When my colleague Robert and I arrived around 6pm on Friday at the “Blockchain Hackathon” event at betahaus in Kreuzberg it was already freezing cold and we were pretty tired from our workweek at Turbine Kreuzberg. ‘Grabbing some beers and pizza and have some good afterwork talks’ was all we expected from that event. Then I remembered the phone call with my old friend Dyrk from Hamburg that I had to dismiss far too early the other day because I wanted to prepare some IOTA idea for the hackathon. I thought: what if the idea that Dyrk asked me to help him with was exactly the idea that we could work on during the weekend?

Dyrk has two little children, his friends are distributed evenly across the country and his family is living at the countryside. He would love to share images of his beloved ones with family and friends but for known reasons he’s very uncomfortable with the idea uploading his images to cloud servers where Google or Facebook can index and reuse them.

There are a gazillion of options for Dyrk to solve his problem: he could choose Own/Nextcloud, a “cloud”-enabled harddisk, maybe the NAS feature of a Fritzbox or simply send the images using e-mail. Nowadays he could even use a distributed filesystem like IPFS or freenet — if he only knew how to use it (not to mention that his mother must be able to live with his decision as well).

We decided to approach Dyrk’s problem using the technology that our host blockstack had to offer, so I stood up for the first “Blockstagram” pitch and put it down on paper. It looked like this:

After pitching Dyrk’s idea quite a lot of people approached me and we discussed it in depth. We had quite a good time that Friday night developing a first conceptual idea; we broke our heads over possible issues, lost ourselves in philosophical discussions about sense and nonsense of blockchain technology and some beers later we finally concluded: “boy, we think we can do this”. In the end 8 people stayed for longer and we’ve formed Team Blockstagram out of them. Let me quickly introduce us to you:

Team Blockstagram

from left to right:

Robert K: the backend mastermind that took care of the “friend” concept and the storage access. Fixed all the issues no one else understood.

Timo W: the experienced blockchain dev with a ReactJS preference who glued together API calls, figured out how to talk to the Gaia hub correctly, handled many merge conflicts and revised most of the code that we were delivering.

Stefan A (that’s me :D ): initialized our repo & the Webpack tooling, setup the frontend using Bulma.io, refactored parts of the friend list and finally pulled out to take care of the slides.

Nathan vB: colors, frames, borders and layout. Learning React from scratch and giving everyone a great time!

Markus G: the PSD, voice recognition and font guru that made our CD happen and inspired our logo and the final presentation.

Peter S: taking care of the frontend idea, providing images and helpful insights when testing the frontend.

Artur P: the best copilot for Timo that he could wish for, hinting him to technology and solutions, telling him about missing brackets and having a 2nd eye on all the PRs

Ben P (Not in the image, had to catch his flight back to London ;) ): the ReactJS lover that provided us buttons, ordering mechanisms and a lot of code love for the PRs.