Baseline Protocol Baseline Hackathon 2020, 9 Dec 2020

Previous Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Hackathon 2020 Excel

Description

The backgrounder on the Baseline Protocol Hackathon 2020 Challenge #1, codenamed "Excel".
https://bitcoin.co/hackathon/baseline/onboard
Details here: https://github.com/ethereum-oasis/baseline-roadmap/issues/164

A

Hi, I'm john wolpert and I'm here with the baseline protocol team. I've got kale teeter from microsoft on and he's going to take us through the bitcoin hackathon challenge that we're calling excel's code name is excel and gail's going to tell you all about it and how you can compete and win the thousand dollar bounty. That is on that challenge. Between december 9th 2020 and uh january 6, 2021.

A

kale how's it going everything's.

B

Awesome and excel is we're talking about microsoft, excel, not the size of my pants with excel excellent, not.

A

B

That was a good joke. It was good.

A

um Yeah so um uh yeah, so uh microsoft can bring the funny uh so uh yeah microsoft excel. What what's the what's the idea behind this, and how can people uh get up up to speed quickly.

B

Yep, so if you take a look, I'm sharing my screen right now. We have a an issue up here that will be used for the git coin. Hackathon and essentially this is a persistence package using um an already established kind of provider implementation.

B

So most of the base is already kind of built here as part of the baseline protocol, and you can essentially what we're looking to is hook up native excel. So we're not talking about csvs or text file kind of stuff, because excel can render all kinds of stuff. What we want to build is an add-in into excel, so when you're in excel.

B

Let me just pop it for a second here when you open up excel and you go to like this data tab, there's ways for you to interact with uh other things like databases, and things like that, so you can imagine this would be connected to baseline or blockchain through here. uh This is kind of the core idea here as a persistence layer to both provide.

B

You know, rights and reads back and forth right between this kind of thing and.

A

So this is this would be cool, kale right. Why? Because small companies uh that, even you know the largest companies in the world, work with tiny companies that may be working their their records on spreadsheets, not even on something like dynamics right so uh being able to have a company working on a spreadsheet, be able to baseline a row in their table with, um say, dynamics would increase the reduce the the risk of counterparty uh mistakes and and uh shenanigans right.

B

Yeah I mean the idea is like you know: people use the tools that they use to run their business uh excel, as you mentioned, like, even not just with small companies like massive companies. Use excel for very important things in their business, so excel to me is almost like a ui. You know for for how users interact with stuff, so we're just basically making a back end for excel. That allows it to use uh the blockchain, so the user is not, as you know, has to be blockchain savvy.

B

In order to use this, they can just use excel like they did today. It might be connecting to something slightly different, but that doesn't really matter right.

A

B

So we have so this is the challenge yep. So we have the requirements listed out here. um Some of the things that we're gonna- we put some related links in here uh for to get you started to help uh people and like what kind of skill sets am. I gonna need to do this. uh Where am I gonna, you know put these kind of things.

B

So if you look at the bottom here under related documentation, you'll see that we have one core link here to the excel add-ins overview, which will basically take you out to excel and talk about like how you build these add-ins. So you can walk through that. um It'll it'll walk you through everything from like creating one from scratch, all those kind of things essentially we're going to be talking to an api, so we're just going to use excel to basically talk to an api and listen to events that are coming back off of another one.

B

um That's it kind of in a nutshell. We have um implementations of this uh just to help. You get started a little bit so in the past, and this is one of our microsoft repos. We actually have one here using forms inside of you, know the power platform and it's using excel to basically bi-directionally talk to a blockchain, so we can like write data over there and read data. So if you're looking for inspiration or like an implementation of how this has been done before this, actually you can go use this right now it works.

B

Maybe not the exact implementation we're looking for here and what I mean by that is this one's using logic, apps and all kinds of external things to do that. What we want to do is take some of that stuff and just pack it into the add-in. So from an end user perspective, all they need is excel, and this add-in and some configuration obviously and then they're off to the races they can use. This thing.

A

Right on thanks a lot so so that's um so after somebody's uh developed uh under figured out how to understand baselining and all that right, so they're gonna go you're gonna go to baseline dashprotocol.org and uh get on the slack channel.

A

The slack inviter is right there on the on the website and uh there's a hashtag hackathon2020-xl, and that's where you'll be able to ask questions of people that are in the judges and others uh in in the community also just come in and say hi to uh on the general and people are really friendly in there. So uh you can, you can get to know people and they can help you out um so learn of course why? What baselining is all about?

A

Why why you want a baseline, an excel spreadsheet and and something else what that means and then you'd be getting into this right.

B

Yep and then, where you can put your um implementation, the other one I wanted to mention john brought. This up is, if you go out here to this repo, we'll paste this link actually out in the issue uh which basically is under the br i1 implementation, I'll bounce back, real, quick.

A

Baseline reference implementation uh by the way.

B

Yep so one of the challenge requirements you can see the solution works with the bri1 reference implementation, replacing the memory implementation provider. You can see out here if you pop into baseline examples, bri one lib again we'll put the link out there, there's actually one here for google sheets right now that works with you know, sap and microsoft dynamics.

B

This has been created. You know this year earlier this year, but basically you can look through this one too, and this again can be like great inspiration because we're doing something very similar with excel here. uh So you could use this as a thing to help you kind of build that as well. So I think, there's a lot of good things here that are already been built. We kind of just you know, form them a little bit differently for the excel uh add-in uh to make this work.

A

Cool, so uh those are pretty good resources uh kale. What? What? um What do people need to know uh uh in terms of how to make sure that they get uh a good submission that they're judged well, um and you know how do they kind of finish the finish the road.

B

Yep so obviously make sure you're meeting all these challenge requirements so keep an eye on those kind of things and make sure that it works with the br bri one implementation that we have over there. So those are two kind of main things like these are like definitely got to have those kind of things and then um what I've seen you know with other hackathons that we've done the more whenever you implement this thing, like you, provide like clear, documentation, clear steps making it uh as friction.

B

You know less as possible. So, as I mentioned before, once this thing's packaged and there's an ad in this actually can be published to the marketplace for office. You know for free and everything, so people could use it, but basically what we want to do is get to the point where it's just like almost a single click for someone to install this add-in, so the closer you can get to that and I'm not saying you have to be 100 there, but the closer you can get to that.

B

The better off you are of of winning this challenge right. Make because the whole point is we want to give somebody who's less in tune or less technical, with the blockchain to be able to use the environment they're familiar with excel uh to to use, baseline and and baseline. You know a sheet in excel.

A

Right on cale thanks a lot for the time I know you're busy, I'm sure this is going to help people a lot and any last words. No.

B

This is great. I look forward to the submissions and again, as john mentioned I'll, be uh on the threads here. So if you have any questions, whether it be on the excel side or the baseline side, any of that feel free to jump in and talk to us because we're here to help.

A

Thanks again, kale and and by the way, everybody more than the thousand dollar um bounty, there's also the fact that, uh if you, if you're coming into this community, you're working with people like kale and others who can really put your career ahead, uh getting noticed by these people is a good idea for anybody and we love working with them. It's a great community come on in and join the party thanks a lot.

B

B