Search Apps Documentation Source Content File Folder Download Copy

Gnomes Spotted in Belgrade, Serbia: Recap from the Engineering Retreat and Golang Serbia Meetup

Dobro jutro gnomes! Last week, the Gno core engineering team convened in Belgrade, Serbia, to discuss various aspects of our technical roadmap, including Test4, blockchainless Gno, Gnoweb, governance and DAO structuring, GnoVM, and more. While the team was in town, we took the chance to host a Gno @ Golang Serbia meetup titled ‘Building Dynamic Applications with Interpreted Go’ - you can catch the recording of the full presentation here.

Engineering Retreat Recap

Over five full days of coding and workshops, the Gno core engineering team delved into several critical topics and emerged with several key takeaways:

  • Test4 Progress:
    • Test4 has been the primary effort for the team in the past couple of months, aiming to create a stable multi-node testnet which will serve as the last precursor to Gno.land’s upcoming mainnet. Discussions revolved around chain initialization flows, node metrics & telemetry, versioning of binaries, adding a way to modify the validator set via a realm (r/sys/vals), and more. Currently, the Test4 milestone is 62% complete.
  • Blockchainless Gno:
    • With the upcoming GopherCon EU & US conferences, the team discussed a different perspective on Gno - a fully functional Go interpreter with automatic state persistence. The team aims to modularize the GnoVM so that it can be used in contexts outside the Gno.land blockchain, which will open up the ecosystem to completely new use-cases, inviting even more web2 developers to join our mission.
  • Gnoweb Enhancements:
    • gnoweb serves as one of the main tools to explore the Gno.land ecosystem. The team discussed changes to the UI as well as improving gnoweb’s functionalities such as the rendering of realm state & source code, and possible approaches to add more ways to interact with on-chain apps.
  • Governance and DAO Structuring:
    • Discussions relating to GovDAO and WorxDAO took place during the retreat, as they are the foundation for Gno.land’s consensus mechanism - Proof of Contribution. Manfred Touron, Gno.land’s VP of Engineering, discussed the initial implementation of GovDAO and its surrounding infrastructure.
  • GnoVM & Gno.land Development:
    • The team took the opportunity to deal with priority PRs during the retreat, such as the Gno Type Check PR by @itzmaxwell, which will add full type checking to the VM. The team has also added GoReleaser to the monorepo in preparation for the upcoming Test4 milestone, and the first nightly Gno build was released.

Gno @ Golang Serbia

While in Belgrade, we also hosted a new Gnolocal meetup with over 15 developers from the Golang Serbia community. During this event, we introduced Gno.land, with a particular focus on the GnoVM (Virtual Machine) as a foundational layer for Gno - an interpreted version of Go. This was the first time we presented the concept of Gno to Serbia’s Golang community, showcasing its potential to support dynamic application development. It was an opportunity to identify areas of improvement and feedback from the user community.

meetup

Dylan Boltz, a Senior Golang Engineer from the core team, led the presentation, demonstrating how the VM and Gno can be leveraged to design and build efficient, adaptable, and scalable applications. He also provided an overview of the stack-based VM architecture, illustrating how data storage mechanisms and execution traces operate within the VM.

By using the GnoVM outside of the blockchain context, relevant to the Go community, developers can utilize the powerful features of Gno to build applications with automatic state persistence within a sandboxed environment. Dylan showcased how the GnoVM can be embedded in an HTTP server, allowing developers to write and persist Gno applications locally, and then share them with other users, all while maintaining the security of a VM.

The Meetup presentation highlights

  • Virtual Machine Deep Dive: We provided a detailed understanding of the architectural setups of various VMs, and gave an overview of the current GnoVM.
  • Hands-On Learning: We walked through how to embed a virtual machine into your Go applications for dynamic code interpretation. The presentation covered practical techniques, including creating browser-based interfaces using interpreted Go.
  • Interactive Demonstrations: We showed how to create browser-based interfaces with interpreted Go as a foundation, demonstrating how this architecture enables dynamic program execution while maintaining a structured, deterministic approach to storage and state.
  • This was the third meetup in our series of Gnolocal events. We’ll be popping up in more cities around the globe to connect with gnomes, and spread the word about Gno.land. With a few gnomes based in Belgrade, it’s important to keep cultivating and building the Gno.land community locally. If you’re based in Serbia, you can find our regional based channel on the Official Gno.land Discord Server.

The Feedback Loop

After the presentation, we gathered feedback from the attendees to assess the content presented, their interest in Gno.land, and in their interest in using the Gno interpreter tooling. Here are the key insights from form responses:

  • 75% of participants said they were interested in learning more about Gno.
  • 87% of participants found the presentation and concepts understandable.
  • 38% expressed interest in using the embedded Go interpreter in their applications. The feedback highlighted the need for us to clearly outline the problems Gno.land
  • is solving, how our technology addresses these issues, and how it can apply to
  • real-world examples. This feedback is invaluable as it helps us refine our
  • approach and better engage with new contributors.

Conclusion

The meetup was just one of several activities the team organized in Belgrade. In addition to the extensive technical sessions and workshops, we had the opportunity to experience and learn a bit about the local culture and Serbia, visiting the Nikola Tesla Museum, sightseeing, and experiencing traditional Serbian music. These in-person engineering retreats are some of the most important moments in outlining priorities, troubleshooting the technology together, and brainstorming ways to generally enhance and optimize the Gno.land blockchain and builder experience.

Tags: #gnome #gnolocal #retreat #meetup #golang

Written by leohhhn, michelleellen on 28 May 2024

Published by g1manfred47kzduec920z88wfr64ylksmdcedlf5 to gno.land's blog