Join Us at the Grace Hopper Celebration’s Open Source Day

The annual Grace Hopper Celebration is coming up soon! It’s a hands-on conference designed to promote women in computing. Last year, we were proud to host an Open Source Day project session.

We spent eight hours with female engineers participating in a hackathon with Hyperledger FireFly, discussing architecture, reviewing code, and merging several first time contributions to the project. For engineers, low-pressure workshops like this that let you make real contributions to open source projects are a great way to learn.

This year, we will be hosting two different sessions at Open Source Day. You will have the opportunity to join another Hyperledger FireFly project session this year – led by Nicko Guyer, a Senior Fullstack Engineer at Kaleido, who is also the Open Source Community Lead for Hyperledger FireFly. The project will have a refreshed list of issues to tackle as the codebase grew significantly within the past year. We will have the whole day to collaborate on filing various issues ranging from UI to pipeline ones with the help of awesome mentors like Cari Albritton, a Cloud Engineer here at Kaleido.

Additionally, we will also host a 1-hour workshop teaching developers how to deploy their first smart contract – led by Anastasia Lalamentik, a Fullstack Engineer at Kaleido. We chose this topic because as we see companies move towards building applications on-chain, the ability to write and manage smart contracts is more important than ever.

In our workshop, we’ll discuss how Ethereum smart contracts work and go over related concepts like gas fees, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), customizable event classes, wallets and identities, visualization tools, and more. We’ll get familiar with the Solidity programming language and write a simple smart contract together. Then we’ll deploy the smart contract to an Ethereum test network through Ethereum development tools like Hardhat and the MetaMask wallet. By the end of our session, attendees will feel empowered to write, test, and deploy your own smart contract to bring blockchain to your use case.

Our session kicks off the event during Open Source Day on September 16. Open Source Day is virtual for everyone and easy to attend. The remainder of the conference runs September 20-23 in-person in Orlando, Florida and online.

This conference gives engineers who are interested in blockchain a chance to learn practical skills, gain some hands-on experience, and meet other like-minded engineers. If you haven’t registered yet, consider joining Anastasia’s “Deploy your First Smart Contract” workshop and Nicko’s Hyperledger Firefly project session on Open Source Day. The all-day hackathon is a great way to meet new people and learn new skills.

Sign up for these sessions start on September 8 (a GHC registration is required to participate on Open Source Day). Feel free to ping us with any questions, and we hope to see you in our sessions on September 16!