Workshop and Brunch with a16z and NEAR
You are warmly invited to Weekly Brunches, a series of events held every Saturday. These events aim to provide students with guidance, connections, and support in bringing their ideas to life over the year. The events begin with a brunch, followed by two streams of (1) entrepreneurial and (2) technical workshops. The objective is to bring together students who have diverse backgrounds but share entrepreneurial ambitions, and to support the best projects with opportunities for publication, hackathons, incubation, or other forms of implementation.
Entrepreneurial stream
Liz Harkavy is a partner on the a16z crypto investment team. She focuses on web 2.5 / picks and shovels, as well as decentralised infrastructure. Before joining a16z crypto, Liz was a founding engineer at Corsali (now Vana), a venture-backed full-stack machine learning platform. The platform is powered by highly educated workers who label data to earn crypto from their phones. Prior to that, she gained experience at Facebook and NASA JPL. At JPL, Liz conducted research on utilising reinforcement learning to optimise a delay tolerant network node. She presented her findings at the IEEE Aerospace conference.
Liz completed her bachelor's degree in Physics and Computer Science, as well as her master's degree in Computer Science, at MIT. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Technical stream
Owen Hassall is the Developer Relations at near/dev/hub. He is also a co-founder of VEX, an Esports project that is currently being developed on NEAR. In addition, Owen serves as the President of the Leeds Blockchain Society. He is a Theoretical Physics student with a strong passion for Quantum Computing.
The first NEAR workshop (out of two) will be slightly more challenging, but fear not - Owen will provide hands-on assistance to ensure that the content remains manageable. Make sure, though, to meet a few prerequisites beforehand.
1. Install Rust from https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.
o An introduction to Rust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q3Z5RBX7hQ.
o If you are using Windows, it is recommended to use WSL by following this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install. If you are not using Windows, you can use a Linux VM.
2. Ensure that you have a code editor installed. You can download Visual Studio Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/download.
3. Learn a little about object-oriented programming from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGDa0P2PXrY.
In the second NEAR workshop on February 24th, you will be able to connect the back-end to the front-end, creating a fully functional app!
The events are co-hosted with Cambridge Blockchain Society.
For more information, join the Weekly Brunches Telegram group.
TICKETS: to attend the workshop, please message the Weekly Brunches Telegram group
WHEN: Saturday 10 February 2024, 12 - 2pm
WHERE: King's College, Cambridge
