Minsk · June 1–2, 2019 · 36-hour scheduled window
EMERGE HACK 2019
A future-tech hackathon scheduled across a 36-hour weekend window ahead of EMERGE 2019, where I worked on the early Realy product: an attempt to design software around meaningful friendship rather than feeds, swiping, or attention.
Organizer
EMERGE / EPAM
Place
Minsk, Belarus
Project
Realy
Format
60 participants · 36-hour scheduled window
What I worked on
Realy tried to design for friendship
The hackathon was framed around technologies of the future, with briefs spanning food, longevity, mobility, health and wellbeing. Inside that room, Realy was asking a quieter question: can software help strangers become real friends without turning people into another feed to browse?
Read the full Raw Draft →Build history
The weekend and the longer tail
- 01
SAT / 01
Treat friendship as a design problem
Join the Realy build inside a hackathon framed around technologies of the future, and focus on a quieter problem: how software might help people find relationships that can become real friendships.
- 02
BUILD
Turn trust and connection into an interface
Prototype flows around people, profiles, verification, requests and chats while asking what information helps strangers approach each other without reducing a person to a swipeable card.
- 03
SUN / 02
Leave with a product thread, not a finished product
The scheduled weekend ended on Sunday evening, but Realy continued into private iOS test builds and ongoing product design through 2019 and beyond.
What happened after
Hackathon prototype became a continuing product
Realy continued after Minsk rather than disappearing with the weekend. The archive shows private iOS builds from summer 2019 onward, later product work, and a friendship-focused app that is still publicly available.
- The EMERGE HACK weekend is an early product and design milestone, not a claim that the complete later Realy product was built during the hackathon.
- Realy was not the winning project at the hackathon. Blink, an eye-training app using eye tracking, took first place.
- The longer Realy story remains centered on meaningful human connection, shared values, deeper conversation and moving relationships offline.
Article
At EMERGE HACK 2019, We Tried to Design for Friendship
Read the reconstructed field note about Minsk, the early Realy product trail, and why friendship is such a difficult but important thing to design technology around.
Earlier Minsk archive
LOVEHACK Minsk 2018
Go back one year to another Minsk hackathon where the design problem was emotional translation across language rather than friendship.