retrieval augmented generation that enable the AI to believably simulate your own personality.

On the last day Friday, we had a morning session to debrief and to share our learnings and experiences. It was a program that I really want to do more and deeper. This community helped push me harder to reach out to my audience, my clients, to help me develop more direction, more drive, to get feedback from my users, to get out of my bubble, to see how the user see’s the world, what problems they have and what I can offer them. I hope to organize more meetups that build a community of devs, founders and designers that can help each other advance in their journeys.

Last Demo Day

On the Friday afternoon we had the last town hall, demo day and in the evening a closing ceremony. The demo day was an opportunity for people to show what they built during the month or before. It took a full two hours. Some notable ones that were memorable were: 1. A post card sending service, where you paid for a postcard to be hand written in your own writing by a physical 2D printer and sent to the address you chose. 2. Punto Press: a crypto native zine publishing platform. 3. Meditation Hacker house: a community for meditation practitioners and developers.

Closing Ceremony

At the end of the demo day we got into shuttle buses and made it to a restaurant venue about 25 minutes away. The sun was setting over the lake, as we got into the place, it was open space, airy, on the outside there was a DJ booth, a patio and open grass. At the lake there was a pebbly beach. Inside were some booths setup with people’s art, and work, there were “hors d’oeuvres” and non alcoholic drinks. I ate, chatted and walked around. It was a good setup, I was glad they didn’t do a sit down dinner kind of thing. Everyone got an opportunity to approach and chat with people they didn’t chat with before. I made many positive new connections and built relationships.

Reflections on Edge City

This month was really great for building momentum on developing your thinking on a topic. I got into very many different topics and discussions, they all serendipitously cross pollinated and synergised. It was great for breaking out of old paradigms, old patterns and see what direction you want to take. It was a good balance of doing individual focused work on your project with open ended wandering and being open to serendipity. The biggest insight for me was that I need to build products for an audience, to get out of my bubble and talk to users. I discovered the value of “Praxis” that is of creating things, of publishing Substack articles, of launching apps, of creating AI films. I rediscovered the joy and value of organizing events, this is very important to develop your own personal brand, build a network and share ideas. We really only progress if we are surrounded by other people, working with and for other people constantly. We can’t progress as well by only interacting with the world through the internet, this reduces our connection, it reduces our ability to grow, we develop and learn so much faster by interacting with people in real life. I learned more how to follow my intuition, to follow my bliss. I heard about the Argentina Onchain Residency plan to build for the community and I decided to join those sessions, to clear my entire week and prioritize this. I knew I wanted to be there most of all in the whole world. The teachers and organizers sensed this and appreciated my enthusiasm and participation. The end result was a very positive development, experience, and a foundation for more development on the open source project Augmi.lol.

Saturday Hike and Sunday Fly to Buenos Aires

To conclude the month, I went on a hike in nature. This was very refreshing. It was very special to be in the wild nature. Then on Sunday I checked out of my Airbnb and made it to Buenos Aires. It was great to chat and exchange contact with more Edge city participants that were doing interesting things at the airport and the plane. I learned about Infinita City, a longevity pop up city in Roatan, Honduras, an tropical island. At Buenos Aires I made it to the Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2. I saw some talks, notably a prerecorded video by David Chaum, the founder of DigiCash, a major precursor to Bitcoin. In the address he called for the creation of decentralized private AI providers and personalized AI, topics that I think align with my own project and vision for Augmi - to create open source secure AI that is an extension of ourselves, and that is our digital twin. Being in Buenos Aires again was a thrill. On the taxi ride from the airport, I looked out at the city, hearing old 70’s rock music on the radio that I knew well. I got flashbacks to being there back in 2010, on a trip with my sister. That was over 15 years ago. I saw my progress in many ways as very significant, yet I had many dreams and hopes that are yet to be realized. Every day I am getting closer to it, all of this effort I put into my creating, into learning, into connecting, is compounding, it is a life style, it is the way I want to be. There are many ways to be, they way I want to be is to say thank you to the world by creating something that makes the world a little bit better, as a creative - technologist - inventor - startup founder. In a memorable quote by the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, success is when you, amongst other things “… know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived …”. This is the view I subscribe to.

Conclusion

This was a very happy week, closing the chapter of Edge City month with the high note of demoing my app in front of local parents, students and teens. Getting to see a good friend that flew in from Chicago, decompressing in nature and making it to Buenos Aires for the privacy conference.

If you liked any part of this essay please leave a like, a comment and subscribe! It means a lot.

peace! ✌️
Konrad