This interview is part of a series conducted during RCon3. Each talk features individuals in the RChain ecosystem that provide knowledge and resources to help us create tools that allow everyone to coordinate and communicate better.
Jeremy Beal sits down with Kayvan Kazeminejad, core dev of RSong and RChain community member, to discuss the Plantoid project (which debuted at Burning Man this year), the development of RSong, and his experiences being a community member. Keep scrolling to the bottom to learn more about Kayvan’s upcoming presentation with MIT’s Media Lab.
Kayvan’s Background
Kayvan has worked in a number industries and for a variety of startups in the San Francisco area as a software engineer and architect. Over the last decade, he’s been focused on music and video streaming platforms such as Vevo, Verizon, Intel, and IntelMedia. He also worked on IoT devices for Intel and Northrop Grumman SIGINT products. Kayvan is a member of the RChain Co-op development team, currently developing RSong and integrating the Plantoid project with RNode.
RChain Community Experience:
A cooperative is a group of people working together to fulfill a common goal. In RChain, members from all walks of life engage with one another, collaborating on different ideas and in solving problems. Everyone contributes their skill sets, whether it’s in programming, marketing, project managing, communications, and beyond.
There is power in doing things the way we do. I have been doing this for a long time and I can tell you this is the happiest I have been in a very long time in my career. We all work together, and if I have a problem then I can just ask.
Plantoid
The Plantoid project is a blockchain-based life form—a sculpture of sorts connected to an array of sensors that communicate on the blockchain. Kayvan created the means for deploying RNode on a Raspberry Pi and a series of algorithms that take the data from the sensors to create music.
We wanted to be able to generate music based on sensor data, which pretty much boils down into collecting that sensor data from a variety of sensors that we have attached to the raspberry pi… Turn around and get that data and fit it into a number of algorithms which basically generate digits of PI and natural law, and turn that into music.
Though Kayvan could have used Java, Python, Node JS, or C+ to tackle this project, he chose Scala. If he encountered any issues an RNode dev would help him solve it; it didn’t hurt that he’s a native Scala developer.
In order to interact with RNode, you need to write contracts. Those contracts are written in Rholang. However, in order to interact with the outside world you need to use a different language. Our code base for Rnode is Scala; have been doing Scala for a long time, and it seems like a natural fit.
MIT HACKATHON
RChain will partake in an official showcase and exploration of RSong’s architecture in an Open Media Legal hackathon being hosted in MIT’s Media Lab. The event includes three tracks: learning, discussing, and hacking. The purpose is to demonstrate how adaptable the RSong framework is when you employ it as a backend to any supply management project.
In the above learning session with Dazza Greenwood. Kayvan walks everyone through installing the infrastructure and its dependencies in order to begin building RSong (or any other application that will need to connect to the RNode environment).
To learn more about the upcoming hackathon visit their site. To experiment with the RSong Proxy and develop your own application, learn more on Github. You can download RSong on our site or read the RSong White Paper.