#web3

“Test, test, test” is a well known sentence right now due to the current circumstances. However, it does not apply only to Covid-19 or other diseases. Testing is one word that all of us have dreamt - or had nightmares - about in the past. It is also one crucial part and step in the Software Engineering and Development process, as it allows to verify and ensure that a certain system behaves as expected. At least, for known cases!

As such, all kinds of systems should be able to be easily tested, regardless of what they do. Nevertheless, both you and I know that that is not the case. There are certain systems that are much easy to test than others, in many orders of magnitude. For example, a library that converts between different times formats is much easier to test than an app to upload and download files.

Furthermore, any system that involves peer-to-peer communication or any other kind of distribution gets much harder to test! At Protocol Labs, we wanted to know and measure how changes to the IPFS and libp2p codebase would affect the performance of the network, but we couldn’t find any reliable platform to help us with that. And then… Testground was born! 🚀

We are living in an increasingly interconnected world. Today, 4.1 billion people have access to the internet. And with every passing year, millions more are born into the world as “digital natives” with digital technology and the World Wide Web at their fingertips from early childhood.

But as the internet becomes more and more intertwined with our everyday lives, we must remember that it’s up to us to set the right course for the web’s future and to continue improving it. Today, control over the internet is increasingly centralized in the hands of just a few big tech companies.

Over the past months, I have been reading more and more posts where people are saying they miss the vibe of the 90s web. Even though I wasn’t alive to see how that web was, I still remember the website of my high school filled with overly saturated colors, GIFs and iframes. Not only that characterizes some of the pages of the early web, but also the pixelation and the footers saying to use X or Y browser.