Looking Back at DevCon
Programmers and supporters of the Ethereum cryptocurrency have gathered in Prague for the 4th DevCon, official Ethereum Foundation conference. It took place in the Congress Center between 30th of October and 2nd of November 2018 and associated meetups took place also at our Danube House within the wider Blockchain Week Prague event. Thanks to the development of Ethereum iOS DevKit we were one of the official grantees, we had two talks during the conference and we were in the center of action during the whole week.
Day 0
Even before the official start of the public program there was a “preparatory day”, during which the showcase of the grants has been organized in quite an original manner – for the grantees, there were no printed logos or posters, everybody drew their own poster. DIY is not dead! Thanks to the very relaxed vibe, it was possible to get to know the other grantees in an informal setting and after the successful Grantee Showcase, all were invited by Ethereum Foundation for a drink in the evening.
Our CEO Josef has also managed to give a lecture for PwC on Monday and on Tuesday, within his subject BI-BIG on ČVUT, he has invited James Ducan from Ethereum Foundation as a speaker.
Workshop by Ackee Developers
Within the Blockchain Week Prague event, we have organized a follow-up meetup in Ackee called Ethereum iOS DevKit hands-on workshop, where our developers showed a practical example of how to create an iOS app using Ethereum smart contracts in one hour. The participants have brought their own computers and tried the whole process on the spot.
Our iOS developer Marek Fořt who participated in the development of the tools for Ethereum Foundation gave a lecture during the workshop. “Developing for Ethereum was an interesting experience and I had a great time doing it. Devcon represented the climax of the whole project – it was great to show to other developers how to work with our DevKit. At the same time, we have met a lot of new people, we had a chat about how they could benefit from our project and how it could help them building something new.”
The evening after the workshop in Danube House continued in the spirit of Rockaway, where we moved for a party to celebrate the release of the blockchain investment fund.
DevKit on DevCon
Thanks to the cooperation with Ethereum Foundation we could develop our own, already mentioned starting project for development of mobile apps working with Ethereum blockchain. As part of the Ethereum iOS DevKit itself, there is also an iOS project skeleton, which we have been internally developing and using for over two years and that we are now giving at the disposal of the development community as an open-source software.
DevKit will enable operations with Ethereum blockchain directly from the Swift programming language which was not possible so far. Now the iOS programmers can work with Ethereum smart contracts as with another SDK – without extended knowledge of blockchain.
DevKit was presented during the conference by our CIO Josef in his keynote, he was invited as an official speaker. “It was a great pleasure for us that the development community has accepted our work – apart from the positive discussion on the spot we also received some emails with thanks. We very much appreciate such positive feedback,” Josef added.
Apart from that we also could not miss other parts of the DevCon program. For example, we presented within a block dedicated to mobile development for Ethereum, we met with developers of other libraries and we exchanged our experiences, for example how to present these libraries best to the open-source community.
Meetups in Danube
Apart from our own workshop, we have also hosted other DevCon meetups within Prague Blockchain Week: “The Community of Communities Get Together” for the development community and “Web3 stack, what’s next for developers? Prague Blockchain Week Edition” where lectures were given for example by Evgeny Ponomarev, co-founder and CEO of Fluence.one or Viktor Tron, director of Swarm company who has worked for the Ethereum Foundation from the beginning.
Concluding Remarks
We are very excited to be able to help connecting the world of blockchain and mobile applications. We are happy to provide open-source to the development community and we share our experiences. As we are working with three cryptocurrencies already, we have collected a lot of experience in this field which we can now share and use it as Ackee Blockchain and help with further development of blockchain and cryptocurrencies in which we see a lot of potential.
