For all its reputation as the world’s greatest problem solver (well, mostly!), hiring still remains a tough nut to crack for the tech industry. Remember the creator of ‘Homebrew’ getting rejected from Google over a trivial whiteboard problem? It’s a problem broken on both ends, companies worry about finding the right candidate and the ‘candidates’ worry about finding the right companies. We believe this problem is especially pronounced for the particular subsets of both candidates (student developers and young software professionals) and companies (startups, even well-funded ones). In both cases, they resort to a variety of hiring tools from campus placement drives to recruiting consultants.

It doesn’t have to be this hard, especially with Devfolio involved. 😁

Earlier this year, we were called to interview with Y Combinator. The most important thing we learned through the process was something that seems trivial but is still surprisingly uncommon — talking to your users. The Devfolio team has been fortunate enough to be closely connected with both the student developer community and startups through the increasing number of university hackathons being hosted on Devfolio and multiple editions of Devfolio Official hackathons personally organized by us over the years. This has led us to have some pretty interesting conversations and insights which came in handy while we built Devfolio. Here’s what we learned.

The Great Indian Tech Hiring Disconnect

While definitions of what exactly classifies as a startup may vary, there are certain characteristics startups have been come to be known by. They are either in a state of or poised for runaway growth, have typically smaller team sizes than more ‘established’ businesses, constantly need to innovate to stand out from the competition, and are often faced with situations where solutions are not obvious straight away. Every employee of a startup is an essential cog than keeps the engine running. This makes their mindset, skillset, and culture requirements very different from those of more stable businesses. An incoming tech recruit can’t expect to get by based on purely technical or academic chops; real world building, collaboration, and shipping skills are just as important to make meaningful contributions.

It’s not a stretch to say that most student developers in India start their coding journey, not for the joy of it but to secure their future by landing a well-paying job at the end of the undergraduate degree. While there is nothing wrong with this as such, it means they end up focusing on academic CS knowledge and competitive programming skills based on advice from college seniors and what they expect they will be tested on during their campus placement process. Few end up with their dream jobs through campus placement, and the rest have to settle for mediocre companies that are invariably service-based (particularly true for Tier II and Tier III colleges) with limited growth opportunities. Most of them realize pretty late the outsized impact of their first job can have on the rest of their careers. Student developers aspiring to work at startups are also, in most cases, unaware of which is the right startup for them. In the end, they are left with neither the skills nor viable channels to identify and apply to the right set of startups.

Current channels for startups and student developers to currently discover each other are woefully inadequate.

• Given the limited resources in terms of time, effort, and available staff startups can afford, they can visit only a limited set of colleges for campus placement. This leads them to choose to visit mostly only top tier colleges, basing the probability of finding good developers on the reputation of the college. On-campus, they end up competing for student attention with a large number of companies offering equally attractive salary packages missing out on the chance to talk about stuff like their vision, culture, or innovations, which are essential for attracting the right kind of candidates.
• Because of lack of effective metrics to evaluate candidates, startups tend to fall back on the evaluation platforms, which are mainly built to identify coders with competitive programming skills rather than the builders/makers/hackers they need. Running online hiring challenges also does not help as it’s hard to effectively design the challenges right and then equally hard to engage the right audience through the online medium.
• Job Portals/Boards and career pages on websites are channels that perhaps generate leads with the highest noise-to-signal ratio for startups. Since just about anybody on the internet can apply, there are no checks on the quality for incoming applications. The response rate for candidates is predictably low, and candidates never get to hear the feedback they can use to improve themselves. Startups need to rely on email content, profile links, resume, or anything else a candidate shares for an initial evaluation. It’s virtually impossible to determine the actual skill level of the candidates by going through the information shared by them.
• Hiring consultants are also an option than startups, and candidates resort to, for off-campus discovery. They are able to tap into extremely limited candidate pools, which are mostly confined to nearby geographic locations. Even after the connections with prospective candidates are made, startups still need to put the candidate through 2–3 rounds of evaluation for which is an unavoidable burden on the technical staff.

Laying the foundation with Devfolio hackathon platform

Seems like yesterday until when Devfolio was just a state-of-the-art end-to-end hackathon management platform!😛

We built the hackathon platform to nurture and grow the hacker culture in India, which considering the response we received, has been successful, way beyond our expectations. Hackathons allow developers to learn new skills, engage with peers and the industry, and showcase their creativity over the course of just a weekend. With the new and improved Devfolio, hackers can not only fill the missing gaps in their skills through hackathons but verify them and get a job at a company they’d love to work at, all through Devfolio. Our support for hackathons on Devfolio will continue unabated with many more hackathons to be hosted on Devfolio in the coming months.

The first iteration: Devfolio Opportunities

From the time we launched the hackathon platform for the public, we had started getting requests from startups to hire developers from our platform. The ‘Devfolio Opportunities’ program was our first stab at the developer hiring problem.

Developers were shortlisted on the basis of their Devfolio profiles, from among those who had indicated interest in participating in the program. Post a quick phone call by the Devfolio team to understand their inclinations, a curated list of hacker profiles was sent out to the startups, part of the program. Once startups indicated their interest in proceeding with selected candidates, they were connected to take the conversation forward.

While the program was reasonably successful by ‘Beta’ standards, we understood pretty early on that this was not something that could scale. We had managed to significantly aid the discovery process for both startups and the developers but were not adding any further value to the process. Startups still had to make efforts to evaluate the candidates to determine if their skill level matched what they claimed in their profiles. As a result, students still needed to go through multiple evaluation rounds and bear with an extended hiring process as well.

Devfolio: A much-needed ‘patch’ for Tech Hiring

With Devfolio, we provide a simple way for talented developers to get jobs in startups they’d love to work for, bypassing unnecessary hurdles. They just need to give the Devfolio Quiz, verify their skills through an interview with the Devfolio engineering team, and proceed to final onsite interviews with Devfolio partner companies!

We built the process keeping in mind the key issues we were able to identify in the tech hiring space. Here’s how it goes:

1.) Devfolio Quiz:

The quiz is a series of MCQs based on the skill area chosen by the candidate. This keeps the application process accessible for candidates as per their convenience yet acts as an effective initial filter for makers and builders from the crowd of potential applicants. Three attempts to clear the quiz are provided with the rest period after they get exhausted, being three months.

2.) Skill Verification on Devfolio:

Upon clearing the Devfolio quiz, a developer can book a slot for an interview with the Devfolio engineering team. The interview lasting approximately one and a half hours will test the depth of the candidate’s knowledge in the chosen skill area. Clearing the interview verifies the chosen skill on Devfolio vetting the candidate’s abilities. Unsuccessful candidates are provided detailed feedback at this stage to enable them to fill the gaps in their knowledge and apply again.

3.) Onsite interview with top startups:

Once their skills have been verified on Devfolio, candidates fill a quick matching questionnaire and receive invitations to interview with top startups. Devfolio partner companies are mission-driven startups with fantastic work culture, great workspaces, and trusted names in the industry.

Devfolio is an endeavor very close to our hearts considering the impact it can have on the lives of thousands of student developers and young graduates in India. We’re excited to see how the community receives our new product. While we think it’s the best thing to happen to the world since sliced bread, don’t take our word for it, check it out now! 👉 devfolio.co

Originally published at https://devfolio.co/blog/ on October 7, 2019

Why we built Devfolio? was originally published in Devfolio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A lot has happened since our last update. So grab a cuppa’, it’ll be worth your while!

A tryst with Y Combinator

It’s certainly not a regular day when the world’s most prestigious startup accelerator calls on you for an interview. The subject of the 6:45 a.m. Y Combinator application decision email was a cryptic ‘Your Y Combinator Application’, and we instinctively braced ourselves for rejection, thinking of a million ways we could have chosen our words better in the application form. We were pleasantly surprised (to put it mildly 😁), when the email turned out to be an invitation to an interview with the YC team on 7 May.

We’re really thankful to folks from the startup ecosystem who offered us invaluable advice and support while we asked ourselves hard questions in lead-up to the interview. Vidit from Meesho, Shashank from Razorpay, Nikhil from Setu and Ryan from Product Hunt provided us useful tips on not just the YC interview process but insights into how we can provide more value to the developer community in India. Spoiler alert, we didn’t make it to the S19 batch of YC, but the immense learning gained from the journey made the experience worth it anyway. We truly believe we’re on to something meaningful, which you’ll hear more about very soon. Stay tuned!

Organizing WMN; — India’s Largest Women-Only Hackathon

Right after we got done with the YC interview we dived head first into gearing up for wmn; — India’s largest women-only hackathon. Though we had been working on it since February, our social media strategy closer to the event paid off with a lot more companies starting to show interest once they realised the scale of the event and the enthusiasm of the hacker community for it. We had some great speakers and mentors over and received some rave reviews that made our day. Here’s a recap of the event by a wmn; podium finisher. Check the photos out here if you haven’t done so already. Playing our part in growing the representation of women in tech in India was a truly rewarding experience!

An All-New Organizer Dashboard

We constantly try and incorporate feedback from our community which is why we in addition to the features and improvements we’ve been shipping to our hacker dashboard over the past months, we have launched a brand new organizer dashboard. We’ve packed it with super useful features and a super slick UI which Devfolio has now come to be known for. Some of the major features have been listed in the changelog below. We demoed it at the hackathon organizer meetup at wmn; on 2 June where we were pleased to learn that our efforts had matched and even exceeded expectations. 😋

Fall Hackathon Season Kickoff!

With the hackathon movement in the Indian subcontinent gaining momentum we were stoked to kick off the Fall Hackathon Season in July. The first hackathon of the season took place in the Kathmandu Valley! With a team of organizers and volunteers based across the globe coming together for Everest Hack, it was the biggest hackathon in Nepal. We were glad to be able to participate in the endeavour of nurturing the hackathon culture in Nepal.

New hackathons are being listed on Devfolio every week by enthusiastic organizers across the world from New Delhi to San Francisco. From the feedback we get to hear from our community members, they couldn’t be happier!

ETHIndia 2.0 — A Devfolio Official Hackathon

We stay close to our organizer roots by putting together Devfolio Official Hackathons which include wmn;, InOut and ETHIndia. After the brilliant run, we had in the last edition; we raised the bar with ETHIndia 2.0 with sponsors like the Ethereum Foundation, NuCypher, Lendroid, Kyber Network, Matic and many more in tow. The 3 day event hosted the best minds in crypto and connected them with the next generation of BUIDLers to push decentralized tech forward. The conference and closing ceremonies were live-streamed for the benefit of those who couldn’t make it in person. Catch up on all the action in our recap here!

What we’ve been writing/ reading/ watching/ listening:

• Building the new Facebook with React, GraphQl and Relay
• Redesigning a dearly loved brand through an iterative and open process
• Cultivating the right mindset and framework to ‘win’
• Learning hooks in React in just 5 steps with examples
• Pearls of wisdom from a serial entrepreneur who’s done it all

Changelog:

Hacker Dashboard

• Revamped dashboard UI
• Added ‘High School’ option in Education drop-down list
• Search submissions through team name/hack name/tags
• Improved team joining error messages
• Deprecated Address field and added ability to add location through Postal Code
• Added the ability for organizers to setup their hackathons through the Devfolio dashboard

Organizer Dashboard

• Powerful analytics overview
• Essential admin level features — Application date Extension / Submission deadline Extension / RSVP reset
• Send targeted announcement emails
• Add travel reimbursement amount as per travel location
• Tab based access control for organising team

Community Update: Letting you in on our startup journey and plans for general world domination! was originally published in Devfolio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Devfolio team organised the second edition of Asia’s biggest Ethereum Hackathon on 2–4 August. Missed out on attending ETHIndia 2.0 in person? Luckily for you, our social media team did a great job covering all the action from the event. Relive the highlights with a little help from our ‘LIT’ twitter feed. 🔥

The MLR Convention Centre in Bangalore opened its gates for ETHIndia Conference attendees at 8 AM on 2 August. With a stellar lineup of talks and workshops for the ETHIndia conference, we welcomed over 400 attendees for the conference. Check-ins were a hassle-free process thanks to Devfolio’s built-in single-click check-in process and our dedicated volunteer team.

ETHIndia on Twitter

Rise and Shine hackers! 😁 We have an awesome line up of Talks + Workshops today! Followed by of course the #hackathon 💖 Check in at 8 am, See you there! 💃🏻

ETHIndia on Twitter

Make your way to the registeration desks and check In to #ETHIndia 2.0! Our proactive team of volunteers will make sure you have an amazing time! 💃🏻

After a hearty breakfast, attendees headed for the auditorium where Nash from Devfolio along with Kartik and Jacob from ETHGlobal kicked off the opening ceremonies with shoutouts to our amazing sponsors, organisers and volunteers who made ETHIndia possible. We also had some cool stats from the hacker applications to show off, which is a testament to the rising popularity of developer interest in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Pranav from NuCypher, Jaynti from Matic and Anand from Lendroid took to the stage to introduce their projects and the bounties they had in store for hackers.

We didn’t want folks who couldn’t make it in person to the conference to miss out on the action which is why we live-streamed it. :)

Check out the recording here — bit.ly/2OJO9bQ

Shakti Goap on Twitter

@devfolioco @ethereum @ETHGlobal - #ETHIndia 2.0 received 1927 applications from 20 countries across the world - 45% are attending their first hackathon - 68% are new to @ethereum ecosystem - The average age of hackers is 23 years

ETHIndia on Twitter

Kicking off #ETHIndia with the Opening Ceremony 🎊 We have @TheRealKartik and @jacob_willemsma from @ETHGlobal , @NashVail from @devfolioco giving the event a Superb Start! 🚀

ETHIndia on Twitter

Shout out to all our Sponsors for helping #ETHIndia 2.0 to Kick Off! We are forever grateful to you! Love you the most 💖

ETHIndia on Twitter

We have @_jdkanani Founder and CEO of @maticnetwork @_jdkanani briefed us about Matic's accomplishments and goals. @maticnetwork provides secure side chain scaling solutions for public blockchains 🙌🏻

Lendroid on Twitter

'We bring a dozen viable ideas and quality dev tools for you, the hackers, to stand on our shoulders and build something awesome.' @viananda makes an entrance for @lendroidproject at #ethindia @ETHIndiaco #Blockchain #Ethereum

ETHIndia on Twitter

🔊 Make your way to the auditorium! Talks + Workshops begin at 10 am IST! Or Tune In Live at https://t.co/1gQhcEIYGm 🎥 to not miss a beat of #ETHIndia 2.0 🚀

Soon after the opening ceremony, it was time for the first workshop of the day by Arpit from Matic Network on getting starting with Solidity. Vignesh from Lendroid then took to the stage to talk about his transformative experience with hackathons! Up next were Desmond and Anton from Kyber Network to talk about how they enable on-chain liquidity for the decentralised economy. Stani from AAVE took up the final session before lunch, speaking about how decentralised lending pools are impacting the DeFi landscape. Attendees made good use of the lunch break, swarming the sponsor booths to interact and learn more about the exciting projects taking part in ETHIndia.

ETHIndia on Twitter

We are Building #decentralized Airbnb! Follow along the workshop to familar yourself with Solidity and show your skills in the #ETHIndia hackathon, commencing tonight! @atvanguard diving deep into the code👨🏻‍💻

ETHIndia on Twitter

There is treasure here. You just need to look for it" @vigsun explains the importance of Hackathons & Team work. @lendroidproject started at a hackathon & believes in stepping out of comfort zone and Community building! Catch their technical talk at 2 pm IST 🚀

ETHIndia on Twitter

@Anyhowclick briefs about the on-chain Liquidity Protocol, Token exhange and Reserves on Kyber! Meet @KyberNetwork at their booth to brainstorm on ideas 🔥

ETHIndia on Twitter

@StaniKulechov briefs about the Decentralized Lending Pool, DLP architecture, Interest Rate Swaps and DLP Protocol 🎊 "Hackathons are magical. If you can be free and creative. You can build amazing things" - @StaniKulechov at #ETHIndia 2.0

ETHIndia on Twitter

Visit the Sponsor Booths to know more about our Sponsors and the exciting products they are working on 🎉

ETHIndia on Twitter

Lunch Time, Go fill your bellies and come back to the Auditorium! The action has only just begun 💪🏻 Fun Fact: The First use of Crypto Currency was to buy Pizza 🍕

The day continued with Vii from Lendroid taking up a workshop on the Lendroid Protocol and their journey so far. Sayli from Matic continued Arpit’s solidity introduction session from the morning to showcase a dApp version of Airbnb. Anton from Kyber Network showed us how to integrate the Kyber Protocol into dApps. Privacy is a pre-requisite for any real world usage of blockchain and Arnaud from AZTEC showed us how you can bake it into your dApps using the AZTEC toolbox.

ETHIndia on Twitter

@lendroidproject protocol will be shifting to mainnet in a week 🎉 @viisundaram and @vigsun explain why Lendroid uses Vyper for Smart Contracts. "Smart Contracts were not meant to create systems that replicate cloud environment " - @viisundaram at #ETHIndia 2.0

ETHIndia on Twitter

And Done! Decentralized Airbnb is complete🎉 Thanks to @atvanguard @ptsayli from @maticnetwork for this super informative session 🔥

ETHIndia on Twitter

Implementing @KyberNetwork Protocol in a DApp. We are testing contracts on the go! WOW 🤯

Finally, it was time for Vitalik, someone who doesn’t need an introduction! Even though he couldn’t make it in person, the interactive nature of the fireside chat with him led by Kartik made the audience feel he was here with us in Bangalore. Vitalik spoke about his journey from writing articles in exchange for Bitcoin to building Ethereum and answered some thought-provoking about the way ahead for Ethereum from the audience.

Next up was Gaurav from QuikNode who demonstrated how to set up an Ethereum Block Explorer using QuikNode and web3.js. The last talk of the conference was taken up by Leonard from Torus who explained how frictionless logins for dApps are enabled through Torus.

Anand Venkateswaran on Twitter

@VitalikButerin non-giver of ETH, but giver of much mirth at @ETHIndiaco. #ethindia

ETHIndia on Twitter

Taking it to the next level with @VitalikButerin #ETHIndia 🇮🇳

ETHIndia on Twitter

The fastest and the easiest way to run your own Ethereum Node! ⚡️ Feel free to contact Gaurav and brainstorm on ideas for the #hackathon 🧠

ETHIndia on Twitter

It has been an extremely interactive session with @TorusLabs 🙌🏻 Feel free to reach out to Leonard Tan and team for more deets😍

With the conference wrapped up, our hackers were all set to hack and started checking in in earnest for the hackathon. Jeff Lau from ENS did an excellent job brainstorming with the hackers and helping them use ENS domains for their dApps.

ETHIndia on Twitter

Attention all hackers!! Check In for the #hackathon has begun. Please assemble at the registration desk and get yourselves checked in with our team! 🤗

ETHIndia on Twitter

@_jefflau did a Brilliant job on brainstorming our hackers with all things ENS! Feel free to reach Jeff for any information you may need about @ensdomains 💪🏻

The hackathon kicked off at 10 PM post a nourishing dinner for our hackers. Energised by the inspiring talks and stimulating conversations through the day hackers were raring to get a chance to build the next big dApp.

ETHIndia 2.0 Day 1 — A Twitter Recap was originally published in Devfolio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Phew! We’re finally done with the Spring Season (January — March 2019) of Devfolio hackathons.

And, it certainly has been a ride to remember. Since we launched our platform in December last year for use in community hackathons, more than 40 organisers from across the country reached out to us. We finally decided to go ahead with 12 of the most promising hackathons in terms of hacker experience. The response of our community was overwhelming. Each of the hackathons received a minimum of 500 registrations with some charting unheard-of highs!

These were the exciting hackathons hosted on Devfolio in the past 3 months:

• Hackathon v15 — IIIT-D — 13–14 Jan
• iHack — IITB, Mumbai — 19–20 Jan
• DotSlash — SVNIT, Surat — 2–3 Feb
• CodeUtsava — NIT Raipur — 16–17 Feb
• HackVSIT — VIPS, New Delhi — 17–18 Feb
• HackonHills — NIT Hamirpur — 8–10 Mar
• UtkalHacks — Ravenshaw University, Bhubaneswar — 15–17 Mar
• HackFest — IIT ISM Dhanbad — 15–17 Mar
• OnLoad — VVCE, Mysuru — 23–24 Mar
• HackBMU — BML Munjal University, Gurugram — 23–24 Mar
• Hack In The North — IIITA, Prayagraj — 29–31 Mar
• HackNSUT — NSUT, New Delhi— 30–31 Mar

We sincerely wish we could swing by all the hackathons this season. Being a small team with lofty ambitions and focused on improving our platform, we were glad to be able to make it to four of them in person.

We had already told you all about our adventures in January when we visited iHack at IITB, you can read about them here in case you missed it.

February started off with the Ajay from the Devfolio team attending DotSlash, giving student developers pro-tips on how contributing to open source really pays off. P.S That’s how he landed his awesome internship at Devfolio.

March saw our community evangelist (me!) visit Mysuru for Onload. It was a fun hackathon with the organisers focused on ensuring an excellent hacker experience. Despite it being the first edition, thanks to Devfolio teams from across India were able to discover the hackathon and drop by for a memorable time.

Hack in the North 4.0 which needs no introduction amongst the student developer community, was the last of the hackathons of Devfolio Spring Season (the other being HackNSUT held on the same dates in New Delhi). The Devfolio team (Utkarsh — co-founder@Devfolio, and I) flew down to Prayagraj from Bengaluru to connect with and mentor the hackers in-person. Being invited as judges, we certainly had a tough time given the amazing hacks that the hackers came up with. If you’re a hacker looking for inspiration for your hack, do check them out here.

The Ethereum track at these hackathons was supported by Matic, a layer 2 solution to bring scale to the Ethereum ecosystem.

During this whirlwind of university hackathons, we also launched two ‘Official’ hackathons — handcrafted and organised by the Devfolio team.

Currently, only 20% of hackathon participants are women. It’s a low number and unfortunately equal to the percentage of women pursuing degrees in Computer Science. ‘Diversity in tech’ is something that needs to go beyond being just a catchphrase with initiatives that actively encourage the participation of traditionally underrepresented voices in the tech industry. This was the rationale behind Devfolio initiating wmn; — a women-only hackathon taking place in Bengaluru from 1–2 June.

We also launched applications for the second iteration of the massively anticipated ETHIndia. The first edition saw 400+ attendees and 50+ submissions with the best minds in the crypto space coming together for a celebration of decentralised tech. A tangible metric has been the runaway success of the projects which were conceptualised at ETHIndia. Since then the tech has only advanced, and the market matured. We’re excited to see what lies in store with ETHIndia 2.0

What we’ve been writing/ reading/ watching/ listening:

As busy as we are, we always find the time to keep ourselves informed. Check these links out to level up your game:

• On mental models for effectively building products, nuances of JS, React, and much more
• Building an engine to discover product-market fit
• How one of the hottest startups in the market today made a comeback and kept a relentless focus on design
• On keeping your ‘lizard brain’ calm and shipping on time
• A battle plan to defeat the dreaded blank screen
• Tips on how to do remote work right as a student developer

Change-log:

Check out all the nifty features we shipped in February and March.

• Announcements — Enabling organisers to communicate with participants through the dashboard itself
• ‘Work experience’ section UX refactor — Easier to add more detailed work experiences
• ‘Explore’ section card UI — Made life easier for those who wait till the last minute to apply by showing last date to register explicitly
• GIPHY powered acceptance “do this” — Because GIFs make everything better
• Added Devfolio badge for ‘official’ hackathons — A stamp of approval you can trust for hackathons organised by the Devfolio team
• Feedback feature — Ability to provide feedback for both attended hackathons and the Devfolio Platform itself

Devfolio Spring Season Wrap-Up was originally published in Devfolio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2018 was awesome. 2019 is turning out to be ‘awesomer’!

Since this is the first official update since our public launch, let’s start with a rundown of how Devfolio came to be.

The team behind what is now Devfolio had been organising InOut — a popular community hackathon since 2015. In October 2017, our team organised the fourth edition of InOut. We received 4500+ applications from across 8 countries in just 25 days!

This was a testament to the burgeoning interest of developers in community-centric hackathons such as ours where the focus was on learning and fun, rather than generic creativity-stifling approaches. We wondered if we could find a way to share the internal tools we’d built, the resources we had access to and the know-how we had honed, with budding hackathon organisers much like ourselves a few years back. This coupled with the growing demand for opportunities by the talent we saw in the maker community laid the foundation for Devfolio.

Aspiring designers should definitely check out our brilliant Design Lead Nash Vail’s insightful treatise on how he designed the initial UI/UX of Devfolio.

ETHIndia — Asia’s Biggest Ethereum Hackathon organised by us in August 2018 was the first hackathon to be held on the Devfolio platform. We got rave reviews for both the event itself and the platform. There was no looking back for us after that.

We got the validation we needed at InOut 5.0 in October 2018 which was again very well received. Prateek Surana, who has joined us now as Frontend Engineering Intern has written a great article about his experience as a hacker at InOut 5.0.

Devfolio started 2019 with a whole suite of amazing community hackathons lined up for our Spring Season, all without even having a landing page initially! Along the way, we picked up an awesome partner in crime: Matic — a crypto-startup that works to supercharge blockchain transactions and also brought on board a full-time ‘Community Manager’ — yours truly to nurture our expanding community.

iHack organised by E-Cell, IITB on 19–20 January was the first hackathon hosted on Devfolio (not directly organised by us). Our Founder Shakti and Community Manager Denver flew down to Mumbai to connect in-person with the hacker community. They were joined by Anurag and Nirbhik from Matic who were sponsors for the Blockchain track. Check out their article about iHack and the amazing hacks built there.

We have a lot more awesome hackathons lined up in the coming months, that we’re sure we’ll meet you at. Don’t miss the chance to lay your hands on some cool Devfolio schwag in the upcoming hackathons.

What we’ve been writing/ reading/ watching/ listening

We’re a bunch of passionate folks who love what they do and like to stay on top of things as much as possible. Here’s a bunch of links and resources we’ve been reading/watching ourselves at Devfolio:

• https://youtu.be/WLqc0EX8Bmg — A behind the scenes look into engineering Netflix’s interactive masterpiece — Bandersnatch
• https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/seo-for-engineers — A guide to a much overlooked and misunderstood topic
• https://medium.com/s/office-politics/3-disasters-to-avoid-when-youre-growing-a-startup-1df4de6221ac — On building the right culture for your startup
• https://cantunsee.space/ — A game that teaches you essential UI/UX principles
• https://www.nashvail.me/blog/deep-work/ — Another profound article by Nash on the art of ‘deep work’

Change-log

Below is the change-log of features we shipped in Jan, we’re sure you’ll love them:

• Upload avatar — Bored of the placeholder avatar? Here’s your chance to personalise it. Find it under the General tab of the settings option in the avatar dropdown menu
• Update username — Self Explanatory. Find it below the upload avatar option
• Email notifications — Choose the kind of email notifications you’ll like to receive. Tab located next to the general tab under settings
• Opportunities — Curated opportunities for talented developers. More on this in the near future. Located in the avatar dropdown menu
• Work experience — Updated the work experience profile section to accommodate those yet to find their first work opportunity
• Logo Update — Devfolio is no more in beta and hence the logo update along with the launch of a shiny new landing page

Hope you enjoyed reading this update. Until next time!

Devfolio 2019 Update — One Update to Rule Them All was originally published in Devfolio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.