First Year at Protocol Labs

I’ve been wanting to write about my journey at Protocol Labs for a while already. Well, for a big while but unfortunately I haven’t had the time nor the disposition to write: the last post I wrote was in June 2017. This is something I want to change.

In November 2017, just one month after I’ve started my first year at university, I learned about the existence of IPFS and what it was. Immediately I saw the potential of this technology and the benefits it an bring to the society in the future and in the present.

Part of the team
Part of the team

All the IPFS related work is open-source and you can find it on GitHub. In the meanwhile, I was offered a position at Protocol Labs (PL), which is the company created to back this project.

We are kind of divided into multiple working groups or teams. I can say I’m part of two different teams right now: IPFS GUI and JavaScript team. We can say they’re tightly related. The latter is mostly related to IPFS implementation in JavaScript and everything around it.

The first one, IPFS GUI, is my main team and we’re developing, well… you guessed it: graphical applications! 😂 In order for IPFS to be widely used, it will need to be really user friendly so we need awesome and easy to use interfaces.

The three main projects of IPFS GUI are:

  • IPFS Companion, which is our web extension for Firefox and Chrome. It enables you to use IPFS in your browser, pin content, add files and much more. It’s a completely rad extension! Check it out!
  • IPFS Web UI, which is, in some way, the web dashboard. On it you can find stats, manage your files, see how many peers your node has and much more.
  • IPFS Desktop, which is our desktop application. We’re now working on revamping this one and making it even better. It should be the entry point for new users in the future. It will just sit on your taskbar and run an IPFS node for you, integrating it with your operating system.

Working at PL has been an amazing experience: being a decentralized company, we have people from everywhere, from every possible timezone and from every possible location. But that’s not the best part: everyone is incredibly smart and amazing and has a lot of value.

I am really grateful for the opportunity of being surround by all of this amazing people. It’s mind blowing 🤯. I really hope the IPFS project succeeds and we will use a distributed and peer-to-peer Internet in the near future.

P.S.: the picture above shows only some of us.