text
stringlengths
0
1.82k
**Erik St. Martin:** So with that, I guess we have to say goodbye... At some point we have to, because we're out of time. I wanna thank everybody on the show, and especially I wanna thank Bryan for coming on the show and talking to us about all the great topics today. Thanks to everybody who's listening now; if you're ...
**Brian Ketelsen:** Goodbye, thanks Bryan.
**Bryan Liles:** Thanks for having me.
**Carlisia Thompson:** Thanks, Bryan.
• Blockchain definition and use cases
• Chain's blockchain infrastructure and UTXO model
• Double-spend problem and validation of transactions
• Distributed ledger systems and non-UTXO blockchains
• Chain Core implementation and hosted version
• Testnet and development of blockchain networks for financial institutions
• Chain Core's potential applications for businesses outside of traditional financial institutions
• Validating assets on a private blockchain network
• Differences between public and private blockchain networks
• Federation-based consensus protocol in Chain Core
• Customizable asset issuance and validation processes
• IBM's business-oriented blockchain announcement and its differences from Chain Core
• Distributed consensus algorithms in blockchain technology
• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) as a backbone for some blockchains
• Limitations of PBFT in production environments
• Implementation of a single node "generator" or "block proposer" for consensus
• Comparison with Proof of Work used by Bitcoin
• Open sourcing project and licensing choices, specifically AGPL license
• Concerns about AGPL's network usage requirements
• Balancing permissive vs restrictive licenses to protect business interests
• Discussion on the importance of people and business knowledge in creating a successful company
• Benefits of using Go for cross-compiling and ease of use
• Tess Rinearson's experience learning Go and its impact on her interest in systems programming
• Chain Core open sourcing process and guidelines for project structure and implementation
• Comparison of open source vs non-open source codebases and considerations for structuring projects
• GopherCon milestones and the community's shared understanding of time measurement
• Discussion about open sourcing code and writing documentation
• Personal anecdotes about Brian Ketelsen releasing his own code on GitHub despite initial reluctance
• Side project of Tess Rinearson connecting her apartment buzzer to Twilio for grocery delivery service
• Use cases and future plans for the side project, including auditing and dashboard development
• Discussion about working with Twilio in Go, including using XML tooling and encoding structs
• Early web development and browser compatibility issues
• Old browsers such as Lynx, Netscape, and IE 6
• Console-based web browsing with Lynx
• Early internet experiences and dial-up connections
• Hacking and security vulnerabilities in old systems
• Basics of web security (SQL injection, cross-site scripting)
• Social engineering and human error in security breaches
• The host has problems with isolated Wi-Fi networks and accidentally putting guests on his regular network.
• The group celebrates Bill Kennedy's birthday by singing "Happy Birthday" over a bad internet connection, leading to humorous discussion about the lag and potential post-production fixes.
• Review Dog software, a Go application that automates code reviews and adds comments to Git pull requests, is discussed as a useful tool for maintaining clean codebases.
• The default Go path for Go 1.8 has been set to /go in the user's home directory, eliminating the need to specify a path explicitly.
• The change is seen as a significant improvement for beginners, making it easier to get started with Go.
• The difficulty of setting up environment variables in programming languages
• Making language tooling more approachable for beginners
• Comparisons to other programming languages (Ruby on Rails) to identify challenges in learning Go
• The importance of accessibility and community involvement in making programming easier for new learners
• Discussion of the workspace tool idea that Andrew Gerrand presented
• Shoutouts to free software projects, including go-torch and the Go Tour
• Encouragement to contribute to open source projects, specifically the Go Tour
• Cory LaNou's "OSS help wanted" repository for listing projects in need of help
• Projects can be categorized and listed by level of expertise and ease of contribution
• Go Tour project discussed as a potential addition to the repository
• Discussion of wrap-up and goodbyes, thanking sponsors and listeners
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, we are back for another episode of GoTime. It is episode \#23. Today's show is sponsored by Linode and Code School. On the show today we have myself, Erik St. Martin, we also have Brian Ketelsen - say hello, Brian.
**Brian Ketelsen:** Hello, Brian.
**Erik St. Martin:** And Carlisia Campos.
**Carlisia Thompson:** Hi, everybody. \[laughs\]
**Erik St. Martin:** She's already laughing... And today's special guest is Tess Rinearson. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself, Tess?
**Tess Rinearson:** Hey. I am a software engineer at Chain, which is a San Francisco startup that builds blockchain infrastructure, and we do almost everything we do, all of our infrastructure is written in Go.
**Erik St. Martin:** This comes the fun part - I wonder how many people are familiar with what blockchain is.
**Tess Rinearson:** Yeah...
**Erik St. Martin:** Can you give a little background of what blockchain is and what it's used for?
**Brian Ketelsen:** Something-something Bitcoin.
**Tess Rinearson:** Yeah, that's usually where I start. My house party explanation always begins with "Do you know what Bitcoin is?" 95% of the time people say yes, so I'll just take it from there. The blockchain generically is the infrastructure that powers Bitcoin. It's all of the distributed systems and cryptography...
You can use that infrastructure to power all kinds of other things. The system that I work on at Chain is sort of like a blockchain for generic assets. We work with financial institutions like NASDAQ or VISA, who have other assets (non-Bitcoin assets) that they would like to put on a blockchain to get a lot of those sa...
**Carlisia Thompson:** Right this second this question came up for me - is blockchain a protocol? I didn't get it.
**Tess Rinearson:** Yeah, that's actually a funny question. I would say no, it's not a protocol... To be honest, the word blockchain right now is a little bit like the word cloud, where maybe if you have seven or eight characteristics and if some product or service matches six of those seven or eight characteristics, t...
**Carlisia Thompson:** I guess Chain implemented its own blockchain, right?
**Tess Rinearson:** That's right. We actually have our own protocol as well. Maybe you can think of a blockchain as like the generic category of protocols and services, and then we wrote this protocol called The Chain Protocol, which is a blockchain protocol designed for financial services. Then, we also have an implem...
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[03:56\] Makes sense.
**Erik St. Martin:** From what I saw, it was designed more in line with Bitcoin's implementation, where there's kind of like the UTXOs...
**Tess Rinearson:** That's right, we have a UTXO model. A UTXO is an unspent transaction output - somehow you get the TX from "transaction." So that's the basic system that we use, which is the same mechanism that Bitcoin uses.
You can think of the UTXO model as a little bit like being a series of boxes. So if I want to send Carlisia five dollars, I have to go through all of the outputs of previous transactions that I own. I put five dollars into her box, and then that box is an unspent transaction output for Carlisia that she can then unlock...