This year, I spent some time doing quantum challenges and hackathons. The main goal of these events was to introduce tools for exploring quantum computing and provide a high-level overview of some basic concepts. In this talk, I will walk you through the most exciting problems while trying to share with you what I’ve learned. We will spend most of the time on VQE, but we will also decompose some unitaries and look at various topics - such as error correction and transmon qubits.