Introducing Ourselves
TEXT SEBASTIAN HEUSSER
Normally, we ask the teams behind the projects from the IOTA Ecosystem these questions. As we basically are an IOTA Ecosystem project ourselves, we have answered our questions ourselves this time.
Please describe your project briefly and simply.
It is our task to collect and publish content related to IOTA and to explain it in simple terms. We work towards the goals of the IOTA Foundation and make content from the IOTA Ecosystem available in English and German.
How did the idea come up?
There just wasn‘t a website that explained IOTA in simple terms, and even less so in German.
Which target group does your project address?
We would like to help newcomers understand the IOTA technologies better and to deliver new, exciting content to IOTA enthusiasts.
What‘s the vision you‘re building on?
To make complex things understandable and to provide opportunities for an exchange of knowledge. Our vision is a large, supportive community.
Does your project have concrete goals? If so, what are they?
We translate every blog post into German as quickly as possible and make it available to the Community. We would like to do the same now more extensively for projects as well. With what we are doing, we want to encourage the exchange of news and knowledge between experienced teams and the Community.
Where do you use IOTA technology?
We operate a website with a content management system and thus only have small use cases for IOTA. But we are running a few sample projects with IOTA for testing. For example, we count the people who visit our website with the help of the Tangle. This procedure is completely anonymous, because every visitor sends a transaction without any content from their browser to a certain address. We simply read how many transactions are on this address and thus get our total visitor numbers. From the timestamps of the transactions we can also see when a visitor opened the website.
Which IOTA technologies do you use?
For our visitor counter we used the Javascript library. In our articles, tutorials and workshops, however, we touch upon many other libraries and technologies. For example, we have a tutorial in which we transform an ESP32 into a hardware wallet. The whole thing was programmed with C and the belonging library. You can easily follow the tutorial step by step.
What hardware and software do you use apart from that?
For our connection to the Tangle, we use the nodes from TangleBay. org, a community-run node load balancer, which consists of very many nodes. For our articles, we use Ghost. This is a very good open-source software for writing articles. Our website is built with Vue.js and has the advantage of providing a progressive web app, which means that it can be saved on your smatphone‘s home screen.
Did you consider other DLTs?
Ha ha, einfachBitcoin already existed. No, seriously, we have looked into the other technologies in depth and realized that blockchain has major loopholes. Almost all of us started with Bitcoin, then went to Ethereum and finally ended up with IOTA. And we are still convinced of it.
What is your main reason for opting for IOTA?
The technical aspects that convinced us the most are its scalability at no transaction cost and the possibility to send data only. The easy access to development and the huge, solution-oriented and very supportive community are further reasons.
Who is responsible for the project and who else is in your team?
The person currently responsible is Sebastian, also known by his nickname Huhn (chicken). He joined our team of authors last year in November and is now responsible for the planning and execution of articles and projects. Our team now has 14 members: Steffen, a.k.a. NO8ODY, takes care of the einfachIOTA infrastructure. Volker, a.k.a. vrom, is our Social Media Manager and twitters faster than his shadow. Thoralf helps with all questions related to software development. Tobi, a.k.a. RonQen, is an author who also represents einfachIOTA on stage at meetups. Further authors are Kai (Kaineahnung), Mario (impi), Patrik (pstrump), Ze$Ty and playnight. The beautiful design is made by our designers Sven (r3p0x) and Richard (rck). Just recently, three more members have joined us who will focus on the Community. They are Kryptonaut, IoTAngle and PIOTA.
What are your skills and experiences?
We are a colorful team with various backgrounds, but most of us do have rather technical skills. Our team has been following the developments and reporting on them for a while now. Just this year, we have translated more than a hundred articles by the IOTA Foundation and reported on many projects and meetups in detail.
What motivated you to launch this project?
It is amazing to see how much you learn when you try to explain things to other people. We want to understand and catch everything ourselves, so einfachIOTA became the place where we collected our information and where we could discuss with each other. The whole thing went down well with the Community, so we just kept on doing this.
What motivates you to continue it?
It‘s a lot of fun to report on the different projects and to try out new formats. The Community keeps giving us great feedback, so we can keep improving our content. With einfachIOTA we stay on top of everything that happens around IOTA, and this is just very exciting!
Can the Community help you? If so, how?
Of course! It‘s always a question of what you would like to do. We are open to new ideas, but we can also use help in almost every regard of implementing our own ideas. Be it writing articles, proofreading, shooting or editing videos, designing something, programming, doing research or just asking or answering questions on the Discord chat server... There is so much to do, and it keeps getting more.
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.“
- Alan Turing