Code Angelz — Grant Report #2

John Asafo — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 03:01:44 +0000

Project Update

The project was definitely much harder to complete than I expected. This is really down to a few things. During the project term, I changed jobs and my new job was much more demanding than I expected. Which meant I had to fit my project hours in late at night which lead to me being constantly tired. Then unfortunately I had a family tragedy which derailed the project for a few weeks.

On the project side of things, the Coil implementation took a long time. Even getting approval takes a while but it was the implementation of the project that took the majority of the time. It was difficult because I hired quite junior developers who worked on the authentication part of the project and had moved off the project by the time I was ready to implement Coil. They had implemented some strange behaviour in the backend middleware which took me ages to resolve. The reason I decided to go for junior developers to work with me was that the more senior developers I was coming across were charging me 3 times the amount without guaranteeing they would finish the project. The end result was that the project ran behind the expected timeline. In hindsight what could I have done better I should have implemented a Pull Request review system for the junior devs.

Progress on objectives

Code Angelz was created to address several problems, one of the major ones is that answers on developer Q and A sites are often out of date or top-rated answers are no longer the best answer on the page.
I tried to fix this by providing an incentive that would keep developers engaged and willing to improve out-of-date posts. By using a revenue share my circle of friends have told me this would inspire them to keep content up to date. But they also fed back to me about some of the barriers to entry the main one was signing up for the Uphold digital wallet. They found the KYC part quite intrusive, but this is to be expected.

The updated top answers will help reduce the likely hood of old code with security flaws being copied and pasted into projects.
I set out to get rid of the creepy adverts that follow users around the internet and this has been achieved. When a user logs in using Coil we turn off the ads.

Another objective was to reward developers for taking time out of their schedules to help others. This has been done, because not only do you receive a revenue share for having the selected answer. Users can tip any answer using XRP via Xumm. The problem with using XRP is that users who hold XRP think it is some form of gold, in order to get people more
to tip, I may have to use a different coin.

The website is live so you can try it out, but it is still quite unstable and is more of a beta release.

Key activities

The project task was to make a prototype that solve the problems highlighted in the objectives. In the end, I created something that is more than a prototype with all key features implemented. Users can tip each other using XRP, they see the answers to their questions in real-time. Adverts are hidden from Coil users and a Web Monetization revenue share is available to users.

Communications and marketing

In terms of marketing, I have a war chest of social media and press releases ready to go once the project is out of beta.
Information on how to get your hands on some amazing merch will be posted to the community shortly.

What’s next?

This may sound strange as I didn't spend all of my budget, but I need a mid-level developer to assist me in the tech debt and polishing the website. The money I had left was not enough to hire one. So I will be looking at different options with regard to more funding. I believe that the project still has a lot of potential.

What community support would benefit your project?

From the community, I would like feedback and potentially like to partner with another senior dev with time on their hands and passion in their heart to make this site the great force for good I know it can be.

Additional comments

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Code Angelz — Grant Report #1

John Asafo — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 22:14:14 +0000

Project Update

Let me start by introducing Code Angelz, which is a developer based Question and Answer website. That allows registered users to ask questions in real time and the developers who answer the questions are rewarded with micro-payments.

As far as the timeline goes I probably about a month behind where I expected to be, although we have a basic CMS working to control the website and some functionality of the Question and Answer site there is still a bit to do make it polished.

The main problem I had initially I found it hard to find good developer contractors that would do the amount work I required for the budget that I had. Another issue I had was that I lost some contractors due to me wanting to wait for the grant funds to clear before they started. In the month before I received the funds I had done a lot of the groundwork with regards to working out the architecture and technology used on the platform. Once the funds had cleared I found myself a great UI designer who worked with me to come up with the UI / UX experience. Once that was complete I was back on the hunt for some developers I increased my budget and manage put a great team of developers together.

Progress on objectives

Of the all the objectives we originally there are 3 core elements that are not complete.

The first is the ability to hide adverts for users who do not have have Coil enabled.

The second is the ability to send a XRP tips a person who has provided you with a useful answer.

Lastly, not all the infrastructure is in place at the moment we don't have the Continuous Integration pipeline to push builds to a staging and production environments.

Key activities

We have Alpha and Beta release to be shared with a small number of developers once the missing core features are added to the platform. After each release there will be round bug fixing, to the expedite the process of finding we may offer a bug bounty.

Communications and marketing

The plan is to become more active on Social Media and use the marketing budget to promote the platform. Blog posts, video tutorials and meetup events are all in the pipeline.

What’s next?

At this point in time we need to complete the missing features and make the platform more stable. Then complete the key activities, the communications and marketing plan.

What community support would benefit your project?

Once we are into Beta we will posting to the community to get some feedback and to get users involved in the bug bounty.

The Interledger Community 🌱: John Asafo

Code Angelz — Grant Report #2

Project Update

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Communications and marketing

What’s next?

What community support would benefit your project?

Additional comments

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Code Angelz — Grant Report #1

Project Update

Progress on objectives

Key activities

Communications and marketing

What’s next?

What community support would benefit your project?