STEEM Hackahon with @howo - Building a Wordpress plugin, STEEM Tutorial Page and aiming for the Ballmer peak

As mentioned in my post last week @howo , who is an @utopian-io moderator, and I have had many ideas for Apps we would like to build on the steem blockchain. But while talking about ideas can be fun enough in and off itself, nothing beats getting together to try and turn thoughts into actions! At least when combined with a lot of good food and beer.

Picture of our Saturday hacking space in @howo's apartment in Paris.

I don't want to do any big announcements of what we've built just yet, but thought I would give you a short overview of what we're looking to build and I would appreciate your ideas as well!

A Wordpress plugin for STEEM.

Our first idea was to build a Wordpress plugin that allows anyone writing a wordpress blog to download it and upload whatever they write to the STEEM Blockchain. We believe that STEEM has many benefits for bloggers and people sharing creative content regardless of them being on steemit.com and so we want to build a convenient tool to bring all the benefits of STEEM anywhere on the web. We intend to go beyond Wordpress and also make it easy for anyone writing articles on LinkedIn, Medium, etc, to also post it on the blockchain.

We have our first prototype finished and are now reaching out to communities we know who have said they would be willing to try it out and provide their feedback. My thought is that by targeting medium-sized existing communities, we can both get the feedback we seek, but also promote STEEM to what I view as the most relevant new early adopters. I.E groups that are large enough to provide value, yet small/medium enough that they are just below the threshold of obtaining a decent income on the platforms that they use.

I'm looking forward to getting their feedback over the course of the week and also see their impressions of STEEM and steemit.

STEEM Tutorial

Another idea we have been talking about for a while was to build a gamified STEEM tutorial for new users. We both think that 2018 will bring a lot of new users to STEEM and steemit and thus it would be nice to have a more fun and elegant way to teach new users the essentials of the Blockchain and also how to get started.

In short, we want a website where people can learn by doing and then provide their feedback in comments on what they find difficult or confusing when getting started on STEEM. My hope is that we can help lower the barrier to entry that people experience when getting started as there just seems to be an endless amount of things to learn in order to be a pro user.

We hit a few obstacles in terms of how we want to implement the tutorial on the blockchain, but at least we have a working website with the fundamentals in place to be built on. I hope we can share some cool updates in not too long.

Passing "the Ballmer peak"

Being a Saturday we couldn't help but treat ourselves! @Howo insisted that there is this thing in programming called "the Ballmer peak", whereby reaching a certain alcohol level our productivity and creativity would both be amazing.

Illustration of the Ballmer peak, a joke claiming that coding skills are at their best at a certain alcohol level

If it is true that this peak actually exists, I think it is safe to say that we must have passed over it at some point as our productivity went down quite significantly. At the end of the day, it was mostly just a very fun thing to do. Our WordPress plugin is now being tested and I am very optimistic about what we can do with it. I hope we can have a professional looking app for it ready either later this month or in February that we can start to market towards more bloggers. Thus also marketing STEEM at the same time.

The best thing for me to see though was how two steemians waning to build something to benefit the blockchain we're both now quite invested in can come together and get something done in a weekend. It looks very promising for the blockchain when people with ideas can discuss their ideas and then come up with something to present the overall community.

Looking forward to some exciting times ahead!

Fredrik / @fredrikaa