Early Days of Ethereum

Preserving the history and stories of the people who built Ethereum.

devcon0

Invitation-only developer conference held in Berlin
DEVCON0

The first Ethereum developer conference was held at the brand new Berlin ETHDEV offices in November 2014.

George Hallam posted about DEVCON0 on Reddit while it was in progress, and wrote a recap post after it had finished:

/articles/devcon-0-recap/
A comprehensive recap of the first Ethereum developer conference held in Berlin from November 24-28, 2014, covering mission, processes, languages, ÐApps, architecture, security, and future blockchain theory

It was held shortly after the conclusion of the crowdsale, in September of that year. When the funds came in from the crowdsale a whole new batch of full-time staff members were hired immediately, and this Berlin event was the first time that many of these people met each other or met the earlier contributors. DEVCON0 was intended to get everybody on the same page and set clear future direction.

New starters at that point included George Hallam, Christoph Jentzsch, Zsolt Felföldi, Alex van de Sande, Christian Reitwießner, Daniel Nagy, Felix Lange, Marek Kotewicz, Arkadiy Paronyan, Christian Vömel, Jutta Steiner, Ken Kappler, Lefteris Karapetsas, Paweł Bylica, Sven Ehlert, Vinay Gupta and Yann Levreau.

There was a lot of inconsistency of spelling at the time, so you'll see DEVCON, DEVcon and even ÐΞVcon-0 in various places. It was only in later years that the slightly confusing use of Ð and Ξ characters ceased. You'll see Ðapps in various places at this time too, and even ΞTHÐΞV!

Here is the list of attendees who made the group photo. Most worked for ETHDEV or the Ethereum Foundation, but others had a looser affiliation (Joe Lubin, for example):

Others were contributors from outside of ETHDEV and the Ethereum Foundation entirely:

Who else did not make the photo? Anybody missing here?

There is a DEVCON0 Playlist on YouTube but it only contains 11 videos for an event which ran for 5 full days. Additional sessions are detailed in the recap post above. Perhaps video can be found for these in the future? They are all worth a watch in any case.

In particular, this opening session given by Gavin Wood has a section in which nearly all the attendees come up to the microphone and briefly introduce themselves. This is a priceless artifact. The "DEVCON0" videos shown under individual profiles link to the timestamp within that video of their own self-introduction.

Video not found: "Ethereum ÐΞVcon-0 – Gavin: Welcome! Our mission: ÐApps"