In a previous article, I highlighted how awesome it is that Pillar gives me the opportunity to travel for work — it always feels like an adventure to see new places and meet new faces, while at the same time taking myself out of a comfortable position and throwing myself into the fields of the unknown.
The latest adventure took Jack and myself to Groningen, a beautiful town in the Netherlands — roughly 2 hours from Amsterdam by train — so that we could attend the Odyssey Hackathon. Members of the Pillar Developer Team were there hacking away and tackling challenges regarding digital identity. Pillar was one of the many, many teams dedicating themselves to solving the most diverse issues and trying to improve society together with the Dutch government.
Now, I can’t stress enough how mind-blowingly good the event itself was. The venue, the sound, the video production, the dynamics, the food — oh my sweet lord, the food — everything.
Everything was on point. It felt techie, it felt hackery. The energy in that huge room pointed towards change, towards improvement.
I felt reenergized. I felt inspired.
It made me want to do another kind of video, made me want to experiment, to expand, to take risks.
I want to thank everyone involved. Those people made me see that there are indeed people left in the world who are fighting for change — big or small.
And I want to give a massive shoutout to the Pillar Devs, who worked their asses off and got out of that crazy crunch with a working prototype of the Citizen Wallet, something that will revolutionize and streamline the process of personal identification, in an easy and secure manner. You guys rock.