Oct 23, 2020
OpenSource with æternity
The second episode of the ækiti æmbassy’s Local SuperheroLeague started with a bang as the league began in the meeting room and was simultaneously live on YouTube.
The host kicked off the event with an introductory speech welcoming all the guests, speakers, and organizers to the celebration of OpenSource. She introduced the theme of the event “OpenSource with æternity” and promised that the event would be informative for those who have little to no knowledge of either OpenSource, Superhero, æternity or Hacktoberfest. Before she went on, the host introduced herself as “Akinola Blessing Debby and her co-host Chidinma Amanna”, she ‘a content writer and the technical content writer for the ækiti community, the CEO of CrystalBay enterprises and an android development enthusiast’.
She went further to introduce the four topics specially chosen by the organizers;
- Introducing Hacktoberfest,
- OpenSource: A Tool For All,
- æternity & Superhero,
- Workshop: Building an OpenSource æpp.
Before she called on the first speaker, she gave some special announcements about the league; she announced that the contest was still ongoing and that it was to end 24hours after the league. She further gave instructions about the event, that the use of vulgar language was prohibited, the event was Live on YouTube; therefore if anyone at any point had a bad or unstable connection they could watch it on YouTube and be able to chat with the chatbox section while streaming, further to advised the audience to use their AENS(æternity Naming System) name to replace the default Fellow Superhero name to receive tips on relevant questions asked, lastly she instructed everyone to turn off their mics and cameras so as not to distract anyone when the speaker comes on.
The first speaker, Favour Adeshina (a front-end web developer, an ækiti jæmer, a tech enthusiast, and Lead of Ekiti State Chapter of the Developer Student Clubs), was introduced by the host. He gave a brief explanation of what Hacktoberfest is all about right after a video from the CEO of DigitalOcean was played.
He anchored the ‘Introducing Hacktoberfest’ session and broke his talk to the following subtopics;
- Who can participate in Hacktoberfest,
- How can you participate in Hacktoberfest, and
- Stand a chance to get a limited-edition T-shirt or plant a tree.
Favour rounded up his session nicely with no question asked as the session was very informative.
Unfortunately, The second speaker’s session was moved to the third because the speaker had network issues. Emmanuel Joseph, popularly known as JET (a full stack web developer that makes use of Google and æternity technologies for developing web apps. He led the ækiti æmbassy Developer Study Jæm 10 weeks workshop series that introduced and taught æternity technologies to developers in Ekiti State, Nigeria) was brought up instead to talk on his topic: ‘æternity & Superhero’.
The audience learned about æternity blockchain as he explained the listed features well;
- Sophia smart contracts,
- FATE(Fast æternity Transaction Engine) virtual machine,
- Advanced state channels,
- Oracles,
- Unique Governance, and
- AENS(æternity Naming System).
He then spoke about the Superhero platform to explain the Whys of Superhero and How to get started with Superhero. Before he showed how to use the Superhero platform effectively, JET took his time to talk about the upcoming decentralized finance hackathon-themed “Human DeFi Hæck”.
He gave an overview of the $16,000 hæckathon which is been supported by æternity blockchain and the Superhero Platform and it is anchored by the Devpost platform. He said, “more info about the hackathon would start surfacing on Social Media platforms from the following week”.
He practicalized his session by sharing his screen with the audience, he also answered questions beautifully causing the live-streamed YouTube video to be tipped with AE tokens using the Superhero platform.
With the second speaker’s connection finally stable, the third session began and was anchored by Ridwan Adeola Otun (a 23year old API and Blockchain Engineer who enjoys building scalable systems with Elixir, Ruby, and more recently, æternity. He is currently building a Decentralized Identity System on the æternity blockchain).
Ridwan also gave a wonderful lecture on his ‘OpenSource: A Tool For All’ session as he listed the aim of his talk which goes thus;
- Explain what open source really is,
- Convince you that contributing to open source isn’t that difficult, and
- Convince you to start contributing to open source projects today.
He started his session by quoting Linus Torvalds, “In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny”. He then broke down his session into the below-listed sub-topics;
- What exactly is open-source,
- Why should you care,
- Why open-source,
- Start contributing today, and finally,
- Things to note.
He ended the session well and answered questions asked some by the host herself, beautifully.
A short networking break was taken immediately after the third session to help the audience relax and get to know one another. It was anchored by the host and co-host (Debby and Chindnma respectively); the audiences were asked to turn on their mics and cameras and were called individually to introduce themselves and give a brief description of their skills.
During the Networking Session, we figured out that we had attendees from all over the world as we had attendees from Columbia, Spain, and our home country, Nigeria.
Although the co-host struggled with her network, it was fun as there was a lot of laughing and it seemed to relax the audience.
The fourth and final session began immediately after the networking break, It was hosted by Jesunlonimi Akingbesote (a Software Developer that builds awesome solutions using React, Kotlin, and æternity tools. He is the ækiti æmbassy Co-Lead and has written æternity web and mobile-based tutorials to help developers in the æternity ecosystem). Jesulonimi anchored the ‘Workshop: Building an OpenSource æpp’ session, which built a Lottery smart contract with the AEstudio online text editor.
He started the contract by including the Sophia List library at the top of the contract then named the contract Lottery. The Lottery smart contract then has a contestant record that collected the address, number, and value of a contestant. The contestant record was used to store the contestant list in the smart contract state alongside the winning_number, max_winning number, total_num_of_contestants, minimum_wager, num_of_wagers, total_wager, deployer_address, total_winners_wage, winners, and value_to_send.
With the state fully declared, the contract init function gave the default values for the state properties and then the contract had 2 non stateful functions(get_winning_number and check_if_contestant_exist), 2 stateful functions(announce_winners and record_total_winners_wage), and 2 payable stateful functions(transfer_money_to_winner and transfer_money_to_contract_deployed_address) that helped the system.
Lastly, the Lottery smart contract had a bet payable entrypoint that does the major work of the contract and 4 other entrypoints for getting some default state values. The entrypoints included get_deployer_address, get_total_number_of_winners, get_total_winners_wage and lastly get_state.
Jesulonimi rounded up his session by deploying and testing the contract with the AEstudio text editor and then created a GitHub Repository that explains the contract better to contribute to OpenSource.
To give our attendees the best from the ‘One Hour with GitHub’ event and ‘OpenSource with æternity’ league, we have provided a master slide that contains sessions from the above-mentioned meetups which also has the speaker’s profile from each session.
We also provided a YouTube Playlist that houses the full ‘OpenSource with æternity’ SuperheroLeague and the individual sessions of the league.
Before the league came to a close, JET addressed the audience once again giving a full insight on how to contribute to OpenSource, showing them how to compete in the league’s contest.
The league ended with the Host’s outro; thanking everyone, from the SuperheroLeague team to the speakers, to the event organizers, and to the audience for being amazing and patient with the occasional unstable network. She spoke once more about the contest and that the winners would be announced 24hrs after the contest was over. The Host wished everyone a great day and ended the league.
