Notes from the hackathon floor, and why community-first development beats stealth mode more often than people admit.
Most builders I know default to stealth mode — build in private, ship when perfect, then announce. I've done it myself. Devconnect was a concentrated reminder of why that's usually the wrong call.
It changes who finds you. In a room of 400 builders, the ones who got traction during the hackathon weren't the ones with the best technical demos — they were the ones who could articulate the problem clearly and had been talking about it publicly long enough that people already knew to look for them.
The best time to start building in public was when you started building. The second best time is now.
The web3 community in Latin America is building for real-world problems in ways that map directly to what we're trying to do in West Africa. The infrastructure assumptions are different, the connectivity assumptions are different — but the core challenge of building trust with users who've been burned by failed promises is exactly the same.