From a Spark of Inspiration to a Product That Makes a Difference – Our Hackathon Journey

2 weeks, 4-5 hours of Sleep each day, and the Birth of Miraki: A Savage Hackathon Tale

Let's be real, most hackathons are a chaotic circus. You've got sleep-deprived devs chugging energy drinks like it's water, half-baked ideas flying around, and enough tech jargon to make your head spin. But hey, that's where the magic (or madness) happens.

My team decided to dive headfirst into the Web3 online hackathon with a mission to make life less miserable for DAO contributors. You know the drill – tools scattered across the internet like lost socks, communication breakdowns that would give couples therapy a run for its money, and a general sense of "Where the heck is anything?

Introducing Miraki: VS Code for DAO tools

This is just a small explainer. More details about Miraki and the team behind will be published in later blogs.

Miraki is our brainchild, a browser-based devtool that aims to bring order to the wild world of DAOs. Think of it as VSCode, but with a Web3 twist. Here's the breakdown:

• Workspaces: Your customizable command center for a specific DAO or project. Imagine all those DAO tools finally living in harmony, under one glorious roof. Public or private spaces – you choose the level of chaos you're comfortable with. Anyone who wants to participate in your DAO or project can join your workspace (if public) and they’ll see all the apps the workspace uses in the dashboard along with all the activities within.

  

  
  

• Apps: Like VS Code extensions, but for all your DAO needs. Plug in Trello for project management, Snapshot for voting, or even Confluence for collectively losing your minds over documentation. All these apps can be found on miraki app store, and in case you have a specific app that hasn’t been made yet, you can make it yourself.

• Universal Search: Because let's face it, nobody has time to play hide-and-seek with vital info across a million different tools. One single search box for entire workspace. Your contributors will be able to search across different apps within the workspace.

  

  
  

The Hackathon Hustle: Caffeine, Code, and Controlled Chaos

The frontend was a React party, with TypeScript and Vite adding that extra bit of class. Our MVP sported three must-have apps: Trello, Snapshot, and DappSuit (swagger UI for Solana programs) to show that integration of such diverse app into one platform is possible. Shoutout to Turbo monorepo for keeping our sprawling codebase from turning into a spaghetti monster.

We ideated fancy isolation techniques for our apps: iframes, web workers, we read blogs from figma to understand how they implemented plugins, we digged deep into vs-codes original source code, the whole nine yards. But pragmatism won the day – in the true spirit of hackathons, we embraced the "it works (for now)" mantra to avoid disappearing down that rabbit hole.

The backend? Django and Postgres, a classic combo for building the foundation of our little empire. React Pluggable gave us that sweet extensibility we craved, without the crippling overengineering headaches. And that’s how we managed to wrap up the project just a day before last submission date.

The Savage Truth

Was it smooth sailing? Pfft.

More like navigating a storm in a leaky boat. But amidst the sleep deprivation, the caffeine-induced jitters, and enough bugs to rival an Amazon rainforest, a truly useful tool emerged.

Miraki ain't perfect (yet), but it's got the potential to make DAOs less of a soul-sucking experience for everyone involved. And that, my friends, is what hackathons are all about – taking a problem, caffeinating yourself into oblivion, and emerging with something that might just make the tech world a slightly better place.

So, what's next for Miraki?

We're aiming to unleash this beast into the wild, gather feedback, and iterate like there's no tomorrow. If you're a fellow DAO dweller tired of feeling like a lost explorer in a digital jungle, stay tuned. Miraki might just be your salvation.

PS: The blog is rephrased using Gemini AI. Because the writer was on Leet-code when he should be taking English writing classes.

Follow Miraki on https://twitter.com/Miraki_io.

All feedback is most-welcomed. You can contact us through email at [email protected].