Reflecting on the 2018 BOINC Workshop in Oxford

Three weeks ago I posted about intending to attend the 2018 BOINC workshop in oxford.

I traveled solo down to the workshop to unofficially represent Gridcoin, advance the progress of my BOINC pull request #2134 and learn/network with others in the BOINC community.

Day 1 - Presentations

Everyone introduced themselves, there were approximately 30-35 people in attendance, then we went through many 30 min long presentations from BOINC developers, IBM representatives, project administrators, and blockchain related tech companies.

Presentation audio & poster repository!

I'd highly recommend that you listen to some of the above presentations & browse their presentation PDFs alongside the audio - plenty of new and interesting information to spend an afternoon on!

Gridcoin presentation

I gave a Gridcoin presentation in the morning, just a fast update regarding the last year of Gridcoin and what lies in the future for Gridcoin!

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Day 2 - More presentation & Discussions

Further presentations

There were multiple important presentations given, most notable were the BOINC GDPR presentation (GDPR was a major concern for many of the workshop attendees) and the BOINC Docker Server presentation by Marius!

Proof of BOINC UserID Ownership talk

After lunch, I spoke about pull request #2134 which proposes to introduce a public key cryptographic proof of userId ownership within the BOINC web server for any external system to verify BOINC account ownership with.

I did not prepare slides for this talk, so it's audio only currently.

The reception to PR#2134 was largely positive, with several requests for change being implemented in the day 3 hackathon. The PR still requires some last minute testing using the latest boinc_docker, boinc codebase and recaptcha enabled, then it should be good for being merged into the BOINC master codebase!

Once this is implemented in the BOINC master codebase, we'll have to wait for projects to upgrade to include the new functionality, then we can begin the migration from CPID based account ownership proof to UserId ownership proof within the Gridcoin client.

Plenty more discussion was held on the topic off microphone, especially over a glass of beer throughout the week!

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Day 3 - Hackathon!

As a group, we identified the areas we all wanted to work on, then further summarized them before splitting into two groups to work on what we believed

We split into two groups (one air-conditioned room, one roasting) and worked separately on what we believed were the highest priorities for BOINC. After an hour or so of brainstorming within our groups, we merged back into the one group and provided summaries of what we had talked about - funnily enough both teams focused on two entirely different areas of discussion (one towards getting more volunteers, the other towards more technical BOINC development changes).

After lunch we split into multiple groups to work on our own areas of interest which had been proposed in the earlier group sessions.

Whilst making requested changes to PR#2134, I participated in discussions regarding the improvement of the BOINC development process on GitHub. In the afternoon I completed my PR changes, worked a bit on data serialization scripts then helped out with formulating some documentation for onboarding new users.

After the second hackathon session in the afternoon we got back together as the one group and provided an update on what we had all achieved - much progress was announced, excellent stuff!

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Day 4 - Walking!

Approximately the 16 of us walked approx 5 miles along the river Themes, ending at The Talbot Inn. The river was deep green, the sun was blasting and much banter was had along the way!

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Summary!

The 2018 BOINC workshop was a massive success! It was highly productive, an entirely positive experience (no negativity) and had a blast every night meeting up with the workshop attendees for beer and burgers throughout Oxford - they're all great people & I can't wait to attend future BOINC workshops wherever they're held!

Shout out to the Blocklink devs who I didn't get so say goodbye to on the last day!

Best regards,
CM