At EMERGE HACK 2019, We Tried to Design for Friendship

On June 1, 2019, I was in Minsk with a laptop, a hotel booking that literally said "Hackathon", and a weekend window to make something before the room disappeared again.

The event was EMERGE HACK, the opening pre-event of the second EMERGE technology conference. Around 60 people had been invited to spend June 1 and 2 building around a strange collection of future-facing themes: food and agriculture, longevity, mobility, health and wellbeing. The public schedule ran from 10:00 on Saturday to 22:00 on Sunday, a 36-hour event window, with EPAM supporting the hackathon. The strongest teams could continue into EMERGE with a Startup Pass and a chance to pitch at EMERGE Challenge. A later account from the winning Blink team described its actual working sprint as 24 hours, which is a useful reminder that the published event window and the time teams experienced as the hackathon were not necessarily the same thing.

The thing I was working on was called Realy.

It did not look like the most futuristic thing in the room. We were not extending life or rebuilding transport. We were working on a social product around a very old human problem: finding people you can actually become close to.

I had already spent years moving between countries, projects and temporary communities, so I knew the contradiction quite personally. The internet had made it almost absurdly easy to meet people and strangely difficult to feel less alone. We had more profiles, followers, matches and messages than any generation before us, but those systems were mostly designed to keep interaction moving. Friendship asks for almost the opposite. Time. Repetition. Vulnerability. Trust. The willingness to become inconvenient to each other.

That is what makes Realy interesting to me in retrospect. It was trying to turn a very soft human process into an interface without pretending that the interface itself was the relationship.

What I can actually prove from the archive

I do not want to reconstruct an old hackathon by making my memory cleaner than it really is. The surviving trail is more useful precisely because it is messy.

My EMERGE emails confirm that I was accepted to the hackathon on June 1 and 2. A hotel reservation for the trip is marked as a hackathon business trip. Then, on the evening of June 1, while EMERGE HACK was still running, comments from Nikita Arnett start appearing inside a Figma file called "Realy?". The early design work included ideas around verification, requests and chats, finding people, profile structure and how much information the product should ask from someone before letting them connect.

The archive then keeps going after Minsk. By late July 2019 I was receiving private iOS test builds of Realy through Crashlytics. New builds continued through the autumn. In August, I was added to work around localization for a Y Combinator application. The Figma trail itself continued for years.

So I cannot honestly say that a finished Realy was built during one weekend. That would be hackathon mythology. What I can say is more interesting: the weekend sits at the beginning of a much longer design and product trail that did not vanish when the prizes were handed out.

Realy was not the hackathon winner either. The first-place project was Blink, an eye-exercise app using eye tracking. That matters because archives should preserve participation without quietly upgrading it into victory.

Designing against the logic of the social feed

The current Realy product describes itself as friendship-only. No swiping. It tries to connect people through shared values, gives people questions that can help a conversation become deeper, and increasingly pushes the relationship back into physical life rather than keeping it trapped inside the app.

Some of that language and functionality came much later, and I do not want to project the 2026 product backwards onto a 2019 prototype. But the through-line is clear. Realy kept asking a question most social products avoid: what if the goal is not more social activity, but a stronger relationship?

That sounds like a small distinction until you try to design for it.

A feed can be optimized. You can measure impressions, clicks, sessions, replies and time spent. A dating app can count matches. A messenger can count messages. Friendship is harder. You can have a thousand messages with someone who would never come when you need help. You can speak to somebody once a month and know they would cross a country for you.

The important state is not inside the interface.

This changes what a responsible product should optimize. Perhaps success means people need the app less over time. Perhaps the best conversation is the one that leaves the chat and becomes dinner. Perhaps the product should sometimes create silence instead of another notification. Perhaps identity should not be compressed into a profile that makes a person instantly sortable.

That is difficult territory for software because software likes what it can count.

The future problem hiding inside a friendship app

EMERGE framed the hackathon around technologies of the future. In 2019, the obvious versions of that future were longevity, mobility, food systems and digital health. Looking back from 2026, I think friendship belonged there too.

Loneliness and social isolation have since become explicit public-health questions. The World Health Organization now argues that social connection needs to be treated with the same seriousness as physical and mental health. At the same time, social platforms are increasingly full of synthetic content, and AI companions can be available every hour, remember what we tell them and respond with almost impossible patience. We are entering a world where simulated attention may become cheaper and more available than human attention.

That makes the old Realy question feel more serious, not less.

What should technology do when the scarce resource is another human being who chooses to care?

One answer is substitution: make the machine feel enough like a friend that the absence hurts less. There will be useful versions of that. But there is another path I care about more. Technology can help humans cross the difficult first distance between each other. It can make it safer to approach, easier to find shared context, easier to ask something real, easier to organize a dinner, easier to keep a fragile connection alive long enough for trust to form.

In that sense, the interface is scaffolding. The relationship is the thing being built.

I think we need much more technology like that. Not technology trying to become the person, but technology helping people become more capable of finding, understanding and showing up for one another.

A hackathon can be the first room, not the whole story

I have a complicated relationship with hackathons because they make everything look finished on Sunday evening. There is a pitch, applause, photographs, prizes and a demo that is usually held together by just enough code to survive three minutes on a projector.

But the useful unit is sometimes not the prototype. It is the permission the room gives an idea to exist.

For that weekend in Minsk, Realy had that permission. We could treat friendship as a design problem. We could draw screens around trust and connection, argue about what information mattered, and turn something emotionally vague into something concrete enough to test.

Then the room ended, but the project did not.

Years later, Realy became a real product with live iOS and Android apps and a broader project around friendship and human connection. I was only one person in that longer history, and my role belongs to the early product and design trail rather than the whole story. But I like that the prototype survived long enough to become something other people could actually use.

Mostly, though, I like that the question survived.

Can software help us become less alone without becoming a substitute for other people?

That still feels like a future worth hacking on.

Connected reading

• EMERGE HACK 2019 archive
• LOVEHACK Minsk 2018: Yellow Blue Bus
• The Return of the Room
• I Took My Mom to a Hackathon

AI authorship note

This archive note began with Kris Haamer remembering that he worked on Realy at EMERGE HACK 2019 in Minsk. Gmail was used to recover the acceptance, dates, hotel context, Figma activity and the later iOS build trail. Public sources were used to verify the event format, EPAM's involvement, the scheduled 36-hour window, the approximate participant count, the hackathon themes, the winning project, the later Realy product direction and the growing public-health significance of social connection. AI helped research, reconstruct, draft, edit and publish the note. Kris supplied the lived experience, project connection and editorial framing and approved this version for publication.