For quite some time i have thought about building an application on some kind of blockchain, and for a long time i thought it would be an Ethereum smart contract application i would build. But after getting to know Steem it seems like it would be much easier to develop on, as long as application that fits the capabilities of the Steem. I thought if i am going to build an application, why not share with the community what i did and what i learned on my way there, to get even more applications working on the blockchain, so hopefully you are interested in following along on my journey.

Steem blockchain capabilities?

To figure out what i should build i tried looking at what capabilities the Steem blockchain has and how i could turn that into an application that people might be interested in using. As i see it the Steem blockchain has 3 main capabilities which is posts, comments and votes. When looking at these 3 main capabilities you are able to combine it in unique ways.
Steemit has combined these in to a blogging platform where people can posts their blogposts, people can comment to encourage discussion and reward the contributes by voting on people's posts and comments.
chainbb.com has combined it into a platform which resembles more a discussion forum, where the post will be the first entry of a discussion thread instead of a blogpost, and comments are seen as a reply to other entries. And again people can reward others by voting on valuable content.

What will i build?

The application i am planning to build is basically a clone of Stackoverflow but built on top of the blockchain. For people not familiar with Stackoverflow it a platform where you can ask questions related to programming, and people who have earlier found a solution to the problem or experts have the possibility to respond to the initial question. I thought it could be a nice fit for the Steem blockchain as the posts, comments and votes paradigm fits neatly. With the Steem it is also easier to incentivize people to give good and correct answers as people will be able to vote on the best answers and the author of these answers will be rewarded that way.

How will i do it?

I will try to keep the development as open as possible, and document as much as possible for the community to learn with me and give feedback. I have some experience with React but i am totally new to the Steem part of the application, so hopefully some more experienced Steem developer will join in and help me with feedback. All the code will always be available on the github repo i make for the project and a demo page will be running as soon as there will be something to show. As of right now i have no idea how the end product will turn out, but i am going into this with a "Learning by doing"-attitude and hopefully it all works opt.

What can you get out of it?

If you are interested in exploring the Steem blockchain i will try to get into depth of how to make it work with React/Javascript. You will also be able to follow development of a project from scratch, where i will try to give my reasoning for doing things the way i do. I will try to make my steps as easy as possible to reproduce for you so you get the deepest understanding of how it was done. And of course in the end the Steem community will get hopefully an amazing application which will help the whole community to grow even bigger and stronger!

So remember to follow to join along on my journey into SteemLand! :)