Meet “Buddy”: facilitating the development of blockchain applications

The world runs on code

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Since its very beginning, the importance of coding hasn’t stopped growing all over the planet. With virtually every industry being involved in the digital world, coding is something that is all around us 24/7 even if we don’t realize it.

As time pass, the sophistication behind every developed software becomes greater, and the same can be said about the capabilities and features offered by these tools. All of the comforts that we enjoy in our modern societies wouldn’t be possible without advanced software leveraging the productivity of each individual.

However, as everything becomes more complex, continually improving the software that we use can get quite challenging once we reach a certain point. Innovating in such a competitive industry requires a lot of talent and effort, and this can be time and energy consuming for the people behind these developments.

Current challenges when developing state of the art software

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Once a particular development is ready to be used by the masses, it needs to work perfectly, otherwise the amount of complaints can cause irreparable damage to the reputation of that software, negatively affecting future sales and market adoption.

This is particularly true for blockchain developments, because any potential bug that remains unresolved becomes a ticking bomb that can explode at any moment once a hacker manages to discover said bug and take advantage of it, causing havoc to the project and its users.

In order to avoid something like this happening, there are several procedures that must be done by the developing team to ensure everything is working properly. They need to run multiple resource intensive tests that can be not only very expensive because of the hardware they require and the respective maintenance, but can also be considerably time consuming, which makes the developing team spend hours and part of their funds just into making sure everything is working as it should be, instead of investing that time into improving the features offered by the tool they are developing as well as adding new ones.

Another issue that can present itself is when the project is large enough that several people are working on it simultaneously, managing and integrating the different parts that each person is working on can get complicated, scaling up their operations can sometimes be an obstacle many teams cannot overcome, and the lack of solutions to automate part of the work can end up halting the potential innovation they could have brought to the market, making their ideas and the entire industry evolve slower as a result.

The fact that blockchain technology is relativity new can be one of the reasons why there is a current lack of tools and platforms that can facilitate the development process of new applications, therefore, there is clearly a demand for something like this and Buddy is planning on becoming the best solution to make everything easier for developers in the creation of decentralized applications.

How will Buddy promote the creation of decentralized applications and provide developers with a well needed help?

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Buddy is a platform that offers any developer who wish to use it, tools that can facilitate the entire process of creating software by allowing automation procedures to take place, which makes the development teams much more efficient with their time, and since it also serves as a deployment platform the potential optimization of the available resources is even better. Additionally, in order to create a healthy community with constant improvements, Buddy also offers different features like a marketplace specifically designed to operate with these tools, as well as a way to remotely rent computer resources to run tests in a cost effective way.

Having said that, some of the most important features will be explained below:

The DevOps Marketplace

Any successful ecosystem has the possibility of providing a way to achieve constant interaction between the creators of tools and their consumers, this is included to facilitate the commercialization of any new development that can be of interest to members of a particular platform. Examples like this can be found all around the web with famous app stores like the one in the Apple ecosystem, or less known ones like the Unity Asset Store where developers can offer assets to be used in video games being created with the Unity engine.

In the case of Buddy’s platform, developers will be able to create their own scripts for sale to improve the automation process of any new development under the Buddy platform, since this is a place where developers can serve each others with their own ideas, there will probably be a lot of sophisticated tools being on sale creating a healthy dynamic with a self serving community capable of improving itself on a constant basis.

The complexity of the tools being available on the marketplace depends on the developer doing the particular work, some examples could be about creating a way to automatically review if the code being written is properly typed, or evaluating the security of a particular code in order to prevent any potential vulnerability.

Since there is always the risk of malware being transmitted through these means, there will be a curation process that will scan everything being on sale in the marketplace and reject any fraudulent developments, this way buyers are protected from malicious software, and sellers are protected from having their creation stolen and being put on sale by another person.

All of these transactions will be done using the BUD token that will be explained a few sections below.

Private Automation GRID

This is where most of Buddy’s automation features take place, helping developers with both the developing and the deployment process. Buddy allows to use several instances of this platform and have full control when it comes to deciding where to run said instances. Developers can use their own computers or remote serves to do this, which allows for them to be in full control over where their code is being run, and leverage the available resources in the most efficient way.

Since this is a resource intensive procedure, it is designed to scale easily, which means new Buddy’s instances can be added with no hassle, and they can automatically integrate with each other flawlessly to allow for several tests to be run without this being a problem for the developer.

Shared Automation GRID

Similar to the previous point, although in this case, what Buddy is offering is the possibility to use computer resources from other users in Buddy’s network, and rent said resources to perform tests on them. This will allow users to monetize any hardware that is temporarily unused, while allowing developers access to an affordable and quick way to test their code.

Thanks to the ease with which scalability can be achieved using these features, having reliable results from the tests will be a process that happens much faster, increasing the efficiency with which new tools can be created.

Just as the case with the DevOps Marketplace, payments for renting computer resources are done using the BUD token, and only tools that are accepted into said marketplace are going to be able to be tested using the shared automation GRID, this is to protect people who provide computer resources to be a victim of malicious code.

BlockchainOps + dAppOS + Distributed Blockchain-as-a-Service

In the coding field a pipeline consists in “chain of processing elements (processes, threads, coroutines, functions, etc.), arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next” | Source. What Buddy allows is to add certain automatic actions in the form of scripts to aid the developing process of any decentralized application, they even offer a ready to use environment which they call dAppOS that can provide further optimization when it comes to tasks such as reviewing any change that is being done to the code, and similar to the DevOps Marketplace, there will be a Template Universe that is nothing more than a place where developers can sell and buy their own tools that can increase even more the capabilities offered by this feature.

Distributed Blockchain as a service simply means developers can test the application they are creating in several different blockchains with little to none complications, and by leveraging the “Shared Automation GRID” feature, testing the application in different blockchains in order to figure out how to improve the code will be possible, which obviously is of great help and can certainly become a basic feature in the blockchain developing industry.

Benefits that Buddy can bring to the blockchain industry

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Every single one of the features previously mentioned are designed with the goal of making it easier for developers to keep creating innovative tools and figuring out how to code them in order to achieve better performance for the potential future users.

By taking advantage of what Buddy is offering, any developer will be able to reduce and even completely eliminate the time they spent doing repetitive and tedious tasks, and will be able to use that time on more productive activities that require creativity and brainstorming, this will result in a higher innovation rate for the blockchain industry in general, because now ideas would be able to be developed much faster than before, and it will be possible to test their ideas easily without bothering with making too many configurations. Besides, if there is a need for extra processing power, they can acquire it thanks to the Shared Automation GRID.

The number of developers that decide to get involved in this industry could also increase, now that they have a dedicated platform that makes their work much easier, and a growing and thriving community thanks to the possibility of buying and selling tools in the marketplace from other developers doing projects under the same platform.

As more developers get involved, the better the applications will be, and the higher the satisfaction from the users that are trying them out, and this obviously could help the blockchain industry in getting even more mainstream that what already is.

Use case

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There is a young team of coders that are still in college, they have quite an advanced knowledge about how to develop all sort of applications because they mostly learn on their own, but unfortunately they don’t have the necessary resources to carry out something of such magnitude given the fact their ideas are very ambitious and money is something they lack.

However, one day they found out about Buddy and how it offers a lot of features that can help them develop their application, especially when it comes to automating certain tasks that are very time consuming and then running the tests with affordable but efficient processing resources to see if everything is working as it should be.

These guys are so smart that once they managed to grasp a proper knowledge about how Buddy’s work, they created their own automation script and put in on sale in the marketplace, and use those funds to continue with the developing of their application.

Once it was finished, users love it and thanks to word of mouth, it became one of the most popular applications in the blockchain industry, indirectly helping the whole decentralized ecosystem to thrive as well.

BUD Token

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As was previously mentioned, the token used in this platform for every single monetary transaction is called BUD. Some examples of these transactions are the followings:

• Buying or selling tools & plugins in the available marketplace and Template Universe
• Renting remote processing resources in the Shared Automation GRID

The token also draws value thanks to these features:

^Source

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Summary

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There are currently a lack of tools and platforms that can facilitate the development of decentralized applications using the blockchain technology. This lacks of tools can have a negative impact in the general industry because too many developers can find themselves with excessive obstacles when trying to create their own applications, and with no way of overcoming said obstacles, which might result in less ideas being developed and therefore, less innovation.

Buddy offers a solution to these problems by providing a platform that can help developers in automating a lot of tasks, as well as making it much easier to deploy their application and test it using remote computer resources available from other Buddy users.

There is also the potential for this project to become one thriving community thanks to the marketplaces that allows developers to directly interact with each other by selling and buying any tool they might have created to further enhance Buddy’s capabilities.

Besides, Buddy is capable of working with several different blockchains, and it also has strong partners such as:

^Source

When taking into account all of this, as well as the fact that Buddy is already a working product compatible with other platforms such as GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab, it is very clear that Buddy is one of the platforms with the potential to become the best option any blockchain developer would want to use.

Team

^Source

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• If you want to know more about this project, I invite you to visit their website.
• If you want to know more about how this platform works, please feel free to check their whitepaper.
• If you want to see informative videos about this project, you can find those here in their youtube page. For articles, you can find those in Medium.
• They are also present in several social medias, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Telegram

Here is a video I made sharing my thoughts about this platform.