Breaking the Threshold with Kotlinx-cli

After the onboarding process, my initial two weeks at the Summer of Bitcoin internship were not very productive due to my end-semester exams and participation in a hackathon.

However, I started by making a basic implementation of Kotlinx-cli, which was a threshold breaker for me to enter the world of Kotlin. The main purpose of the task was to help me get familiar with the basics of Kotlin and most importantly understand how the Kotlinx-cli works. I also needed to write a few unit tests for the same.

The Work

There's a great website mempool - Bitcoin Explorer which lets us explore the Bitcoin blockchain(recent blocks and transactions). I had the task to create a CLI that takes startHeight as an input and then calls an API endpoint and returns to the user the id of the first element of the array(endpoint of the API) and then calls the API endpoint https://mempool.space/api/block/$id/txids which is a list of all txId in that block.

I made many mistakes initially but eventually learned about Ktor and serialization properly. My mentor T-bast's regular code review helped me the most.

This video made my concepts of ktor better. With each issue I faced, my understanding of things and code got better.

Finally, I was able to complete the stuff. In case you want to check it out, here's the GitHub link.

Weekly Seminars

We also had a seminar, which is very innovative(by structure). I'd been paired up with Raihan and given a particular question. Our task was to explore it. We had small breakout groups where a few people(around 6-8) from different pairs which were formed earlier, had discussions regarding the topic they were given. In the end, we all met in a common room where we were hosted by Adi, the SoB lead. Folks shared interesting points they'd learned, which were again followed by some great discussions.

Excited and Scared for Upcoming Challenges

The catch is, this is not even the tip of the iceberg.

Thinking about the upcoming challenges (the actual iceberg) makes me feel excited and scared at the same time.

The summer of Bitcoin has allowed me to meet some of the most passionate folks I've seen so far and work with them to make Bitcoin better.

Adios!, till the next blog.