What I learnt building on Near blockchain

In late 2023, November to be precise. I participated in a hackathon organized by Near blockchain in Lagos Nigeria. This is my experience building on Near, and what I learnt from building on Near.

I will refer to the Near blockchain as Near in this article.

Introduction

I heard about the Near blockchain 3 days to the hackathon when I was called by my colleague to register for the hackathon. I didn’t know about building on Near but I registered anyway. My thought. It’s web3 right. I’m down for it.

Onboard on Near

On the day of the hackathon, I was focused during the briefing before the hackathon started, from which I understood that on Near, you build dapps using components which you can write from scratch or better still, use a component already deployed on Near. Though I had this understanding, I still felt I needed to try this in code to fully understand how this works.

The first day of the hackathon went well. It was more of gaining familiarity with how to build dapps using Components already deployed to Near and how to modify these components for your use case. Hours went by and yea, me and my team couldn’t write as much code as we had planned. It was more of first finding the components that will suit our project for the hackathon.

The Hackathon Project

The project we chose from the category of projects for the hackathon was a twitter-like social media dapp with the ability to list posts, search posts, filter posts by tags and more.

Day 2

On the second day of the hackathon, my team and I quickly jumped into action trying to continue from where we stopped in day 1 of the hackathon. We continued with our search for the best post component that we can make use of. We found many, but of the many we found, we had to choose the one that most fit our chosen project.

The hunt for the best component continued for 3 hours but we finally settled on one. That seemed like we hit the jackpot already, but… Yes, there was a but. After working on the current component for 4 hours. We realized that the post component we had chosen wouldn’t work for us. Demoralizing, definitely. But it was almost the end of the second day of the hackathon. So, myself and my co-dev that was onsite decided to close the second day of the hackathon with that disappointment. 😥

Day 3

It was the third day of the hackathon and it seemed that we were back to where we started on day 1 of the hackathon. Of course, we had gotten familiar with how components work on Near and how to customize components that we could use for our project. All that was needed was to find the right post component to use. After about 4 hours of searching, my team finally got what we needed. A component that solved our use-case. It was an interesting turn of events for us. Building on our knowledge from the component we had used from day 2, we began to piece-the-pieces together. See what I did there? As quickly as we could, we plugged the post component into the other components we had built from day 2 and as easy as plugging a charger to a wall socket. Everything lighted up. For the first time in 3 days. We had hope of winning the hackathon. Once we plugged the post component which was the missing piece of our project, we proceeded with implementing the search functionality and the filter by tags functionality. And so quickly we saw the results we needed to see. Yes, finally, we had a working dapp, fully functional by standard of what we set out to build. It was a fulfilling day for my team knowing that we just needed to add that final touch of perfection. And we did. We perfected the style for the page and tested our dapp. Yes, it was working as intended. We were good to go.

Gold Section Winners

After 4 days of building on Near and have pitched our idea, we were convinced that we had a shot at winning the first position of the Gold section that we signed up for. And… drum roll… we did it. We won the first place of the Gold section of the Near BOS hackathon in November 2023. We built PostX and won the Gold section of the hackathon.

What I learnt

Personally, building on Near was a wonderful experience and also a feat for me because it was my first hackathon and my team won Gold. Aside from the dapp I built in this hackathon, I built other things, I built the confidence to build any form of project in the web3 space. Because prior to the hackathon. I had 4 months of knowledge about web3. I had just started my journey to web3 in August of 2023. So aside from winning the hackathon. I gained knowledge of building on another blockchain different from what I was used to and in a development structure different from what I had learnt and known. I was introduced to web3 writing smart contracts using Solidity and building using components and without a language like solidity and a dedicated frontend way of building dapps was very new to me. But, in 4 days. My team and I were able to build a twitter-like social media dapp on Near. The name of the hackathon winning project is called PostX (available on Near).

I learnt;

1. about Near Blockchain Operating System (Near BOS)
2. about building on Near, a different way of building dapps.
3. about collaboration in a new light.
4. about a new community called near.org
5. how much I have grown in the web3 space even though I had only started my web3 journey in August 2023, just 4 months before the hackathon.
6. and saw open source in another light different from what I was used to.

The summary of what I learnt from building on Near is a revolutionary way of building software that works. The revolutionary way of building software that Near embraces. And I have to say, it is cool. I think the word “cool” just sums it up.

Conclusion

In my 4 days building on Near, I definitely learnt a lot. The most obvious from this article is the style of building dapps different from conventional ways of doing so. One key takeaway is that building on Near abstracts many complexities which makes it a wonderful platform to building dapps for users new to the ecosystem like myself and also for experienced developers who can customize available components to their liking. In short, all I have to say from building on Near is: 👏🏽 Building on Near works. It just does.

Remarks

I want to dedicate this article to the PostX team that won the Near BOS hackathon held in Lagos, Nigeria in November of 2023. Thanks to them I am able to write this article.

Shoutout to Near as well.

Thanks for reading. 🙂