Top Ten, Second in CTF, and the People You Meet Along the Way

Quick context: If you read my last post, you know I just came off the Chainlink Convergence hackathon feeling pretty good about my growth as a builder. Well, I didn't slow down. Almost immediately after submitting that project, I started preparing for another hackathon - my second Intellibus event, and once again, in person.

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Intellibus at the National Arena

The Intellibus hackathon was back at the National Arena. If you remember from my crypto journey post, the first Intellibus event was where I came up with a novel way to use blockchain to solve a real-world problem. This time around, I came in with more experience, sharper skills, and a better idea of what to expect.

There's something about being surrounded by other builders that pushes you differently. You can look around and see people grinding. You can walk over to someone's screen and ask what they're working on. You can have a conversation that would have been a 15-message thread on Discord but instead takes 30 seconds face to face.

The Results

I finished in the top ten overall. Not first. Not trying to spin it as something it wasn't. But compared to where I was at the first Intellibus, the improvement was real. Competing against people who clearly knew what they were doing, I'll take it.

The highlight though? Second place in the CTF challenge.

If you're not familiar, Capture the Flag competitions are essentially security puzzles. You're given systems to probe, vulnerabilities to find, flags to capture. It's the kind of challenge where everything you've learned about how systems work gets tested at once - not in isolation, but in combination.

Placing second in that felt different from any hackathon result I've had before. Building a project is one thing - you control the scope, the architecture, the pace. A CTF strips all of that away. You're reacting. You're under pressure. You either know your stuff or you don't. There's no architecting your way out of a challenge you can't solve.

The People

This is the part I didn't expect to matter as much as it did.

I met and spoke with people working at the forefront of AI research. Not influencers. Not Twitter personalities. Actual researchers and engineers pushing the boundaries of what's possible. The kind of conversations where you walk away with a reading list and a completely shifted perspective on where technology is heading.

I also met some genuinely brilliant people in the competition itself. The kind of people who approach problems from angles you wouldn't think of. You learn a lot about someone by watching how they break down a challenge in real time. Some of the competitors I talked to had backgrounds I wouldn't have crossed paths with online.

That's the thing about showing up in person. The internet is great for learning, but it filters everything. You see people's polished output, not their process. In a room, you see how people actually think. And sometimes that's more valuable than any documentation or course.

What I've Been Doing Since

Since submitting my Chainlink Convergence project, it's been heads down. Reading documentation. Planning. Not building for the sake of building, but actually taking the time to understand tools and frameworks deeply before jumping into the next project.

This is a pattern I've been developing over the past few months. The old me would have immediately started the next hackathon project. The current me knows that the time between projects - the reading, the planning, the research - is where the real compounding happens. Every hackathon I've done better at correlates directly with how much preparation went in beforehand, not how many hours I coded during the event.

What's Next

Finals are coming up in about a month. University doesn't pause just because you're out here competing in hackathons and going down rabbit holes. So for now, the focus shifts to academics.

It's a different kind of grind, but it's not separate from everything else. The structured thinking, the problem decomposition, the discipline of actually sitting down and doing the work - it all feeds into the same skill set. The classroom and the hackathon floor aren't as far apart as you'd think.

I'll update you guys soon. Probably after finals, probably with something new I've been building on the side because let's be honest, I can never fully stop.

Still building. Still learning. Still showing up.

# IRL > URL
class Growth:
    def __init__(self):
        self.hackathons_completed = 5
        self.ctf_placement = 2
        self.people_met = "invaluable"
        self.finals_pending = True

    def next_chapter(self):
        if self.finals_pending:
            return "study_mode"
        return "build_mode"

    def show_up(self):
        # The best connections happen in person
        # The best growth happens under pressure
        return "keep_going"