The problem SKIDL solves

The modern day internet is full of learning material and ways to profit from it. However, most of it is passive - static material that the consumer must make do with. The closest thing to personalised instruction is in the form of internet forums - slow, inefficient and unincentivised text based systems that are best for catering to the doubts of a community instead of the needs of an individual. In a world driven by technology where human expertise has no equal, and where the internet is at the forefront of disruption in every walk of life, it is surprising that the average netizen cannot find high quality on-demand expert guidance and mentoring even while willing to pay for it.

In essence, the modern world lacks a system that is accessible, profitable, self regulating, and most importantly, makes available the expertise of people who truly are experts in their domains.

It is easy to see that blockchain tech lends itself favourably as a potential solution to this problem that not only brings expertise on the platform thanks to lucrative incentives made possible by the lack of middlemen and the nature of cryptocurrencies, but also brings with it the promise of a learning experience that boasts excellent quality thanks to a potential departure from traditional static learning that is made possible by technology.

SKIDL is a decentralised application that brings people who need a one-time learning session in any domain and people who, for appropriate incentives, are willing to lend their expertise together in a safe, transparent and profitable way. Our system allows people to post a bounty for a learning session indicating the price per hour that they're willing to pay. People willing to teach can take up prospective bounties, and our system immediately connects them over a real time video call. Once the session concludes, the tutor is rewarded for his efforts with the bounty.

Challenges we ran into

Being neophytes in the world of blockchain, which is a technology so young that finding consistent, applicable resources itself was a challenge, complicated the process of making an end to end Dapp. Integration of blockchain with conventional technologies like ReactJS is not very straightforward, and we ran into a lot of obstacles in this area. Exacerbating our difficulties was the heavily constrained and unnatural nature of the programming languages used for the blockchain, that deign even the most trivial programming tasks as convoluted and requiring a hack around. However, the most difficult thing was perhaps properly architecting the infrastructure that allows a Dapp to use the Agora RTC API in tandem with it's natural decentralised architecture.