Momentous

Inspiration

We were inspired to create Momentous when it came time to purchase yearbooks from our children's school. While yearbooks themselves have a somewhat nostalgic allure, we decided that we could potentially do something on blockchain that wouldn't get lost or damaged. Additionally, parents get raked over the coals when it comes time to buy one! Time to change things.

What it does

Similar to a yearbook, Momentous is a way to celebrate the major moments in your life. In its current state, it is a sharable repository for photos. Weddings, graduations, and childbirths are all great candidates for minting an NFT to celebrate the big event.

How we built it

Fueled by copious cups of coffee, in the early mornings and late nights, we tirelessly scoured the Dfinity forums to learn how to build on this insanely cool blockchain. Writing Momentous was uniquely challenging for us, however, considering how new the Internet Computer is, we were able to manage quite well. Developing cutting (dare I say bleeding) edge technology is always difficult, but that's what makes it fun!

While Momentous has been fun to create, we have learned valuable lessons in creating distributed computing models. We are working on abstracting the Motoko language and associated frameworks to enable a much quicker generation of back-end code.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult parts of development were creating and managing a custom token canister (with no clear token standard winner) and figuring out how to scale data storage (without BigMap released for Motoko). Unfortunately, we bridged the storage gap relatively late in the game, delaying some fun UI development. Once BigMap is finalized, things will be exponentially better.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating and using a custom token on the live Internet Computer blockchain was immensely difficult for us. Fortunately, the Dfinity developer forum is full of incredible people who were more than willing to lend a hand.

What we learned

Our biggest takeaways: 1) The Internet Computer Blockchain is simply amazing 2) The Web3 possibilities on it are endless 3) How important it is to dive into the developer community early!