We have been saying for a while that Argentina's tech community neither starts nor ends in Buenos Aires. On July 31st and August 1st we joined Internet Para Todos for #BuildLaRioja, the province's first innovation hackathon.
Internet Para Todos was celebrating its first 100,000 subscribers, and we wanted to bring the spirit of Nerdearla somewhere these spaces are still scarce. The result went beyond anything we expected when we started.
Real challenges, not empty pitches
If one thing set #BuildLaRioja apart from a typical hackathon, it was the starting point. On the first day, institutions from La Rioja such as Sanatorio Rioja, Aguas Riojanas and Cerdo de los Llanos presented participants with real problems from their operations: the challenges came with context, with data, and with someone on the other side waiting for a solution.
That changed everything. This was not about building flashy demos, but about thinking up solutions someone could be using the following Monday, with the brief of going from idea to MVP in a handful of hours and defending it in front of the jury in a 3 minute pitch.
A Friday night of talks, to build all Saturday
To support the process we invited three people very close to the community, who said yes without hesitating: Tati Sorroche, Goncy Pozzo and Charly Gauto, who took part as speakers and as jury.
Tati opened the talks with everything that happens before you write the first line of code: how to get from an abstract idea to a concrete MVP, how to gather requirements, and how to tell the story of your idea in a good pitch.
Goncy first got the whole room on its feet making noise, and then showed how to do as little as possible with vibecoding tools. He also threw in tips for presenting to the jury: DO NOT SHOW A LOGIN SCREEN.
And Charly closed the first night, past 9pm, with the forgotten side of hackathons: checking that what we are building works and does not break anything else.
The projects
The quality of the solutions surprised all of us, jury included. Some of the projects that took the podium and caught our attention:
- CardioTrak: patient management for Sanatorio Rioja, and winners of the hackathon's first prize!
- Real time pig monitoring: an alert system that flags deviations to catch health problems in the animals, answering the challenge set by Cerdo de los Llanos.
- WiGuard AI: detects falls among older adults using the WiFi signal (CSI) to recognise activity patterns and fire alerts over Telegram.
In total more than 150 people took part across more than 40 teams, either starting from the challenges set by the local organisations or presenting projects of their own.
What we take away
Beyond the podium, what stays with us from these two days is how warmly the community in La Rioja welcomed us, and the sheer appetite for building at every table. Choosing to spend an entire Friday and Saturday solving a problem is not something everyone is willing to do, and on that count everyone who took part had already won.
Thanks to Internet Para Todos, who made us feel at home: to Javier, Martín, Mica, Flor and the whole staff. A special mention for Guty, who, thanks to \<Komodin>, I found out 14 years later was \<dalgrev> from the early days of the Sysarmy IRC.
To all of them, thank you for the hospitality and for betting on the idea that technology is also built from La Rioja.
This is only the beginning. See you at the next #BuildLaRioja!