gWebinars: Golem Test Harness (Goth), Hackathon 101 and Q&A session

We’re excited to share the Golem Test Harness (Goth), a tool which the yagna integrations team from Golem have been working on for the last couple months. Goth has the purpose of speeding up your development process and making it more enjoyable, as a Golem app creator.

There are three main categories of problems being solved with the Golem Test Harness:

1. Limited debugging information. This is a challenge related to the network being decentralized and P2P. Since providers make their own decisions on whether or not to store logs locally it becomes difficult to have them to provide more than the minimum logs (e.g. `stdout` and `stderr`) showing specifics on why they might be having an issue with a particular requestors task. This in turn makes it a challenge for the requestor to get information on why their task failed to compute. The Goth solves this problem.
2. Unavailability in the Golem Network. Sometimes the network may not have enough providers to keep up with task/requestor demand, this can be particularly true on a testing network where requestors have 0-cost for testing their applications. If there are multiple requestors testing at the same time it can naturally cause congestion. The Goth solves this problem.
3. Unreliable provider connection and task computation speed. It can happen that a requestor sends out a task to a provider that has unusually slow network connection or is providing very little resources which will cause the requestors task to take a long time. The testing network has a timeout period of 30 minutes for a task to mitigate a singular requestor—most likely unintentionally—locking up the test network. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem the same way in a mainnet setting since if the network is being utilized to capacity then there is incentive for other providers to join the network and get compensated in the form of GLM. Since we’re still in a testnet-only setting and applications will always need to be tested before going into the wild then a solution is required. The Goth solves this problem.

Kuba tells you more about Goth, what it is, it’s features, how you can use it along with it’s interactive mode and how we run it (along with a demo).

We’ve had a lot of interesting questions and discussions in our Discord related to the hackathon, particularly on topics such as what we expect and what developers can build on top of Golem.

Kuba Kucharski, the CPO at Golem, created a Golem x Gitcoin Hackathon 101. The purpose of this is to explain what we’re doing, our approach, addressing some common questions developers have had and what New Golem’s current limitations are.

We then have María Paula Fernández - advisory to the Golem board of directors, Phillip Jensen - leading technical support and Mattias Nystrom - Community Manager, joining Connor O'Day - Business Development at Gitcoin for a Q&A session. We were very excited for everyone who participated and the community members joining to watch and give questions, a quick shoutout to Alessandro Voto for hopping onto the video and giving feedback.

If you’re curious to find out more then please see the Gitcoin Golem Hackathon Online page, Hackathons and Awesome Golem repos. We’re excited for anyone to ask and the helpful Golem community questions so don’t hesitate to come in the Golem Discord. For more updates on Golem, follow the official Twitter!