As blockchain becomes more and more widespread and decentralized applications are emerging as solutions in growing number of industries to solve real-world problems there is a need for blockchain(s) to interact with the world outside of their own. The way blockchain itself is designed provides no straight-forward way to interact with standard APIs living on non-blockchain systems. To tackle this drawback a solution in form of “oracles” is used. Oracles are sources of data living outside of blockchain. Read more

Recently, I was working on a web app made with React and NextJS using TypeScript, and along the way, I wanted to write tests for pages and components of this app. I used Jest before, so I wanted to use it in this project as well. But, I ended up spending more time on configuring tests than I planned. During the process of setting it all up, I asked a friend, who is also working on an app with NextJS and TypeScript, for help. Read more

InterPlanetary File System or IPFS for short, is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer and more open. It is a method for storing files in a distributed file system spread across different computing devices (nodes). Once you add a file to IPFS it becomes a part of a file system distributed across the world. Each file added to IPFS gets a unique identifier, a cryptographic hash of its content, as its name. Read more