February 2017 Summaries

PubNub was a gold-level sponsor of SM Hacks, San Mateo High School's inaugural hackathon, which took place on January 14-15 at Informatica in Redwood City, attracting approximately 130 high school hackers from across the Bay Area. The event featured a diverse group of participants, with around 50% being first-time hackers and 40% female, and included various workshops, one of which was hosted by PubNub. The hackathon's first-place winner was the "Donation and Motivation Service" (DMS), a web app encouraging users to achieve their goals by committing to charitable donations if tasks are unfinished, utilizing PubNub for chat and the Stripe API for secure transactions. The second-place project, "Open Source Keyboard," was a 36-key keypad that simplifies command inputs, while the third-place project, "Gift of Food," was a web and iOS app facilitating food donations and deliveries. PubNub expressed admiration for the innovative projects and is eager to participate in future high school hackathons, inviting interaction via their Twitter handle.

The Inspire Chat app, a web and mobile group chat application designed to motivate and inspire users through shared messages, quotes, and media, has transitioned to using PubNub's serverless infrastructure for enhanced real-time chat capabilities. Initially, the development team at Interestix Corp managed their own chat server using ejabberd, which required significant effort due to its use of the Erlang programming language and the need to create custom libraries for various platforms. The switch to PubNub allowed them to leverage its reliable infrastructure and easy-to-integrate SDKs across multiple platforms, reducing development time and enabling them to focus on improving user-facing features. PubNub's consistent API calls across platforms and features such as Online Presence Detection and Storage and Playback further streamlined the development process by eliminating the need for custom backend solutions, ultimately enhancing the user experience. With future plans to utilize additional PubNub features like mobile push notifications and security encryption, the team aims to continue improving the app's functionality and user engagement.

Esteban Herrera, a seasoned software developer with over twelve years of experience, shares a detailed tutorial on creating a web application that verifies file existence using time-stamped transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain. The application utilizes Node.js, Tierion, RethinkDB, PubNub, and jsreport-core to store file hashes in Bitcoin's Blockchain, enabling users to certify a file's existence at a specific time without revealing its contents. The decentralized nature of blockchain ensures data integrity and anonymity, eliminating the need for central authority verification. The tutorial explains the setup process, from creating the project directories and dependencies to configuring the server-side code. It highlights using Tierion's Hash API for blockchain transactions and RethinkDB's changefeed for real-time updates, while PubNub's Storage and Playback feature ensures data synchronization. Through this application, users can upload files, generate SHA256 digests, and receive blockchain receipts, which can be checked on platforms like Block Explorer or Blockchain.info. The tutorial also covers the verification process using Merkle Trees and Tierion's validation tools, demonstrating how blockchain technology can be leveraged for secure and efficient data certification.