Some people asked me how the 3 years hiatus have been. The answer to that question will probably take 100 days of writing, because a lot of stuff happened.
I will try, nonetheless, to cherry pick a few important, life course altering events.
Like that time when I won a hackathon in Korea.
A Glitch in the Matrix
Interestingly, the name of the hackathon was "Glitch". Yeah, exactly, who names a hackathon "the Glitch hackathon"? And yet, here it was, on top of the list of my potential networking events in Seoul, 2 years ago.
You see, after I decided to spend some time there, I began to assemble my new "social layer". I knew literally nobody in Seoul, so the only way to meet new people and try to make friends was to attend crypto events. And hackathons are very large crypto events.
I planned my visit to Korea for about 6 months. And even before that, knowing that I might go there, I started to learn Korean, for about a year. Which proved a lot more difficult than I thought. But, at the end of the day, it was very rewarding.
The hackathon turned out to be made of a series of small events, to allow people to know each other and form teams, and one full weekend in Incheon (a city close to Seoul, which you may know because that's where the largest airport in Korea is).
I'll skip over the non-important stuff, and get to the 2 days spent in Incheon. The level of professionalism of the organizers is hard to describe. In general, Koreans are obsessed with doing a great job no matter what they do, but this event was something else.
We had accommodation in a 4 star hosting campus, we had huge rooms for 50-60 people at a time for each track (there were 4 tracks in total), food, volunteers, mentors, everything.
Being the only foreigner among a huge group of locals made feel a little bit awkward, at least in the beginning. I was able to understand what they were taking about, and many of them were a little bit, let's say, not confident in my abilities. In a few hours, they realized I can understand them, so they stopped talking about me. Everybody was deep down in their projects, anyway.
Fast forward 48 hours and the results are in.
To my huge surprise, my team won the first place of the Polygon track.
The prize itself, while not insignificant, wasn't the biggest reward I got for winning. The most important things was the validation of my idea.
The project I presented was Flippando. And that was the beginning of a 2 years journey which culminated with the game becoming a real thing, a real project deployed on 5 chains.