CodeChain Dev Meetup Afterthoughts
The third CodeChain Dev Meetup was held yesterday. CodeChain Dev Meetup is a regular event held weekly, where developers, who participate in the open-source CodeChain project, gather and discuss about the development process, participate in code peer reviews, listen to new technical seminars, etc. In this week’s meetup, there was a total of 12 participants. 8 of those participants are a part of the CodeChain team, and 4 of them are outside contributors.
After Ji Young Song’s brief self-intro of himself, the technical seminar went underway. In this week’s meetup, Kwang Yul Seo presented the Schnorr signature. The Schnorr signature has a simpler algorithm when compared to ECDSA, and due to Schnorr’s efficient signing and verification process, it is in the spotlight as a next generation signature algorithm. The Decred project has already implemented Schnorr signatures and Bitcoin is considering to introduce the algorithm as well. CodeChain is also preparing to review the Schnorr signature and is planning on continuously testing stability in the near future.
After the seminar, which lasted around 30 minutes, it was dinner time. We had pizza in the first meetup, chicken in the second one, and today, the menu is burgers. After considering the devs’ taste preferences, we decided to go with fast food. However, this may not be good for long term health, and thus, we are contemplating whether we should go with something healthier, such as sandwiches or salads. (We couldn’t take any pictures due to being busy eating.)
After the meal, we discussed the Stratum Protocol, which was proposed by one of the outside contributors, Dongjun Lee. Stratum is a network protocol that defines JSON RPC over TCP so that the CodeChain nodes and miners can communicate efficiently. Although Bitcoin and Ethereum Mining Pools are also taking advantage of the Stratum protocol, they both define and use a slightly different protocol for each mining pool since a standard specification does not exist.
CodeChain also began to support the Cuckoo Cycle-based PoW agreement algorithm, which required an efficient communication channel between the CodeChain node and the miner. Finally, Mr. Dongjun Lee provided the protocol proposal by supporting the work, and decided to proceed to the implementation afterwards.
After the design review, real coding happens. It is in fact really exciting to see a growing number of external contributors joining the CodeChain project. You can post your PR in advance and attend a meetup to review, or you can come to the meetup and be assigned to fix a bug, discuss it on the spot, and even go straight to requesting a PR and conduct a code review. Anyone who has submitted a PR to the CodeChain project can attend the CodeChain dev meetup.
The right way to become a blockchain-core developer is to develop the core yourself. If you develop with a core development team, it will expedite your development rate drastically. You do not have to worry about not being familiar with blockchain technology yet. CodeChain offers a collection of simple issues, called Good first issues, which are relatively easy to modify so that new contributors can easily kick off the project. After choosing a good first issue, creating a commit, and sending a PR, the CodeChain development team will be open to helping you out.
There are many teams that are developing blockchain core technology, but there is no way to know what kind of projects they are if those teams do not release the source code. If you release your code but do not release the development activity, there is no way for external developers to participate. We envision our CodeChain project to be a truely open-source involving not only the CodeChain team but also many outside developers. We would like to request a lot of participation from the developers out there.
- Project Home Page: https://codechain.io/
- GitHub Address: https://github.com/CodeChain-io/codechain
