May Hack Day Results

Monthly hackathon for the Livepeer community

Last week we hosted our first hack day, which we’ll be doing on a monthly basis moving forward. Join us next month on June 13th for another day of hacking. In preparation, we shared a few good issues to hack on, as well as documentation and example code. Below are a few results from the day. Let us know what you’d like to see next time in the comments below or join the conversation on Discord.

Josh Allman

“I built a transcoder dashboard out of information available in the node’s local database.

Transcoder operators can use the dashboard to get an overview of how their node is doing: the currently active jobs, a time series of the segments they’ve transcoded, the pending claims and fees, any transcode failures and the reason for the failures, and all sorts of other metrics. All these statistics have been sitting in the DB without a tool to surface the information. Progress was pretty good — I used a tool called Metabase which makes this really easy. To make it generally available to Livepeer transcoders would require some more work in exporting and importing the information that’s in Metabase.

Yondon Fu

I built a notification system (https://github.com/yondonfu/livepeer-watchdog) that a user can set up to automatically send SMS text messages via Twilio whenever a particular transcoder calls reward to mint new tokens or changes its reward cut, fee share or price. The project is not yet ready for general use, but it is close — I would like to make some updates to support e-mail notifications, simplify its usage and add some documentation

Raffi Sapire

Livepeer’s inflationary DPoS system is complex and we’re still learning how to succinctly explain how and why someone someone could participate in the network. I built a series of 60 second videos on how to use the explorer, how to delegate, how to assess transcoders, and livepeer 101.

Video 1: Livepeer 101

Video 2: How to Stake

If you’ve been trying to figure out which transcoder to stake to, Assessing the Transcoders will be a good one for you — I walk through what all the terms mean, and how to weigh them

Video 3: Exploring the Explorer

If you just mined your token and you want to know how to stake, check out this intro tutorial on the explorer.livepeer.org

Doug Petkanics

I hacked on integrating Livepeer with The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) so that users can identify transcoders by username instead of long, complex Ethereum addresses. I got as far as deploying an END resolver on Rinkeby and registering some transcoder names and links to their campaigns, but haven’t yet gotten it integrated with the Livepeer explorer to display the names to users. It likely still needs some work to be compatible and integrated with a good UX.

iSasFTW

I worked on tipping for the media player. Didn’t really get started yet, only really had time to set up the environment and take a look at the project

Josiah Savary

I ended up doing a lot of support for our Gitcoin PRs that we were piloting. I messed around with a technology called Whisper — I now know that Infura doesn’t support the rpc methods for it. So if you want to use it, you have to run your own geth node basically.

What do you think? Let us know what you think would be helpful for you to participate in the network