Limerick, Here I Come

Many a fan of DNN will go,
To Limerick with laptop in tow,
For the Connect conference is coming,
Soon the university will be humming,
I am looking forward to this show

The DNN Connect 2018 conference is being held in Limerick, Ireland from May 31 to June 2. I am excited to be presenting a session on Blockchain Smart Contracts at the event. I am even more excited to re-connect with my European friends from the DNN community. I have wanted to attend a few DNN community events in the past couple of years, but taking care of my mom during her illness took priority. I almost didn’t make it to this event because it conflicts with my daughter’s elementary school graduation ceremony. But she was really, really nice about it and we agreed to have an extra special dinner before my trip, and that I’d participate on FaceTime.

I have never been to Ireland, and it’s one country I have always wanted to visit. Glad to be able to check this one of the list. My preliminary research indicates that while in Limerick, must-see attractions are:

• Adare, a tiny picture-postcard village
• King John’s Castle
• Milk Market shopping spot
• Lough Gur stone circle

The conference is being held at the University of Limerick campus, which should be both interesting and fun. One thing I was dreading is not finding vegetarian food, but a cursory Google search shows lots of great vegetarian dining options. Perfect!

Update: Here’s a link to the code and presentation from my session: https://github.com/techbubble/dnnconnect-2018

Now, about my session. Blockchain and DNN are worlds apart, but I think I can bring them together. My goal is to go over some basic Blockchain concepts, then dive right into all the tools and code necessary to create and deploy a simple Smart Contract on the Ropsten test network (for Ethereum). I had intended to use a server-side library such as Nethereum for the DNN module integration, but the session time is too short for that, so I am going to stick with client-side Web3.js integration.

I’d love to do a more in-depth workshop on Blockchain at the conference. If this is something you’d like to see, please leave a comment and if enough people are interested I’ll approach the organizers and see if it’s possible to organize something. If you are attending the conference, I’d love to see you at my session, although with multiple tracks I know it can sometimes be a difficult choice.

Looking forward to seeing the DNN community. Limerick, here I come.