Boto

An actually usable photo storage

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Inspiration

We looked, and looked, and found the current state of photo storage still lacking. And where there's a lack, we gravitate. So with Boto, we are very focused on improving the user experience by delivering both speed and user feel. Getting the look and feel is never easy and is always a continual, long-fought journey.

What it does

Boto stores all the photos you'll ever need or want to store. Storage is unlimited and free! And if we ever go down or get hacked, being powered by Blockstack, your data is always safe and retrievable.

How we built it

We envision both a progressive web app (PWA) and native app for Boto. But to begin the journey, we built the app on top of Gatsby for maximum development velocity, paired with Ant Design for our UI component library. Gatsby, with its tons of plugins and bootstrapping work, has been a huge boon for us. It gets the boring configuration stuff out of the way so we can focus intensely on feature development. With a few plugins here and there, and powered by Heroku and Netlify for CI/CD, we got ourselves a deployed application in minutes.

Ant Design has also done a tremendous amount of UI heavy lifting. It has just let us blown past the need to build generic UI components, and focus more on polishing the user experience, those being snappy user feedback, error handling, performance.

Challenges we ran into

Still, despite the leg-up that our stack has given us, getting to where we are now still took quite some tries. Because Boto is purely a client-side driven application, much of our problems revolve around finding ways to optimize a lot of the computation that a server would be able to do. However, we're looking into ways to give users the option of choosing to do some of their work on the server side for performance gains, or being fully client-side knowing all their work is on their computer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've started this project a little while back, and we're just happy to be able to deliver Boto as an MVP. We're extremely humbled knowing that by promoting decentralization, we're ultimately fighting for the needs of the people. That feels a bit haughty to claim. Laughs

What we learned

Building a decentralized application isn't easy. Fortunately, Blockstack has libraries that have met us far more than half-way and we're thankful. When you're building apps entirely client-side, you're always a bit wary of performance!

What's next for Boto

After reaching v0, we plan to introduce albums and sharing to Boto in v1. V2 will then our native application.

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