Pagoda Community Session (November '22)

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   thank you for joining we're going to kick it off and yeah we're going to go through a bunch of updates and features that are going to be presented in the new console so yeah go ahead and take it away whoever who's who's awesome I'll uh I'll get it started thanks Josh um cool yeah like like Josh mentioned um I just want to share a little bit about pagoda's focus and how that's uh how

2. 0:22

   that's evolved and then uh talk through a new feature called shareable projects which will be live soon um do a little bit of a sneak peek of pagoda templates uh and then and then Tiffany's going to take a data tool or give us a data tools update so um I'll get started so I think at a very high level like Pagoda is successful if near is successful and um like the way that our entire

3. 0:46

   leadership team communicates this and and we all believe it is growing the near the number of developers on near is the Paramount goal that's why if we go to exist right now so um this funnel basically just goes from all of the developers in the world to developers that have many many users that have a project that's uh on Main net on near and like any funnel there's drop-offs in

4. 1:08

   this funnel so there are many many developers across the world um but there's we need to grow the number of developers that are currently on mainnet with uh with a ton of users so the way that we're going to do this is is focus on these two over the the next the next few months um in in this is essentially like the top end of this funnel so we we can't do a ton to push the number of developers in the world we can tell our friends how awesome it is to be a developer and that's probably

5. 1:33

   the extent of what Pagoda and the team's going to do but developers that can build on near and developers that are building on the air is is something that we really want to push forward and and how we do this for developers that can build on here this is like just making near accessible to as many people as possible and the primary ways that we're doing this is with the JavaScript stack and the rust tooling so like we we've we've always been very focused on having

6. 1:57

   uh rust is like the uh the main um Contracting language for near and lately we've been able to release a JavaScript SDK that's opened up to 2 20 million plus JavaScript developers so this is growing the number of developers that are able to build on near without having to learn a ton of new technology and then when we look at developers that are building on near this is a lot of the the specific products that we can launch in order to make it really really

7. 2:21

   easy to get started to build to flourish um uh while while building a um adapt so with that being said um I'd love to focus on one specific new feature which is how we're making it as easy as possible to get started and I'm actually going to pass it to Charleston to walk through this one cool thanks thanks Austin let me share my screen all right so what you can see now is a view of the console on the contract screen um this is showing a a demo build of of the console and the new element that's here is this

8. 3:02

   affordance to share so if I click share on this project I can choose the projects that I want to make available to the audience to whom I'm sharing so I can select all or some subset of the contracts here it's showing me which of these contracts have an embedded API which of them do not and when I click this link what this allows me to do is to share this directly on a social media Network whatever I choose to do and then for the people who click this link whether or not they have a console session or they're logged into

9. 3:35

   the console they will be able to see all of the contracts that I shared to them with a few updates in the UI that make it clear that hey you are not logged in you can if you like but we still allow them to have all the functionality of the contracts module including interacting with contracts looking at the contract API you can send function request calls here so complete functionality to exercise any of the methods available in the contracts that you're sharing for the contracts which have an embedded API they can also view

10. 4:05

    the analytics to see this demographic and performance information that we show on this pre-configured dashboard for the contracts and you know change that to filters to any specific contractor dates that they're interested in so the full functionality of the console for the contracts and analytics module almost a full functionality you can't add any new contracts but you can get the value hopefully get the value of the contracts

11. 4:29

    here and then see explore the other areas such as the indexers page and then the alerts well we currently have a flash page here um that can explain what what you can do with alerts and then just let you know if you want to experience those benefits go ahead and sign up similarly for the API if you want to Leverage The Pagoda apis and get the API Keys you'll just need to sign up another cool thing here is if I'm

12. 4:55

    interacting with these contracts in this shareable mode I can also share this to other people as well and select some contracts get a link and make those available to others so this is just the beginning of what we're looking to do to open up the console to expose more the value to users before they decide that they want to sign up for an account and it kind of ease the onboarding into

13. 5:19

    different areas of the console so just a sneak peek into the shareable project features before it goes live which will be sometime soon and we'd love to hear back from you on any feedback you have on this awesome thanks Charles I'm gonna I'm gonna take over a screen share again uh and and just jump into another section so like shareable projects helps to get people um uh get people into consoles they can start using some of the amazing features but feedback that we've heard from the

14. 5:51

    community over our recent um just just talking to the community we're at nircon we were uh we're just doing some uh user interviews um and we've got pretty consistent feedback that web3 seems hard it seems challenging like it seems difficult um and we've heard things like what do you what do we like what are those commands that I need to learn in order to get started to build and deploy like uh how do I get started where should I

15. 6:16

    get started I've built web apps how are web3 app different uh web3 apps different and and just like some con uh Concepts in web3 can be a little bit confusing and all this kind of sums up to web3 seems hard but it really doesn't need to be and the way that we're tackling this problem is with uh Pagoda templates um and I'm going to just jump in to the actual prototype really quickly we're in

16. 6:40

    Prototype land so unfortunately this hasn't been launched yet um and again we'd love feedback on any piece of this um particularly what templates the community would like to see but the ethos of why we're doing this is that we just want to give the near Community the best foundation in order to build their dapps on top of so what we're and how we're doing this is by creating a bunch of pagoda templates that are entire

17. 7:03

    applications ranging in size and ranging in complexity um you can see a few here that we've mocked up like adding decentralized storage to your application building a customer loyalty program generating nfts and maybe in the future we'll be able to convince the community to also build some of these templates and for example like if refinance wanted to build um like a swap template that people could build on top of so um again like I mentioned the entire

18. 7:27

    benefit of this is just a really solid foundation or to build off of like audited contracts um and and the way I would like or I'd like to show off one particular example which is a loyalty program so the way that we're displaying this is we've got the key features why this is important for web3 and then a system architecture diagram so exactly how you can use the or exactly how this application is structured and how there's some web two components and web3

19. 7:52

    components and then pieces that are bridging across um the entire uh the the way that we um intend for uh developers to to use these templates is um to fork and build the project using our automated deployments add your own code and then use our automated CI CD so I'm just going to walk through um a really quick uh a really quick visual on this so um on the on the left side you have that Pagoda template um and when you click on that use this template button what's

20. 8:25

    going to happen is we're going to Fork a GitHub repo automatically we're going to build and deploy it using GitHub actions so the contract as well as the front end then the developer you'll have that GitHub you'll have that project in your own repo you can clone it you can make changes to it and then you'll be able to do commits and pushes and again using the automation from GitHub actions you'll be able to uh automatically deploy that project to either testnet or mainnet and then interact with it and

21. 8:50

    sort of do that entire feedback loop um uh all within the Pagoda platform so there's a lot more to come on this feature um and uh the the first templates that we're launching with are boilerplate templates so we leveraging like a create new app type templates where you can just get started and use like the most simple Foundation to build off decentralized storage with ipfs customer loyalty with Anonymous wallets

22. 9:15

    um nft minting with ipfs and then an iOS example with an in-game economy so those are the ones that were slotted to build there's going to be more and then eventually we'd love the community to start contributing so um before we before we open it up to allow Community submissions we'd love to hear from the community what feet or what uh what templates you would like to see and and this could be anything ranging from hey I'd just love to see

23. 9:38

    this cool example to I tried to build this and it was really complex I'd love to see like a concrete example so um you can always you can always reach us on Twitter throw it in the chat um or we also have that feedback widget within uh within the console product right in the bottom right corner that little speech bubble um you can always I check those so you can submit requests

24. 10:00

    right through there awesome I think we're gonna switch gears now and I'm gonna pass it over to Tiffany to walk through the data product developer journey and some of the data products thank you Austin um so yeah so uh for similar to what you know we have been discussing and like the overall um development in terms of on web3 there are a lot of components to it on the data side there are also a lot of

25. 10:27

    components that historically have been on our developer's mind so um as you might or might not know historically in order to interact or develop or graph data from the near blockchain you usually need to paint an RPC node or you run to your own RPC node and you need to also use that node to power your whole indexing infrastructure to build your indexer from the ground up there are a lot of code that go into it and actually in order to Output that into an API that can directly you know

26. 10:58

    Source data into your front end usually you will need something like uh you know AWS Google um or gcp or like postgres database and then you do a lot of you know data processing ETL have your apis out there and you probably need more than one person in this whole process and your data stack is here Pagoda near datastack is here to actually simplify that whole process and um you know you only need one person with this one tool and you can go forward and go ahead and focusing on

27. 11:30

    your development so next slide please cool yeah so I'm going to make a very abrupt statement here from the data perspective actually blockchain is essentially just a gigantic big database if you think about it and going through that you when you think about writing or when you think about database or a relationship with a database right there are basically two relationships one is

28. 11:54

    you write to the database and just store all your information another is you pull it from pull from your database so after deployer contract what other cases when you write to your database it's basically when you send transactions and it's it's available there in the RPC apis um that we that Pagoda API provide as well as you know the other other blockchain RPC API also have the

29. 12:18

    standard so this is very straightforward from that the read part is where we're mostly you know confused and it's you know complicated and you know historically you also have been saying developers saying they're like you know it's confusing it's a lot of Step a lot of things to run to make it Act accurate and everything so when you think about reading from a database would you do usually historically like if it's not in

30. 12:41

    a blushing world you will write a bunch of SQL query to query from that database and also understand a relationship mapping which is the very standard object relationship mapping or um process that I I'm assuming a lot of people are familiar with um and we actually mimic that and started to think about okay why does it have to be different if we're thinking about watching as a big database so we

31. 13:04

    come up with this idea of career API which essentially does the same thing on a blockchain and we really take care of a lot of the nuances that happening there and some delightful sorts of surprises actually come along the way so for a lot of the data that you will need most likely for like transactions accounts all of these stuff that you know need most often it's a building block of your D app we already we are actually already compiled and created

32. 13:30

    all of those for you so it's probably even easier in in the blog watching world if you think about it this way right so yeah with all the things set let's go to the next slide and dive a little bit a little bit more about what the query API is basically it's defining your career and your aggregation rules it's what it what you want to what do you want to get how do you want to aggregate it do you want to have a certain filter by certain like accounts

33. 13:55

    transections do you want to filter it by like ordering it by some Maximum minimum rules or if you think about the SQL you want to group by anything right we you define everything you need there and we'll take care of the rest we'll literally take care of the rest we'll compile it aggregate indexing whatever the magic power happened and what output to your own apis for you and all of this

34. 14:18

    process I'm defining this the the queries actually is all integrated with our predefined apis so when you are defining your your queries on what you want to build or where you want to get out of a lot of the ones already available so you can just use those get uh you know build on top of the build on top of those in terms of how you want to aggregate it what time frame is and all of those are near tools integrated so you don't have to switch tools get out or something or anything like that and

35. 14:44

    it's going to be all embedded within the whole experience of developing on you know with pagoda so once you have your own apis you can use that into any cases that you want right you can use that as like a trigger in your own d-app to trigger some functionality you can use that in your front end to display whatever data you need and we also built some extension on top of this so web hooks in order to push the data to you so you don't need

36. 15:08

    to pull and Pull and pull again and again and oracles and even zapier connections or even other layer one uh layer one or two blockchain connectors are all going to be available for all of that powerful extension that really enables you in this multi-chain world and you know connecting the off-chain data and even use those data to power you know some of your you know social media notifications or very interesting

37. 15:32

    magical things that could happen so really unlock the growth part of that too so next slide please um so yeah so the predefined apis that I mentioned is currently released as a beta as an enhanced API and uh currently available is the token information around nfts tokens um near all your historical balances transactions um asset aggregation and we will be aiming for this to be able to directly get your data that you most often use like mentioned with covering more areas essentially so you know you will be able

38. 16:05

    to really filter your blocks by time stem in the future and you will be able to filter through your events locks and go through all of those and you'll be able to filter all the transactions by like who sent it who receives it the signers you know go through them inspect them one by one um and yeah so really gives you a head start and focus on your ideas check it out in the console if you have not yet and yeah and stay tuned so what's coming

39. 16:30

    like is that blocks my time transaction search event search and really with all of these two things combined together together and all the tools we enable on top really see bytech index or building no more no more that word no more that word in the future and in your ecosystem that's our goal and no more expensive Cruise no like a bunch of Crips holds to the RPC no more like very big RPC State

40. 16:54

    because you write everything in it um and yeah that's really our goal to to really make it as easy as possible and it's just all familiar things that you you're already familiar with it's just no different from any you know writing or reading from a database great beautiful I love the passion it's so awesome I think we do actually have one question uh from uh Matthias uh will will I be able to use the API to group by transaction quantity and amounts in

41. 17:26

    order to find whale accounts on near uh that is and so we we sort of defined that's a great question we sort of Define um our apis in terms of the transactional apis that you know it's any D apps we'll use on a daily basis and they will use that to power their d-app what you were talking about is this more like analytical data that um that is very very interesting for sure we actually have this will account um a sort of planned for our uh for our

42. 17:59

    uh explore stats page actually so that data should be we have the analytical database already available um there's extension on top of explore database I'll share the link in the chat once I find it um there are a lot of existing tables that you can use to aggregate for to get that information for now and in the future we will have this kind of like a whale list and you can just you know

43. 18:22

    pull pull from that instead so yes it will it will be an API in the future but it will not be an enhanced apart predefined API for that for that purpose but it will be available through some other mechanism awesome obligatory five second wait to see if there's any other questions um like always I just wanna like the the screenshot that's on the screen right now and like the very bottom right corner of console is a place to give feedback we do look at this

44. 18:58

    um so uh if you don't have questions now but you have some in the future or you're watching the recording of This 10 years from now um you should be able to submit your questions through there cool all right I think I think we can wrap it up then thanks everybody thanks everyone appreciate it see you next time thanks