For those that follow Obyte, you have probably heard us make references to how much easier Obyte is to develop for than other platforms. Words are easy — how about some evidence?

Tarmo from Obyte, Akira from Japan and Alvar from Bind Creative

During the past week, developer Tarmo has been doing Obyte workshops in Estonia with a Japanese high school student, Akira (yes, a high school internship 5,000+ miles from home is pretty cool). Tarmo needed some practice doing longer workshops, so he can do them later for larger numbers of people, whilst Akira needed a company where he could do his internship using distributed ledger technology. They met at Bind Creative offices over a week long period.

As you might know, the Obyte platform is written in Node.js. One of the reasons Obyte uses Javascript is that it’s well known by a lot of developers and easy to write new code quickly. Akira had no previous experience with Node.js, but that didn’t stop him from learning it! There were 4 workshops done during 1 week, each 3–6 hours in length.

Day 1

* Node package manager.

* Environment variables and configuration files.

* Setting up a chatbot on Obyte testnet.

* Markdown text-to-HTML syntax.

* Asking users to sign a message in a chatbot.

* Validating signed message and retrieving their address.

* Offering smart-contract with a vesting period to the user.

* Listening for user payment/acceptance of smart-contract.

Day 2

* Obyte explorer and UTXO (unspent transaction output) model.

* Querying outputs by using SQLite WHERE IN.

* Escaping string array with Array.map() and making comma separated string with Array.join().

* Finding out which user paid to smart-contract and how much.

* Paying a user interest based on the amount they staked for one year.

Day 3

* Simple regular expressions to parse numbers.

* How to suggest commands or add commands into chat responses.

* How to make multi-line responses.

* How to make different projects use the same data folder.

* How to control a headless wallet via chat.

* How to define a new custom asset and issue its tokens.

* Options regarding what kind of different custom asset types can be created.

* How to change the staking bot to send custom asset tokens instead of native tokens.

Day 4

* Difference of data and data_feed message types.

* How attestations and private profiles work.

* Other message types like profile, poll and vote.

* Creating textcoins and claiming unused textcoins back with a script.

* Creating textcoins and claiming them back in the GUI wallet.

* How exchanges use JSON-RPC API.

Phew!! That’s a lot of information for anyone in just 4 days, never mind a 16 year old high school student with no prior Node.js experience. It sure beats an internship of making coffee and running the office photocopier, and Akira left Estonia with many new skills under his belt. A big thanks to Alvar from Bind Creative for making this internship happen.

If reading this inspires you, consider entering the developer contest which runs July-October. There is $38,000 of prizes available to the winners, along with other benefits like learning new skills and raising your profile. See the contest announcement or recent improvements to the Oscript editor (Oscript is the language entries are written in).

Also, if you are interested in taking part in any future Obyte workshops, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter.