This week the Apollo hackathon accelerates into run mode. After the events of the ignition sequence the projects should be cruising along. Two mentor sessions and a Fireside focused on governance were hosted. The week also happened to contain the Autumnal Equinox on which there was an informative Airmeet about Filecoin Dev Grants. Promising projects should be thinking about what the next season will entail.
Based on feedback from the Fleek developers, we spent time investigating the Textile bucket infrastructure. It will indeed be possible to store our custom metadata in a JSON file in each country’s bucket. This satisfies our persistence requirement:
In order for a file to be useful, we need the metadata about that file.
The metadata will also be cached in a database used by our application.
But if, someday, our app/db isn’t running anymore, we want the files to still be available and useful.
Likewise, various climate data websites that list the stored data could go dark. So we want both the files and their metadata to be persistent.
In order to diagram this thinking we evolved our process map. As it includes external infrastructure on both the country and researcher sides of the process, it has become rather complex. Earlier versions were posted on the Chaîne blog. To zoom in, we made an infographic that’s easier to parse. It describes the journey of a climate data file from local silo to public persistence. This is what we’re focusing on during Apollo.
The process map and infographic translate our functional requirements (user stories) into technical terms, as well as stipulate aspects that a backend dev needs to know in order to grok the full picture.
In the infographic footer we mention that we’re looking for a crew member with backend skills to help build out our PoC into a working prototype. If you know anyone who’d like to come onboard, please send a signal! 📡