Atlas

Home page: User's essays and essays shared by friends
Essay page with comments
Essay page exmple

Inspiration

I wanted to start with a simple app to learn to build a decentralized application and understand how it works. Expand and build it into a complete writing app with all the features of traditional apps.

What it does

Atlas is a simple collaborative writing app. Users can write essays, articles, documents, notes, etc, and share drafts with their friends. Collaborators can add comments and suggestions to the shared writings.

How we built it

Atlas is built to be resilient and puts you in control of your data. In Atlas, all of your writings are stored in the decentralized web nodes that you own and hence can control. This means you can decide where to host your data and control who can access it. Atlas is built using Web5 SDK from tbd. Web5 provides a new identity layer for the web to enable decentralized apps and protocols. This was my first time working with decentralized applications and tbd's docs and examples were really great to understand and build the project. This allowed me to get familiar with the decentralized identity concepts and implement them in a short time. I used Nuxtjs to build the web application and this was also my first time working with Nuxt. So, I learned a ton. I used TailwindCss for styling and the application is deployed on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first time working with decentralized identity, web5, and Nuxtjs. This turned out to be harder than expected as I was learning multiple things at the same time. Getting familiar with and understanding how the data storage in DWNs works took a bit of time at first. TBD's docs and discord were really helpful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a working application in a short period of time even though I did not know much about decentralized identity beforehand. Understood a lot about why decentralization is important and how it brings control back to the user and empowers them.

What we learned

Learned a ton about why decentralization is important and how we can build applications such that user can own their data and how this can massively benefit them and put them in control of their data. I also learned Nuxtjs and how decentralized data storage works.