Companies in every industry are building blockchain applications and asking their business partners to integrate with them. Are you ready to build a blockchain application when your CEO comes asking? Blockchain is transforming forward-thinking companies. Now is the time to understand the technology and build a strategy.
This is a full day session geared to both business leaders and technologists. We begin by briefly discussing what blockchain is and what are good and bad use cases. We will split into teams to discuss a business use case applicable to any industry. The remainder of the day will be hacking and coding our solution, geared to developers and data professionals.
This is a hands-on hackathon. You will need a computer with the ability to install software (linux, mac, windows is acceptable). You do not need to have previous blockchain or coding experience. You will also need access to an Azure subscription to spin up the blockchain solution.
(If you would like a general introduction to blockchain please see our Blockchain wiki which contains our notes). You can refer to this if you questions about some of the topics during the hackathon.
We hope at the end of the day you'll learn the following:
- Understand the basics of blockchain (the technology is changing so fast that few people are experts)
- Understand good and bad use cases for blockchain by ideating as small team over some problems you may be facing today.
- build a devenv for Smart Contract development
- Understand the technologies underlying the Azure Blockchain portfolio
- Build a little blockchain app, using common patterns, that attempts to solve the problems you ideated over.
Please follow the instructions on Hack00: EnvironmentSetup.md. You may want to start doing this immediately and multitask while we do the presentations and ideation. Installing software can take valuable time away from hacking.
- Presentation: "What is blockchain"
- Presentation: "What is Azure Blockchain"
- Presentation: "Solidity Smart Contracts"
- Ideation Workshop
- We will do a Design Thinking exercise together as a groupd
- Building a Smart Contract Rapid Prototype
- Hack00: Setup Your Hacking Environment
- Hopefully the setup is done by now, if not you need to complete the devenv setup before continuing.
- Hack01: Creating Smart Contracts
- In this hack we will build a smart contract solution using Azure Blockchain and supporting services
- If you get stuck or need assistance, let us know.
- Hack02: Build a Smart Contract using a Defined Use Case
- In this hack we'll give you a defined use case so you can continue learning about the components of Smart Contracts.
- We will use a "refrigerated transport IoT use case"
- Hack03: Solve Our Ideation Use Case with a Custom Smart Contract
- Now we'll actually hack and try to solve our business use case.
- Hack04: Add value to your Smart Contract using Flow
- A Smart Contract is great but we usually want to integrate the Smart Contract into an existing application or workflow. The easiest way to do this is by building a Flow, which is a serverless, no-code solution. In this lab we'll look at how easy it is to add our Smart Contract to a Flow.
- We could do something similarly with an Azure Logic App.
These are optional hacks you can do to get a deeper understanding of some of the core concepts we discussed today. If you are getting overwhelmed designing your Smart Contract from scratch, try some of these challenges first. (see history)
- Our Blockchain Wiki
- Azure Blockchain documentation
- BlockTalk episodes for developers
- Azure Blockchain blog
- Azure Blockchain samples
- Azure Blockchain Workbench Smart Contracts Samples/Lab
- Azure Blockchain Devkit
- Logic Apps Integration
- DevOps for Blockchain
- Azure Blockchain Developer Kit
- Using Hyperledger Fabric on AKS
- MTC Blockchain-in-a-Day Workshop
- Azure Blockchain Samples
- Other blockchain labs/workshops
- DApp University
- Free Ethereum ebook