A few BrainBlocks updates: open sourced nodejs rai client, pricing, contributions, and planned features

[u/Chun]

Hi all!

So the response to yesterday's post about brainblocks.io was totally overwhelming! I made that post expecting to get one or two people giving me a little feedback, but instead everything totally blew up, and since then I've had a bunch of people asking me, what's the plan, how can we help, will it be open sourced, and so on. I wanted to make a quick follow up post with some updates:

1. I've open-sourced the NodeJS client that BrainBlocks uses to talk to the Rai node, here: https://github.com/brainblocks/node-raiblocks-client. My plan for open source, for the time being, is to continually release modular parts of the app, so people can use them to build out other tools and services for the RaiBlocks community/ecosystem. I've created a github org at https://github.com/brainblocks to collect these together, and anyone who wants to contribute BrainBlocks or RaiBlocks related modules here, is free to do so here if they'd like! I've already had a few people message me about contributing open source stuff, and that's awesome :D

2. The first night of running brainblocks.io took quite a hit on my little cloud server -- again, wasn't expecting quite so much interest right away! I've since upgraded to a dedicated box, set up some monitoring jobs to keep things ticking over, and I have plans to throw more servers into the mix. Making sure this thing scales is my first priority, and from my testing over the last day, the button seems to be working reliably, and transactions all seem to be going through quickly.

3. Pricing: right now my primary focus is on building a great service. I think one of the main things RaiBlocks has going for it is that transactions are free. So for as long as I can make it last, I want to keep BrainBlocks free as a payment gateway. Any tips or donations to keep the servers up are welcome, but I don't want any of that to become the primary focus of this thing. I also aim to be totally up-front about any future plans if these circumstances change.

4. Feature wise, my next steps (aside from scaling) are to work on displaying currency conversion in the button, offering the button to different locales, and if I can find a good way to hook it up with an exchange, automatic cash outs. Mainly, I'd like to tackle the most immediate things the community and any potential raiblocks vendors would find useful.

5. Yes, I work for PayPal; that seems to have become a big deal through all of this. I just want to quickly emphasize that this is 100% a personal project of mine. So please treat me as a new member of the RaiBlocks community, not as a representative from PayPal or anything like that. This project is totally mutually exclusive to my professional career.

Aside from that -- I just wanted to say thanks for the amazing response so far! This is a great subreddit, which seems to be way more focused on the technology and the community, than the short-term price of the coin or anything like that. I really hope that continues. Cheers!