5 events in 1 week

Posted Sunday, July 8th, 2018 

events decentralisation

In the past 7 days I’ve been to 5 different events, this is a quick summary of my impressions regarding what I did at the events, not the event themselves (I plan to write more later).

Interesting links:

• libdweb, an experiment to add APIs to WebExtensions focused on making DWeb apps possible on the browser.

Builders Day

Was a part of DWeb Summit but with different atteendees, limitted to 100 people. Besides joining different discussions and work groups. I’ve spent my time making the case for “libdweb” and more powerful APIs for WebExtension developers. We had a science fair (much like the ones at MozFest) and demoed the APIs there. I built two interactive chat demos for libdweb and that was what we were mostly using as demos.

I was positively surprised that some people actually knew who I was and what I did for the dweb in Firefox (that silly patch that whitelisted dweb protocols), there was a lot of goodwill towards what we’ve been doing.

DWeb Summit

We had a workshop on the second day. The time slot was not helpful, just 1 hour, for a WebExtension workshop is not good. It was enough to get them excited about add-ons and their setup done but not much more. The dweb people are quite excited about libdweb but they want those APIs on the client side, which is extremelly tricky if you want a safe browsing experience.

We had a large group in our workshop and many people there already knew libdweb and were not starting from scratch. I’ve seen IPFS people running “ipfs://” URLs on the browser without the need for a native app companion, and it was awesome. I helped a ton of people, demoed some of my add-ons and work, and helped them get ready to build their own experiments.

Protocol Labs’s Lab Day

This was a very well executed event thrown by the people behind IPFS, LibP2P and Filecoin. I didn’t had a speaking gig on this but they had spaces for hacking, so I just sat there and hacked on add-ons. While doing that, I invited peple to come by and check the demos and work. People did and are excited about it. Talked to a ton of people.

Mesh The Planet 2018

This was help at the omni commons place in Oakland and was organized by the entitites from that place such as sudo room and counter culture labs. I had a lightning talk there about Firefox Add-ons and Decentralization, received a lot of positive feedback from it.

Scuttlebutt 3 years birthday party.

This was very informal, a party from SSB cellebrating 3 years of the first message. We played games and talked to one another. I showed all the extension work to people there, they like it too and we might soon have SSB running purelly as an add-on.

I will write a blog post later about all this, but this is the quick summary of spending a week doing add-on demos, lightning talks and workshop. Irakli and Dietrich were the most awesome people and all of these is just possible because they had implemented the libdweb experiments and were there to lead the way.