MaidSafe Developer Conference 2017
If someone would have told us that our first developer conference would be held 7,500 miles away from Troon we would most certainly not have believed them. However, on the 20th of February, in conjunction with our partners at MaidSafe Asia, we found ourselves Fairmont Hotel in Jakarta hosting MaidSafe Devcon 1. With a population of 300 million Indonesia is one of Asia’s most populated countries. With a thriving developer scene and a highly motivated populace, Jakarta, the country’s capital, proved to be an excellent location.
Short note about MaidSafe Asia
We first announced the intention to set up a joint venture in 2016 and we are now delighted to be able to confirm that the agreement has been signed off and the entity MaidSafe Asia has been incorporated in Singapore. As a quick refresher, the intention in setting up this partnership is to enable MaidSafe UK to focus on developing the network, scale the development team and support developers on the platform. MaidSafe Asia’s priorities are to raise awareness, reach out to developers and generally market the technology. In fact, the name MaidSafe Asia maybe somewhat misleading as we start to discuss extending the area in which the new entity operates. This is a fluid situation and we will keep everyone updated as things progress. Anyway, back to the conference.
Different attitudes
The conferences 250 attendees came from all across Indonesia with some groups even travelling from Singapore and beyond. Many of the developers were freelancers, but also included those working for companies, and some very eager students.
During the morning session, Nick introduced the high level concepts of the SAFE Network and issues with the existing Internet, and the problems caused by it’s current centralised architecture. David spoke later during the morning session, describing MaidSafe’s vision, and the benefits the platform will offer to developers.
What struck us speaking with local people both during and after the event was the different attitudes that both users and developers have toward data security. Both of these issues are becoming of ever increasing importance in the UK and Europe, but these concerns are not shared to the same extent in Indonesia. Developers in Indonesia are more excited by the prospect of being able to compete with large technology companies using SAFEs costless infrastructure, and the concept of Safecoin was something that also seemed to resonate, with many liking the built in revenue streams that it provides. Monetisation it seems is a more significant factor.
CoinPayments
After presenting at the main conference, David and Nick went to speak with members of the press and were joined by Coin Payments CEO Alex Alexandrov. Coin Payments, a partner of MaidSafe Asia, are the largest alt coin payment processor in the world, processing in excess of $50million of transactions per month and have 132,000 vendors across 182 different countries. Processing over 55 alt coins, including of course MaidSafeCoin, the company have been great supporters of the the SAFE Network and are great advocates of our technology. They have also created their own MaidSafeCoin wallet and offer secure coin storage via their vault. You can find out more on their website.
Getting down to business
By the time that Krishna’s developer workshop started in the afternoon session, the polite and shy audience had lost any inhibitions, and became animated and engaged as Krishna explained the networks data types, the core concepts behind the APIs, before going on to showcase the developer tutorials that have been created. It was evident from the questions that followed Krishna’s first afternoon session that the audience had taken much of the information on board.
Krishna’s second session focussed upon the current transition from our REST API paradigm, which while being language agnostic does not cater well for mobile devices. REST demands that the devices hold state which is problematic given the fact that mobile devices automatically disconnect from networks after very short periods. Explaining our current transition to an SDK, he gave an overview of the plans for the next few months, specifically the transitioning of the existing example applications and producing new developer documentation.
After the closing remarks the event finished with much hand shaking and more questions from the attendees whom it cannot be emphasised enough where some of the most friendly conference attendees we have ever had the pleasure to meet. It was also great to see so many female coders, who, while still outnumbered by their male counterparts, were as well represented as we have seen at any recent conference we have attended.
The following day, David and Nick gave filmed interviews with CNN Indonesia. The interviewer politely confirmed our suspicions that Indonesians are not as concerned as we are in Europe regards security and privacy of data, but are very much interested in the sharing economy and the desire to contribute to a crowd sourced Internet. Maybe in time attitudes will change, although maybe they won’t have to as the SAFE Network continues to roll out and starts to deliver the security and privacy many Britons and Europeans value so highly.
