No Code, No Problem – Karen Scarbrough & Austin Griffith

I'm Karen Scarborough I work with VP out of Houston and this y'all know likely Austin Griffith and so ironically three years ago Austin okay good ironically anyways three years ago Austin and I actually hacked together Denver so anyways back at it in a different context here so what I'm going to go through today is how no code platforms have helped VP accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology within our company I work for a digital innovation organization essentially within the broader context of this huge company so to start with I wanted to explain a little bit about what my group does and how it's different so within VP we have the digital and vation organization which is a group of about 30 of us were split between the UK and the US and we have a small team in China and it's a collective group we've got musicians we've got mathematicians we've got engineers across the gamut and our major differentiator is we are in charge of looking out on the order of ten to fifteen years at different technologies that we see impacting the company so for example a good thing to start off with to talk about it's like quantum computing right so that is something we look at in a different context than just something to improve existing business processes because we know it's something that's developing but the immediate ROI or return on that is not something that you can look at in a traditional modernization or like transformative IT project kind of process so we get to look at things a little bit further out strategy wise which is different and on that we also all in that organization look at blockchain technology as well I mean you guys know in this room that as a technology you can spin up black chains on Asher and AWS and there's nothing to stop an enterprise from building out something now but the the research and the change that is happening and the technology especially in the public space is just enormous so we continue to look at that because it's important to not just think of where we are now with aetherium and blockchain but also consider where it's ultimately going and where it's going to be as well so that's what we do so one of the things that we found a challenge within our company is that and we've really seen it across the board within enterprise is that looking at how we move from a proof of value or Minimum Viable Product to actual production was really getting installed in a lot of blockchain projects so we knew we could come in and map out some kind of supply chain process and then spin it up and then at the end of it the business owners would say oK we've seen it this is nice but I'm not sure if it's saving us time saving us money all those kind of questions so what we've come to realize that it's not only just about building with more participants involved because of course you've seen the the consortiums and different environments coming up out of enterprise to allow more participants to be in the network but more than that you actually have to build out more the entirety of the process so like at BP we've got 73,000 employees and that's across the globe with tens of thousands of different processes so although we make it a project that comes in and takes a purchase order from order state to creation to receipt that's just a tiny fraction of what we do it doesn't include tax or finance or audit or compliance so what we wanted to do is look at how we can do that faster so effectively when it's not showing my whole gamut here but I can say it so when we look at implementing blockchain there's a stream line of processes that need to happen we explore the technology we look for a use case within the company we talk to different vendors we come together plot that use case out then they develop it with code and that gets taken back to our digital security teams and then finally it's put in front of the stakeholders of the project and they determine if it's acceptable or not and then we go from there so there's actually several steps that we identified along that process to speed up and so effectively what we said is that in the beginning stages of looking at where to implement blockchain within an enterprise you've got your own expertise of knowing business processes so the question that we had was can we build up some super users within the company some people who know our procurement well know our finance well and basically allow them to put together what they'd want to see and enable actual end-users to put together a blockchain product so from the experience at eath Denver to be honest and in other places in the space one of the things that came to mind was hosting an internal hackathon on how to do that and allow the actual business users to come up with those applications so of course with that targeting those individuals what we were looking for was no code platforms so we wanted to get this in front of the the people that handle our taxes the people that handle our procurement and contracts and allow them to actually build what they want so we collaborated with a company called trium out of consensus who's built a no code platform that allows business users to plot their business processes and then assign different assets and end-user roles to work within that so like I said we brought together the business process SMEs that came together over two days and we gave them an introduction to blockchain as a technology we talked about public versus private networks what should go on a blockchain and what should not all those sorts of things to allow people to develop real systems that could work at the end of the day for the build-out that we were looking to achieve so we hosted this in Houston and in Sunbury over in London and like in the picture you can even see one of the things that happened is we got long streams of process flows built out because the people in those pictures they're not all from the same function so like even that particular picture you've got one from procurement one from tax one from auditing all those different things that they could all talk together in an environment and say well we're all part of the same process flow how should this look in a system so the results of that is we got over a dozen no new use cases we had this incredible cross-functional collaboration that we hadn't had before in these kind of projects and users could present a sort of MVP to their leadership that used a user interface and that's transformative when you're trying to explain to somebody whose world isn't in developing these kind of tools what it can do that provided just such a change ability to what we were able to put together so we had about 50 participants go away with a better understanding of blockchain and as well as a better understanding of private versus public and what can be built and what what should and things so in the context of aetherium because we are at eath denver so there's a statistic out there from Gartner that says by 2024 65% of applications will be built using low code or no code applications so the availability of these kind of platforms with an aetherium is pivotal to the proliferation of it as a network and as a platform in general so and then the other thing that it means is you get actual what we call within the company citizen developers of the owners of the process actually putting together what they would like to see and would be most effective for them to change and improve their business so with that I know Austin has another Lowe code solution that he's going to demo here for us and unless there's any burning questions we can go from there okay okay it's kind of a strange transition here but kind of thinking in terms of prototyping and the power of being able to prototype I'm building this new product called Itza build and it is an O code it there's code we'll get to some code in here anyways but it's very prototype II so you kind of just start with an empty screen and like Karen said if you had a group of people that wanted to kind of hack on something to play around something just get into their hands and see what it feels like this is a really good way to do that so if you guys want to play around with me too we can all do this kind of on the same network but if you want to pull up eath build you can but what I'm gonna do is just kind of like play around with like it's just web 3 prototyping right so it's just like you know get a key pair in here and let's generate a private key right and we can have an address that's derived from that private key okay cool so now we are creating an address right so kind of historically if you wanted to get in and play around with aetherium there's a lot of onboarding required to just screw around right there's a lot that you have to do well you know we can just kind of create accounts right here I can create a key pair from 1986 or win that where that came out so then we can drop in some more interesting things so let's let's get a blockchain going and what I have or eath bill does I have a local test environment running on my server that's shared with everyone so if you guys go to eat build you can kind of play around at the same stuff I'm playing around with but what I'm gonna do is just bring in a faucet right and will drag my address up to the faucet and we'll request some funds and it'll tell us what the transaction is but oh I forgot to get my balance let's run let's see so let's grab the test chain and plug it into our blockchain isn't this cool we're doing with three calls let's get the block number right oh it's it block 40 but what we want to do is grab the balance of this guy and see that he has earned some test net eath oh man I keep disconnecting it there we go there we go and this is really fun like on a touchscreen like I have these new Amazon like 10 tablets it's so cool to just like crush some cool web 3 prototype on a little tablet ok so let's see what's our balance okay first lesson it passed key pairs is like what the heck is that giant number right we can bring in some let's go let's go from way right bring that guy in here line him up and I think actually in a turn of irony I think Patrick's downstairs on the rainbow stage doing a demo of our die and he's using eath built to do that same demo so it's really cool to just kind of show off how things work and we can dive in a little bit more I'm just going with the basics here so so we have an account we generated on the fly I can even turn it into a burner wallet by taking that PK and dropping it into local storage ever do that and then there we go now I can like reload the page and it's all good I could save it actually let's see what I can do oh it still fits in a QR so now you guys could scan that QR and you'll have my same exact eath build including my private key let's see let's see let's see if I can pull it off here oh man that is a big QR code come on baby oh it didn't work we don't have lots of QR code problems today okay so let's let's get into something more advanced once we had kind of half so in terms of prototyping right like let's say you're thinking about building an app you're thinking about you know putting a TCR out there or trying to look at supply chain stuff you're gonna want to probably screw it on to contract so let's kind of let's let me just fast forward real quick here's the curriculum we talk about hash functions key pairs distributed Ledger's see we get into a distributed ledger and we kind of have a ledger set up and it's going across a network and then we dive into what's episode for blockchain cool oh but before blockchain we get these Byzantine generals this is really cool check it this out look at all these soldiers so we got we have oh gosh what am i doing get out of here wire so we have this general here who's wanting to attack a city and he has all his soldiers and if we get in he or she has all her shoulder soldiers we get in here we can look at a soldier and there's a soldier just jamming away at those hashes trying to figure out so this is a really cool way to like illustrate the byzantines general problem and kind of how it's solved by proof of work and then we get into oh oh gosh there's me on youtube then we get into ball chain right we have a chain of blocks and sort of as they get mind we're kind of copying these blocks and pasting them in it's just a really kind of nice way to illustrate you know what the heck is going on here and we kind of once that block is mind I'm gonna wire it up here and then I'm gonna hook my miner up up there and then in the demo I go back and I change one of the value over here on this and everything turns blue again so then I think the most fun I get to transactions I even do a look ahead at meta transactions this is a fun part so we can bring in a contract so here is just a hello world contract with just right so we said no code but I'm gonna have a little code sorry so I'm gonna just hit a button I'm going to deploy that to that test net if you guys are on eath build right now you could totally just go talk to this contract to watch this I could even do that I could go publish and I could drop my network address in there and I could hit publish man and if someone else was on eath build and they were subscribing to the network they would see my message pop oh no come on networking networking demo gods okay it's not gonna that's not looking good you know you'll have to trust me that that works sometimes but let's go let's go okay so we compiled our contract we deployed it and then we have this kind of box that represents our contract so we had more storage here like another let's make it address right public owner and let's just leave it at zeros for now and if oh gosh get out there if we deployed that guy hopefully the address will change and now we have this new kind of owner thing right and we can check the owner of that contract you can kind of just like pull these boxes off again and it should be zeros right that that is right or if we see if we see a test and we query that that should be HelloWorld okay cool so we're kind of we're kind of iterating on a contract by just pulling it up in a browser and it's kind of like this very visual kind of visceral experience right so I don't know how much time I have maybe two minutes two minutes let's see okay so function is it just constructor and solidity I don't even say consider function do I so we got a constructor it's public and this is when we can kind of learn about what message sender is right we said we were gonna do no code and he's diving into code sorry like you can do so much cool prototyping stuff but it really shines when you can so now if we deploy that and we go ask what our owner is it should hopefully be me yeah cool okay so now we've like learned we've learned about kind of storage and smart contracts we've learned about message sender then we could set up like let's set up a function to set the owner right and make it public and bring in some address somebody and then set the owner to that so this is gonna get a little more shifty because what we're gonna have to do is watch this what do I got one minute left one minute left if I pull off the set owner it's not gonna be a function that I can execute on it's actually gonna be the bike code so then what we would have to do is set ooh I need an address let's grab someone else let's grab another key pair let's generate it let's hook the address up there we go so this gives us the call data but what we have to do is make a transaction and you start learning with this that like oh every every single thing I'm doing here is just a transaction there's there's a transaction to deploy a contract there's a transaction to talk to a contract there's a transaction to send data around and change state so what I do I don't have time and I plug that into data I put some value in there I put some two in there oh yeah that's a module that's pretty cool let's let's double click that just to see it so there's the transaction that would be happening in kind of the inputs that would happen but basically it would make a call to the contract you can iterate lots of fun stuff I think I think I even have meta masks in here I have let's see let's see what the price of aetherium is right now 281 hot tamale wait we're developers we don't talk about price what are we doing here okay I think that's it check out each build give me lots of feedback there's tons of YouTube videos but I think the the takeaway here is that no code lo code helps you iterate quickly on prototypes yes also thank you guys [Applause] [Music] you [Music]