Fission at Diffusion 2019 Wrap Up

Two weeks ago, the entire Fission team traveled to Berlin to take part in the Diffusion developer conference and hackathon (see our initial post about it). This was the first time our team had all met in person, and we had just a couple of days to wrap up code and documentation for Fission Live. Here's our recap of the experience, from shipping to funding, and all stops in between.

Making friends with Poutine

We started things off on Friday night with our second meetup (we held the first one as part of Berlin Blockchain Week) at Poutine Kitchen.

And then the majority of the team headed back* to keep coding and documenting so things would be all set and as easy as possible for our hackathon users (yay shipping!).

Thanks everyone for joining us, and for experiencing the "Canadian Kiss" and other secret Canadian rituals. Stay tuned for further Poutine in Berlin adventures.

*But, it did mean that Boris came back with the most excellent prize: 4L of maple syrup!

Getting started with Fission Live Workshop

On Saturday, Ben and Brooke walked the audience through getting started with Fission Live.

Ben had worked all night to even have the slides for the presentation hosted on Fission. Daniel was all up in our DNS tweaking so that subdomains would "just work", and Brooke's fingers were spitting out Haskell types in all directions.

Diffusion had three presentation areas right next to each other. Thanks to wireless headsets for the presenter audio, it meant the audience could be calm and focused while watching the presentation. We really enjoyed this experience, definitely recommended.

IPFS Help Desk

It was great to be able to spend time with Hugo and Vasco from Moxy Studio who hacked on IPFS and libp2p while hanging out on the 2nd floor help desk space where we set up camp.

We shared what we were working on with Fission, and learned a ton about where IPFS is heading at the protocol layer, while sharing what we needed to make our services work better. Need someone to run an IPFS help desk at your next hack event? Get in touch!

Shipping Live

We got a ton done by using Diffusion as a target date to get Fission Live up and running for the hackathon participants to use.

Here's a quick gif of registering, and then going live, all with our fission command line tool:

It was great to see Fission Live get picked up and used by teams throughout Diffusion. We learned lots – like how Infura is used as an anonymous gateway because of how hard it is to store API keys in various automated scenarios, or that if we want our gateway to support hosting SPAs, we'll need to include an SPA mode to redirect queries to route.

See our one page Diffusion on-boarding for Fission Live to get started with our Fission CLI tool. Our guide is where we'll be improving our documentation and getting started.

And since we shipped it, we've been using it for every day use cases ourselves. Here's a link to some of the photos from Fission's trip to Berlin. Available as a regular Web2 domain name, but stored on IPFS, and re-usable anywhere.

Ben, who joined the team just 2 weeks before the event, took his hack time over the weekend and shipped a vscode extension – teleport files onto IPFS and with a domain name directly from your code editor!

Open Source Licensing Evolution Talk

Boris presented on Sunday afternoon. He's been talking about the history and evolution of open source, with a special focus on the legal innovation around licensing. Check out the video & link to slides in our other post

Maple Syrup is for Winners

The top winner of the Diffusion hackathon was Decentralify (see Devpost entry) , built by Marco and Eugene. They used the Netlify Docker image, ran it on iExec, and then deployed the build output to Fission.

Building an "open" Netlify is part of the vision we have for Fission, so seeing it get built as a hackathon project, a day after we shipped the functionality, was amazing.

And here's how Marco feels about his Fission prize:

Convergence Alliance Meeting

There was a private meeting with the members of the Convergence Alliance hosted by the OV team that was super valuable. Lots of discussion about the adoption and commercialization of blockchain and other decentralized protocols. While we champion the developer end user as bottom up adoption, it was great to learn more about the needs of enterprise and specific industries – who in turn are eager to have better tools for their developers to build on. We look forward to further collaboration with the Alliance.

Funding Secured

We announced our pre-seed funding! We're a Canadian company building out a distributed team, and we wanted to have global partners to connect us to the world, and having Outlier Ventures as a lead is a great fit for us. Thank you to Outlier Ventures and Lance Tracey and the Lanebury Capital team for your support and belief in our team.

But funding is really the beginning of the journey where the hard work starts.

Our plan is to build useful services that we charge you (developers and "end users" and larger businesses) for, that also happens to be open source for others to contribute to and collaborate on.

We now have web publishing "Live from your Laptop", our Heroku IPFS file system add on will be next, and soon we'll even sell you a domain name.

Identity, encryption, and databases are the next foundational components. You can follow our Github repos to see what we're up to – we're developing open source and out in the open.

Thanks

Thanks to the Outlier Ventures team and all of the volunteers, mentors, partners and most importantly hackathon participants.

Read the Outlier Ventures wrap up for more on what happened at Diffusion 2019.

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