Issue 46: Week at Devconnect and ETHGlobal Hackathon
[week 11/17/2025 - 11/23/2025]
Intro
This is a weekly newsletter that covers my journey in tech, talking about what I did this week and essays on various relevant topics.
Devconnect Week
On Monday I first attended an AI Agents Day conference in the morning. I stopped by to see what people were talking about, what were people building, what kind of companies were promoting themselves. I saw AI agents that trade your crypto automatically. This is a big topic, as that makes a lot of sense as you are using intelligence to get an edge in day trading, and other some fund management operations. These are things that are currently done for a high fee by fund managers. I stayed and walked around and checked out what kind of companies set up their booths in crypto and agentic AI. It was a brief overview then I went to the main Devconnect venue.
The venue was organized as a worlds fair, with different sections like Defi, Social, Gaming and different pavilions that housed more booths and stages for talks.
I got to demo my app Augmi.lol in front of a group at the Governance Geeks Community Hub. I went over the presentation slides and explained the background story of what this app is about. I recorded it and put it on YouTube here.
To make good use of my time here and to do something useful, I started interviewing people. My thinking was that I already have some really interesting conversations meeting people, so why not film it and share it with the world. So I set up a new channel to promote my startup now Augmi.lol - so find it at Youtube.com/@augmilol
They turned out really good and I will continue this to get better at public speaking, to learn more first hand from interesting founders and people in tech, and to create something interesting for the world. Plus as a bonus I will get to spread the word on my app and build up a reputation as someone knowledgable in the space of crypto and tech.
Some of the highlights were:
FOSS ASIA: An open source hardware builder community. I bought a programmable LED name tag and a multi tool for hardware. I used crypto to pay for this and had a long chat with one of the organizers. This stuff lights me up so I know I need to go deeper into open source hardware builder communities. I found out about their summit in March in Bangkok and will try to make it there. I also got inspired to host my own hardware meetups in Saigon. I learned first hand how this organization got started actually in Saigon, as a series of meetups, that posted their projects in a github, then organized a website and it grew into a large international Not For Profit organization. This is something that lights me up and something I need to pursue further in my own path.
Music Stage: Throughout the week there were always musicians performing on the music stage outside. I would walk through here and sometimes stay to enjoy the various musicians. On Tuesday there was Edge city DJ’s and it was a kind of reunion with many people there from the group. I felt free enough to dance, and just was creative with my moves and original. Sometimes when I feel relaxed I can tap into this global universal energy and flow, move my body in a coordinated manner that is really beautiful and an expression of the music as well as an exploration of the memories and reconnection with the feelings in my body.
Ethereum Phone: I interviewed the guys that made this device. It’s a cool story how a bunch of hackathon friends just got the courage that they could pull this off, found suppliers in China and combined all the hardware and software to come up with a fun, playful, colorful device. See their interview on my youtube channel linked above.
Gaming District: I was very attracted into the gaming district, I interviewed several people here. The world of onchain gaming is early, there will be a big boom here, because it allows for the blending of reality and games, because blockchain allows for digital assets to have real world value. I was especially excited about how Aavegotchi games are developed around a gamification of Defi protocols, and it is managed by a DAO, all of the game assets are public and the world of this game is open for anyone to build and innovate on. I listened to some talks by one of the Axie Infinity team members and their words about how they are stoic about pushing blockchain gaming forward, by listening to their user feedback, innovating and putting out new games, is something that made me convinced that this medium is going to keep growing and very soon will have another boom especially with AI. This later inspired me to build a an onchain education game on the Ronin Network for the Hackathon.
Trustless Agents Day: This was one of the inner mini conferences. The talks were around how AI and crypto is intersecting in the form of AI agents that perform actions on chain.
The ETHGlobal Hackathon: I created an interesting project and got third place from Ronin. You can find out more about it here https://ethglobal.com/showcase/juego-quest-i67n8 My takeaway from this experience was that I love doing this. I met again people that have kept attending the hackathons while I paused for a period, and I saw their progress, it inspired me to keep going. The space of web3 moves fast and by going to hackathons you can see the trends and be able to develop deep pattern recognition skills that allow you to get ahead as a innovator in the blockchain space.
Conclusion
This week was amazing. I only wrote down about 20% of all the amazing things I learned and that lit me up. This is a critical practice as so often we go through amazing week after amazing week and then we forget what are the critical things we learned about what direction to move into. For me it was about onchain gaming, organizing hackathons, events, education, onchain agents, and open source hardware community organizing. That’s all the time I have today for this. It takes a lot of time to write.
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