This is part two of a three-part series focused on the Flow blockchain, NFTs, and IPFS. You can read part one here:

In this tutorial, we’re going to build a simple React application that interfaces with Flow smart contracts to authenticate and to fetch NFTs owned by a user. We will then resolve the NFT’s metadata to get the IPFS location of the NFT’s underlying digital asset (in this case a video). …

As the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) market reaches a fever pitch, it’s interesting to look back on the relatively early days of NFTs and remember the challenges that were exposed by CryptoKitties. The platform, built by the team at Dapper Labs, was the first real example of potential mass adoption and the first real strain on the Ethereum blockchain.

Since then, NFTs have taken off with platforms like Rarible , OpenSea, Foundation, and Sorare springing up. These platforms are seeing millions of dollars flow through monthly. Most of this has happened, despite the early struggles, on the Ethereum blockchain. However, the…

Electron is a great framework that makes developing cross-platform desktop applications easy. If you’re a JavaScript developer, it is probably the first thing you’ll reach for when you decide to build a desktop application. I know I did. In building my first and second desktop applications, I used Electron. In that process, I learned some tricks to help the development process go a little smoother. One such trick is how to better debug issues that may arise in the packaged, production version of your Electron app that you won’t see in development.

If you’re not familiar with Electron, it is…

Or, more accurately, how to build a Blockchain Graphical User Interface (GUI) in Electron. This is the story of how Nelumbo came to life, why I wrote the app in JavaScript, and what I learned along the way.

First, what is Nelumbo? Nelumbo is the first desktop interface for the Filecoin local devnet version of their Lotus blockchain. That was a lot of words to say it makes developing Filecoin applications easier. Nelumbo has a one-click install and start process for the local developer version of the Filecoin blockchain. …

The introduction of Hooks in React was a game-changer. Developers now had options when it came to creating stateful components. It used to be that if you had a stateful component, you’d have to use a class component, and if you had a presentational component, you could choose between a class or a function component. Now, with hooks, state can be managed inside function components. But that’s not all Hooks did for React developers.

Hooks introduced a better way to reuse stateful functions. Today, we’re going to explore how to build a custom React hook that will allow us to…

Serverless development has become the hot thing in tech. Renting time on a virtual machine only when you need it saves money and resources. However, there are many gotchas that can make working with serverless technology difficult if you’re not prepared. One such gotcha is event handling.

Unlike a Web Server applications, events in a serverless function act very similarly to console applications. Take AWS Lambda, for example. A Lambda function is going to spin up, execute, and spin down as quickly as it can. You want this. This is one of the key selling points of serverless, and how…

As part of the Nelumbo project, I set out to hit five specific milestones. You can actually see the original proposal, including milestones here. Today, I’m exciting to announce the completion of Milestone Two.

Before diving into what’s possible with Nelumbo so far, it’s important to understand what Nelumbo is and what problem it sets out to solve. Filecoin, a distributed storage network secured by a blockchain, launched its mainnet back in October of last year. Leading up to its launched, I participated in the Filecoin community and worked towards building Filecoin compatible storage applications. A storage application, simply put…

Substack has become the go-to resource for newsletters and blogging. For people who want to put up a membership wall and a paywall, Substack provides a simple solution. Today, we’re going to build a version of this using IPFS.

To be clear, this will be an implementation that lacks the newsletter functionality of Substack. We will be adding email capabilities to send out authentication emails, so it shouldn’t be too hard to extend that to include newsletter functionality.

What We’ll Need

Since we will need a little bit of a server implementation to go along with our client-side application, let’s use Next.js. It…