The First æpps Summit

At the beginning of this new year, the æpp experts from the æternity team joined forces with the community to empower developers to kick-start a decentralized apps ecosystem.

At the end of December, 2018, we announced that the first æpps Summit event would be held in the period of January 15–18 in Antalya, Turkey. Members of the community were encouraged and enabled to participate through travel grants. We received a significant number of applications and invited only the most relevant candidates to participate. This enthusiastic response led to more people in attendance than we initially expected, resulting in some last minute improvisations related to accommodation. 🙂 But it all worked out well in the end, and we are happy to say that we were able to bring together a great crowd of developers and community people.

These talented minds turned the first æternity æpps Summit into a truly amazing experience!

Here is how the event unfolded.

Earth, Wind and Fire

The first day in Antalya was something else. Heavy showers, strong winds, and heaters running around the clock. But also solid determination to make the most out of the unique bonding opportunity that this first ever æpps Summit presented.

The first day started with keynote speeches by Yanislav (Founder), Emil (æpps team lead) and Emin (Operations). They did an amazing job at explaining what æternity stands for in terms of technology and values, as well as outlining the immediate goals of this first æpps Summit.

All of three of them also sat down for short interviews which you can watch by following the link below:

The primary goals of the æpps Summit can be summarized as:

Meeting the æternity team and other developers from the community working on æternity æpps or æpp tools.
Understanding who is working on what and becoming familiar with the challenges they currently face.
Identifying the right people to go to with questions- who can help support the many æpps-related projects.
Improving developer on-boarding and communication.
Finding the best approach to set up community standards for future æpps development.

The storm brought us even closer together since, from time to time, it was difficult to hear due to the heavy wind and rain outside.

Generally, the first day was dedicated to presenting the open format of the summit, getting to know each other and showcasing our work so far. Everyone had the chance to create their own improvised booth and explain what they are involved in, why they are doing the work they do and what kind of help they might need.

“Booth” #6 was dedicated to the process of making æpps human-friendly [again].

After dinner each “booth-owner” (a person or a team) did a short presentation about the project(s) they are involved in and incorporated the feedback they gathered throughout the day to improve communication. Some of the most frequently asked questions were addressed and by the end of day one, everyone got to know about all the other exiting projects that are happening in the æternity ecosystem.

The Summit

After going through lightning, wind and rain we felt closer than any congress-center organized event could ever bring us. 🙂

Sessions

The main part of the Summit commenced with the generation of sessions dedicated to specific topics. Anyone was able to propose a topic that they were interested to explore, add it to the daily calendar and present it to everyone. As a result, there was a large variety of sessions! Here are the topics that were discussed in the course of the three-day Summit:

Getting started with Sophia (æternity’s functional smart contract language)
Introduction to æternity’s Middleware
æternity’s Explorer Feedback
AirGap Wallet/Vault Introduction and Feedback
SDKs Feedback Session
Implementation of a DEX (decentralize exchange) on Sophia
How and Why to Tokenize Everything: Security vs Utility, Legal & Jurisdiction Questions
Introduction to forgae by LimeChain
Hacking by Hack.bg
Developing a Simple Voting æpp on Sophia (Hack.bg and LimeChain)
AE Account Handling
Improvement Proposals and How to Navigate Them
Incentivizing Community Contributions
DroneGraffiti Project Brainstorming and UX/UI Feedback
The First World Cryptonomic Forum in Vaduz
æternity’s Manifesto Brainstorming
Why Estimate Tasks and Introduction to the Agile Methodology
Feedback for the AEnomally Project
Good Quality Development Tools
Tokens: Past, Present and Future
Introduction to Bonding Curves by LimeChain
Revolutionizing Funding for Blockchain Projects: Why æternity Aims to Do it and How Will This Help Everyone
Missing Dev Tools Requests
Decentralized App Architecture Workshop by UTU
Introduction to the African Blockchain Ecosystem and Planned Hackathon by UTU
Decentralized, Permissioned File Access via Tokens by YAIR
Desktop Browser Integration by AirGap
Identity in the Base æpp
Usability & UX for User Acquisition, Retention and Engagement by Stoyan Vasilev
æternity Components for æpp Development

The TipBot

In an effort to further increase positive interactions between all Summit participants while simultaneously showcasing the speed and efficiency of the æternity network, a dedicated closed group was created in Telegram and the æternity TipBot (developed by our friend Kryztoval) was added.

This allowed anyone to express their gratitude for an enlightening session, conversation, or help they have received from another Summit participant. Needless to say the TipBot was a hit! 🙂

Everyone received 15 AE tokens to tip with and tipping became a standard method of showing appreciation throughout the week.

Participants were pleasantly surprised by the speed with which AE tokens appeared on their accounts after sending, the low transaction fees and the easy process of creating an account in-browser by using the Base æpp on mobile.

The TipBot is already deployed in the main æternity Telegram group. Test it out! Start by typing /deposit to create a TipBot AE token wallet. Find more information here.

Each day brought new topics to the agenda. Everyone had the opportunity to provide recommendations and request the development of features or processes which they believed will aid in making the æpps ecosystem more accessible to a wider audience of developers.

Conclusions

The main conclusions the æpps team reached after the first æpps Summit were as follows:

First and foremost, the event was a success! These types of summits are needed and help the team and community to make giant leaps in terms of æpps development and creation of useful tools. This will enable wider community participation as we build the æpps ecosystem.
The entrance barrier for developers must be lowered. A public call organized by the æpps team will be held once per week and a developer-dedicated chat will be announced to help devs get the answers they need more quickly.
We must allow community members to submit improvement proposals more easily by creating new categories in the Forum and dedicating a topic to open introductions.
We need to create common standards to allow æpp developers access to information on what are the best practices in developing certain app components. With this in mind, a new GitHub repository will be created. The name of which is yet to be determined.
In the future, mechanisms must be developed to govern the development process, both on and off-chain. This will allow for a transparent process for proposal submission, development and the incorporation of code.

We also plan to push all dev and æpps updates to the dedicated Twitter account, so make sure you follow it if you want to stay up-to-date:

Tweets by aeternityTECH

Finally, we are currently working on a blog post dedicated to the results that the developer-dedicated sessions produced. It will be shared soon, so stay tuned!

We hope that more and more community members will become active builders of the æternity æpps ecosystem. We are confident that æternity will gradually become one of the best blockchain platforms on which to build decentralized applications. If you have a project idea or are interested in playing around with the dev tools, please let us know! We are always ready to support anyone in their first steps into the exciting new frontier of possibilities that is æternity.

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