IPFS Help Desk v1

Hackathons are one of the best parts of the decentralized community. They provide an environment where developers can come learn and share ideas while trying to build amazing things in the process.

However, hacking things together at the speed of light can be challenging. Nothing is more frustrating than working with new technology and being stuck on something for hours on end while your precious hackathon hours slip by.

We’ve all been there.

This year, ETHBerlin is offering hackers a little bit of help for a decentralized tech that many of you are starting to use in your applications: IPFS and libp2p. For those of you unfamiliar with IPFS, or the InterPlanetary File System, it’s a peer-to-peer storage protocol that allows developers to make sure their data is tamper-proof and decentralized. IPFS is a core tool for many dapps (including Textile Photos, OpenBazaar, DTube, and many others), as well as blockchains (including Civic, Arbore, Origin, etc) to address and organize their data within a fully distributed network.

The IPFS Ecosystem

IPFS runs atop libp2p, a powerful, modular networking stack to build p2p networks that solves hard challenges such as encryption, transport selection, NAT traversal, multiplexing, peer discovery, routing, and more. In addition to IPFS, libp2p is used by Ethereum 2.0, Filecoin, Polkadot, 0x, and various other large-scale projects looking to assemble unstoppable networks.

To help developers quickly hop over hurdles and get back to building awesome hacks, ETHBerlin will have a dedicated IPFS/libp2p help desk that’s available for hackers to come visit during the hackathon.

Have a question about anything IPFS or libp2p related? Our volunteers would love to help! They’ll also be on hand to answer general questions about IPFS and libp2p and provide their own takes on how you can use this awesome technology.

Have a hackathon idea that you think could benefit from decentralized storage? They can help you scope it out! And if these folks don’t know the answer, they’ll figure out who does.

Meet the IPFS/libp2p Help Desk Team

The whole team is also part of the broader ETHBerlinZwei Mentors program, so they are available to provide on site, and ‘virtual’ mentoring. To give you an idea of who you can expect to see there, here’s the team:

Matt is the CTO / CoFounder of Pinata, an IPFS pinning service that projects can use to host or mirror content on the IPFS network. Pinata was born out of the first ETHBerlin and Matt is excited for the opportunity to help hackers with all things IPFS at this year’s ETHBerlin. He loves hearing about crazy ideas and is excited to help bring yours to life!

Carson is a core developer and community wrangler for Textile, which is a set of open source tools/technologies that provide a decentralized database, remote storage, user management, and more over the IPFS network (on desktop and mobile!). Carson has been working with IPFS-related technologies for a while now, and has written about the topic extensively on the Textile blog. He can help you with all things Textile, IPFS, Javascript, Go, and might even share some parenting hacks he’s learned along the way if you ask nicely 😜.

Raúl is the tech lead for the libp2p project at Protocol Labs. He loves listening to novel, loopy ideas and helping steer them towards fruition. If you’re all set on your grand vision for the next big thing, but need to sketch out the p2p network aspects of it, he is your guy. Whether you’re knowledgeable and simply seek confirmation on your design, or if you’re totally clueless to begin with, he’ll be happy to help!

Héctor is the IPFS Cluster project lead at Protocol Labs. He is used to working with many parts of the go-ipfs and libp2p stack and combining them to produce new applications. If you are looking to understand which part does what, how to quickly plug some components together, or what pieces you can take advantage of for your application, you can talk to Hector.

Vasco is a software engineer at MOXY and is part of the libp2p core engineering team, who has been contributing to the Javascript implementations of libp2p and IPFS. He is a technology enthusiast who aspires to build software to make the world a better place. Either if you are looking to understand how any subsystem of libp2p works, or you want to discuss more specific js-libp2p design or implementation, you can reach Vasco and he will be there to assist.