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Watiri Kambo
Watiri Kambo

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BUILDING A DECENRALIZED MICROBLOG WITH REACH

I had the amazing opportunity to yet again participate in the decentralized Umoja 2 Bounty Hackathon. As the name suggests this is a bounty hackathon that is hosted by Reach, Algorand and Africa Blockchain Alliance. Reach is a decentralized programming language that makes use of dockerised images. When writing a Dapp using Reach, you write a program that generates a smart contract and a backend as well as a frontend. The reach primitive publish allows participants to share information with all other participants which then happens automatically without other parties needing to do anything special.

The hackathon runs for a period of six weeks, whereby teams get to compete for prizes as well as beat deadlines to carry home incentives. For my project,I worked on a microblog which lets you share short messages with an online audience to improve engagement.Blockchain is fundamentally a way to provide reliability and safety by redundancy. A new way which can democratize the process of social networking.Anyone that is a believer of open and free media is definitely a benefactor of decentralized microblogging system.

The flow for my project as demonstrated here is that the frontend is hosted on Reach while Reach interacts with the Algorand network. Anyone with an algorand account can join the network and share their thoughts. The algorand address is used as the reference to the user to uniquely identify them and make transactions within the application.

Basic JavaScript and Reach knowledge is required when bulding a Dapp. Overall, Reach is a very easy to learn and use language especially when you are getting started on blockchain development.I would most definitely recommend that you try out Reach as early as NOW so as to max out on the learning opportunities available.

Lastly, I am grateful for my mentor for she always held my hand and made sure that I was jumping hoops over all the challenges that came my way. On top of this, she also made sure that I completed my project on time and she always encouraged me to deliver the best that I could offer.I surely could not have come this far without the support that I got.Reach also has an amazing community on discord that is always so quick to respond to any questions or concerns. Join the family today, I promise you will like it here.

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