I never attended a Hivefest before. I would really like to and I certainly will if it comes to Europe again. Split was just bad timing for me but I am sure there will be many more to come. I like to stay on top of all things Hive so I sat down on Thursday night to watch day 1 of the event and I have to say I was very impressed by all the speakers at it. I did not watch the full 7 hours in one sitting. Well it wasn't really seven hours because there were some breaks but I really enjoyed it. I felt tinges of stress in some sections as I looked back on old corporate war wounds from conferences I used to organise back when I was somewhat important.
In one of my previous jobs I used to be the decks guy at the companies annual conferences in which a few thousand attend. There was no education provided for this. I was just the most Microsoft Powerpoint saavy at the time. I would have to make sure all the presenters had their presentations into me a couple of days before the event. .I would chase them for it and I was given full power over these vice presidents and presidents to give out to them if they did not have their presentation deck back to me at a certain time. I gladly took them up on their offer and it felt good kicking off with them. During the conference I would then be physically sweating at the click of every deck in case I messed up the slide order etc. Later on we introduced a double screen deck slider in the booth so I could see what was coming next. My most stressful moment of my life came during one of these conference. I was at Wembley, huge conference for all of Europe and there was one of the Company directors doing her presentation and next thing my laptop and the backup laptop which we can switch to if the first one goes down all turned off. I still don't know why they both just turned off. The current slide stayed on screen while myself and another colleague frantically tried restarting both laptops. We informed the stage manager to make sure the director kept talking while I pulled at wires and finally the two laptops started rebooting. It was the longest 5 minutes of my life and I still have trauma from it so when I watch the Hivefest guys go up on stage, it is not as corporate and more laid back but I still get that sense of anxiety when a clicker isn't working or a slide appears not in 16:9 widescreen format like some of the Hivefest presenters found out. Anyway the Hivefest started with @roelandp being his usual charming self. Full of confident and radiances and a great host. Good looking bugger so he could get away with murder. He announced @itsola from the @thebeedevs who I never heard of and she explained some of the new libraries that developers could use which are very helpful such as Workerbee and Wax. I found this very helpful for a project I am working on in the background. Talk about right time , right place. Ola came across very well and I liked her raspberry pi node she had as an accessory which was running a Hive node.
Next up was @clayboyn who was Splinterlands representative and his presentation was very good with some interesting news and a good review. I think Hive has alot to learn from the way Splinterlands have someone running their DAO and hearing @clayboyn speak only doubled down on this for me. It is still decentralised but they need someone to just link it all together. He was very good. Then came me aul flower @macchiata up on stage and I found her presentation excellent chatting about her journey in Hive and what it means to her and she did really well. I did not know she was involved in so much in Hive so I better stay on her good side. Who is minding her cats is my question? :-D
Next on stage was @techcoderx who has a tool called @aioha which basically is an authorisation tool that has all Hive's authorisation tools in one place. So if you use aioha , it has keychain , hivesigner , metamask. Any tool to log into Hive, this covers it. "I will take that", I said to myself as I downloaded their API. Again like the previous presenters @teckcodex came across very well and Hive is lucky to have a dev like him onboard.
Up next were the big dogs, we had @gtg , @blocktrades and @crimsonclad talking about the next hard fork due in November. It was very interesting hearing from them and what is planned. I found the subject of light wallets intriguing and also the improvements which are being planned. So this was good. I think this section of having the top stakeholders and devs on stage could have been a longer segment . A half an hour was not enough. Maybe there were more segments with these guys in Day 2 or 3. I shall wait and see. I know we are decentralised but I think most of us would agree that @blocktrades is the virtual boss man so it was really good to hear his thinking into some areas and the plans for the future. Maybe this way the Community might be more understanding of decisions being made in we understood their view point more. Anyway in summary this was excellent as well and it really did make me optimistic on the future even though it was only about the Hive fork. I think @blocktrades came across very well.
@starkerz was next up and I have to say, this guy is seriously impressive. I know there is talk about having someone in charge of the DHF or a Hive CEO. I would be voting for this guy. He just has a presences about him and I found his presentation very insightful. I was first skeptical about spendHBD but if it is monitored closely it could be a very valuable tool. I used the cashback model with crypto.com and it was great actually. Wasn't it Zuch that said "Move fast and break things." I think @starkerz represents the new age of Hive. He will upset a few old timers but make Hive very successful. Better to try something than try nothing at all and by god he is trying stuff. On a less serious note , I would not like to get into an argument with him because he looks like a guy that would beat the head off ya.
Next up was @sorin.cristescu with his lovely red breeches. I will always trust a man with red pants. Like the person before him he set up a payment system called Innopay which was a method to pay HBD for items in businesses and he came across good as well. It is just very hard to get these payment systems off the ground. Hive needs to attract many business owners in order to get this going. His feeless card and his approach when visiting businesses is a good idea actually. I was just thinking if anyone came into me with a crypto card I would think it is a scam( unless he had red trousers) but no I have to say now his approach to it was good.
@sagarkothari88 was up next after the break. I vote Sagar as a witness which was news to me but I am glad I did because again his presentation was all about making it easier for Layer 2's to set up on Hive. Sagar and his team designed a React Kit and Flutter Kit . I am going to take a look at this in the afternoon as I use React for my layer 2 project. Sagar might end up being my saviour. Good presentation. Top bloke.
Then came @lordbutterfly talking about VSC chain and like @starkerz was impressive explaining VSC and a new rebrand coming up . For people like me who were aware of it but did not really know everything about it. If they pull it off it will be amazing but I feel it has been in development for a while now so it was good to hear their plans. When he spoke about the various hacks to blockchain bridges it is no wonder they are cautious and are taking the adequate time to ensure that everything is tight.
Next up was @detlev and @ninaeatshere and they spoke about world mapping project. I have to say, even before Hivefest. I found their presentation impressive and the timeline to where were to where they are now was excellent. I think there is alot to be learnt about worldmapping .
The Hive keychain founder was up next. A young guy called Quentin who I think is @stoodkev. Roeland made the obvious error like anyone and was calling him Kevin (stoodkev and all the . 2+2= ). But turns out the guy was called Quentin. Now at that moment I have been in the exact same situation as Roeland and acted the exact same as well. The fact that you called this person the wrong name a few times now started playing in Roelands head right there and then there was this awkward smalltalk interchange that gave me belly laughs. I absolutely love this. I think even the weather was mentioned in panic of trying to get out of an awkward situation. 🤣 . But anyway Quentin was impressive and keychain is very very good. They are starting to introduce some cross chain projects which are really excellent so the future is bright with this project and they deserve all the funding they get. I use keychain every day and these are the DHF projects I like to get behind because they are not pissing the funds up against the wall.
And that was it. I would recommend everyone with an interest in Hive to give it a watch . Link is here. It changed my views on a couple of projects and maybe just maybe we are in good hands.
The title image is me with me aul pal Roeland at Hivefest 11. This is a call out warning to him a year in advance!!
If you call me banshee I will hit him over the head with the microphone. This is for me an Quentin!!!!!!!"
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