Buidler Fest 2024: Recap and thoughts
The first Buidler Fest, sponsored by the Cardano Foundation, was held in Toulouse, France.
Blink Labs CEO and co-founder Chris Gianelloni was in attendance for the event and held a workshop on the Go language ecosystem on Cardano.
Buidler Fest 2024: A 2-day event for tech-savvy Cardano builders
From its inception, Buidler Fest was going to be something different. The goal was to get developers together to discuss things that matter to developers, without the frills of most conferences. No booths or sponsored parties. No VIP lists or industry exclusive events. Just a full day of talks and a group dinner, followed by a open space “unconference” second day. Even the act of buying a ticket to the event required passing a small knowledge test of creating a special transaction and submitting it to the Cardano blockchain.
The venue for the event was the Hotel Mercure Toulouse Centre Compans, located in central Toulouse, a 10 minute walk from Capitole Square and adjacent the Jardin Compans Caffarelli and Compans Caffarelli Metro, which allows for easy access from the airport. The event was held onsite using the hotel’s facilities, which included lunches prepared by their staff chef! The meeting rooms were situated near the amphitheater within the hotel.
As people arrived on Monday, many took to local restaurants and pubs to socialize, catching up with old friends and making new ones. I went to The Botanist Pub, which had its 3 floors overrun by Cardano developers. This area of Toulouse is very walk-able. After a bit of waving to familiar faces, I left with a group in search of food to La Rosa Negra down the street. This smaller group allowed time to get to know each other and establish some new relationships over tapas and beer.
Day 1: Talks and Workshops
The day started with a quick set of opening remarks from our event hosts, Arnaud Bailly, Lead Architect at IOG, and Matthias Benkort, Technical Director of Open Source at Cardano Foundation. In true developer fashion, there were no long keynotes or pep rally cheering. The hosts gave an introduction, pointed out the location of the workshop rooms and the toilets, and set us on our way for the day.
Talks were held in the main amphitheater and covered an array of topics. The workshops were held around the corner in a large meeting room. I spent the majority of the day in the amphitheater, except for my own workshop.
The first talk was given by actual rocket scientist Patrick Serafin, a lightning talk on tokenizing real world assets and a framework to demo utilizing these tokens within smart contracts designed like typical financial instruments. Assets such as the title to a property could be tokenized and fractionalized, then utilized in various ways.
Next, Alex Pestchanker, co-founder of Token Allies, a decentralized VC in Cardano, discussed the creation of a more functional and serverless dApp architecture utilizing Marlowe and Demeter.run services. We’re partners with TxPipe, so we may be a bit biased. The takeaway is simple. TxPipe’s pay-as-you-go Demeter.run service with access to managed Cardano infrastructure, along with a Cardano Foundation sponsored free tier, means you can get started building your dApp and focus on your business logic instead of getting infrastructure configured.
After a short break for coffee, I returned to the amphitheater. Jamie Harper, backend developer for Maestro and TxPipe and security engineer, held a lightning talk on transaction chaining. This talk showcased the capabilities available in the UTxO model and deterministic transactions as well as some of the challenges for current dApp developers looking to implement this functionality into their applications.
If there was any concern that the previous material was developer centric and dense, Thomas Vellekoop, Cryptographic Engineer at IOG, ensured that we all had on our thinking caps. An introduction to Zero Knowledge Proofs with equations by the fourth slide, what could go wrong? Thomas did a great job on keeping things flowing and explaining things in a way that kept everyone engaged. The “some affinity with mathematics” was a lie, but I gained an understanding of the technology behind the magic.
Following the introduction to ZKP, Vladimir Sinyakov, founder of zkFold and ENCOINS, took the podium for a lightning talk on powering Cardano smart contracts with ZKP. This technology allows for both scaling and privacy, as you can prove that an action happened without revealing the details. This improves security and privacy of the contract execution while also requiring fewer resources to process.
Lunch was a buffet of foods prepared by the onsite staff. I don’t want to create FOMO, but it was the best food I have ever had at a conference.
After lunch, everyone gathered in the main amphitheater for a panel discussion on the Cardano On-chain Programming Landscape with developers from PlutusTx (Ziyang Liu), Aiken (Kasey White), Scalus (Alexander Nemish), OpShin (Niels Mündler), Plu-ts (Michele Nuzzi), and Marlowe (Tomasz Rybarczyk).
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Pi’s talk on the Gummiworm, a Hydra-based L2 by SundaeSwap Labs.
I left the amphitheater to the workshop room to present Ouroboros and Go, a quick tour around the Go ecosystem on Cardano. During my workshop, I spoke about the different players in the ecosystem currently building utilizing Go and how we can work together to rapidly build the arsenal of Go libraries and capabilities for incoming developers. I walked the audience through a toy application to demonstrate a simple end to end use case. At the end of the workshop, I open sourced our initial work on a Cardano node written in Go.
After a quick coffee, the team from Anastasia Labs, Jonathan Rodriguez, Mark Petruska, and Phil DiSarro, took control of the amphitheater and spilled the beans on common smart contract design patterns, which will provide new dApp developers with a powerful open source library of common patterns.
The final talk for the day was by Sebastian Bode, Director of Engineering at Cardano Foundation, about building an IBC enabled bridge between Cardano and Tendermint based blockchains, including Cosmos. Sebastian spoke of a Go-Haskell wrapper and their recent switch to a different library for Cardano. Cosmos has a rich Go ecosystem and their reference implementations are usually written in Go. I checked the go.mod in the repository and find exactly what I am seeking, gOuroboros. Jackpot! This demonstrates one of the main reasons that we build in Go, the ability to build software to interface with other blockchains more easily by leveraging their existing Go implementations.
Closing remarks were given by Arnaud and Matthias and we broke for the day. Cardano developers spread out throughout the lobby and patio areas.
I took a quick stroll through the Jardin Compans Caffarelli to the Jardin japonais Pierre-Baudis with a couple other builders before we regrouped for the Buidler Feast dinner at HALLES DE LA CITÉ.
Day 2: Open Spaces / Unconference
While the first day had a set agenda with various talks and workshops, the second day was put together by the participants. There were three separate meeting rooms for us to use, along with lobby space. We met in the largest meeting room to collaboratively create the day’s schedule. Anyone could add a sticky note with their idea and a location and time slot onto the wall board.
Once we filled the board, we split into the various areas to discuss, hack, and collaborate.
I stayed in the WeNovation room where there was a discussion about a Rust off-chain framework for headless dApps created by TxPipe, called Hollow. Santiago Carmuega led us through the project and its goals to create a simple and extensible framework for creating on-chain and off-chain composable applications which can be directly interacted with without the need for using a specific frontend interface.
After a quick coffee break and taking a bunch of selfies with everyone I missed the day before, I attended the discussion on chain indexers and their use cases. Cardano has almost as many different indexers geared towards different use cases as it does wallets. The Miro board helped us quickly assemble our thoughts and discuss the various use cases. Feel free to add your own indexer or use case and continue the discourse.
After lunch was an open space discussion about PRAGMA, a Swiss non-profit professional association focused on open source blockchain software development which had been formed two days before by dcSpark, SundaeSwap Labs, TxPipe, the Cardano Foundation, and Blink Labs. Damien Czapla, Secretary and Treasurer of PRAGMA’s Board of Administrators, presents the thoughts behind the organization and how it can strive to be welcoming to outside contribution from the community.
I skipped the second set of meetings to discuss PRAGMA further with some interested people. However, we ended up chatting for far too long and I missed the beginning of the next space, a discussion of Amaru, a Rust full-node project spawned by PRAGMA. Matthias Benkort and Santiago Carmuega led the session on the roadmap for Amaru and the desired developer experience, including discussions about inclusion of various APIs aside from the Ouroboros protocol and mini-protocols, such as UTxO RPC and Ogmios.
The second day ended with some remarks from Matthias and Arnaud and a group retrospective session, where we put up sticky notes and talked about the things that we liked, things that lacked, and things that we learned. This brought the entire event back to our general desire as builders to learn from the things we do.
The always catastrophic Adam Dean and some weirdo in a dog costume bought champagne for the group to celebrate the success of the event and to toast to many more. (We see you, Argentina. 🇦🇷) This was the final act of the event and a perfect send off to the day’s activities.
On the way to dinner, we split into several groups. We walked through central Toulouse and past the Place du Capitole.
As different groups found various established to set down to eat, I made my way to Jalapeños with Santiago and Fede from the TxPipe team to get tacos al pastor.
Unexpected impact of the real world
Travel day was interrupted by an Air Traffic Controller strike in France. This caused quite a bit of commotion among the attendees and several had to make alternative plans to their next destination. I had been rescheduled onto a flight on standby, which didn’t happen, so I went back to the hotel for another day in Toulouse. Many members of the community were still there for a dRep workshop, and I ran into HOSKY, who proceeded to give me the nicest hug of friendship.
Outside the dRep workshop, the lobby was filled with Cardano builders hacking away. I took the opportunity to catch up on some bug fixes and to relax and explore the area.
Aside from the park next to the hotel and the nearby canal, which was populated with an array of ducks, this part of Toulouse has amazing historical architecture. I wish that I had more time to visit Toulouse and to explore the city. Maybe next time.
I ended the impromptu day 3 with the team from Andamio/Gimbalabs having a few beers and then found a restaurant with crêpes and cider, a newfound French favorite.
Until next Buidler Fest! Fin.
