Workshop: NEAR Protocol DevNet Test Drive

It's time! If you're a current blockchain developer or are migrating from an existing stack (eg the web) to see why life is more interesting on chain, this event is for you.

This evening, you'll get a chance to test-drive the new NEAR DevNet. NEAR is a scalable, developer-friendly blockchain put together to address the key concerns of existing blockchains -- usability, scalability and business models. You have the chance to be among the first to take it for a spin before it becomes publicly available.

In the event, the NEAR core team will be available to coach you through a workshop that will get your hands dirty building and deploying a DApp on the chain. We'll have food and drinks as well.

** Prerequisites **

You'll be able to use our web-hosted IDE for this so you don't need to download anything but we'll make the self-hosted environment available at the event. Also:

• Read The Beginner's Guide to NEAR Protocol for a sense of what NEAR is building and why it's different: https://medium.com/nearprotocol/the-beginners-guide-to-the-near-blockchain-62f1c739e098

• Recommended to bring laptop to go through the workshop real-time with Illia

** Presenter **

Illia Polosukhin is co-founder of NEAR Protocol. Previously Deep Learning Researcher and Engineering Manager at Google Research. Built & deployed distributed ML models to Google Search and Play. Major contributor to TensorFlow.

** About NEAR Protocol **

NEAR is a blockchain protocol designed to bridge the adoption gap for mainstream commercial DApps. With NEAR, you can build a blockchain application within minutes, and you will have a better development experience due to tooling (IDE) & use of modern languages like WASM, Typescript and Rust. We have also completely re-imagined how end-user usability will be done, which will tremendously help with user acquisition, which developers care a lot about. To build it, we have assembled a dream team of engineers who implemented sharded distributed systems at scale including 3 early MemSQL engineers, 4 ex-Googlers, 4 gold medals at ACM ICPC and more.

** Agenda **

6:30 - 7:00pm Networking & Kick off questions
7:00 - 8:30pm Build! Debug! Launch!
8:30 - 9:00pm Debrief and wind down