The Agency Workshop
During the Findy Agency project, our development team initially placed greater emphasis on running and deploying the agency in terms of documentation. Due to this prioritization, instructions on building agency clients have gotten less attention. We have now fixed this shortcoming by publishing the agency workshop to educate developers on using, building, and testing agency clients.
Agency Clients
What exactly is an agency client? A client is a piece of software operated by an entity with an identity (individual, organization, or thing). In the agency context, we have three types of clients:
- CLI: a tool for managing the identity agent in the cloud using the command line interface.
- Web Wallet: a web-based user interface for holding and proving credentials through a web browser.
- API client: any application that manages the identity agent with Findy Agency API.
The workshop shows how to use the ready-built clients (CLI tool and web wallet) and start the development using the API. The workshop participant can choose from two tracks, the CLI track, which demonstrates the agent operations with the CLI tool, and the code track, which concentrates on the API calls and testing them with the web wallet. Both workshop branches teach hands-on how SSI’s basic building blocks work. Consequently, the participant learns how to issue, receive and verify credentials utilizing the Findy Agency platform.
The code track instructs on building a simple web application that issues and verifies credentials.
The workshop material is suitable for self-studying. In this case, if the developer does not have an instance of the agency running in the cloud, using a localhost deployment with Docker containers is straightforward. The material is available in a public GitHub repository, containing step-by-step instructions that are easy to follow. Developers can choose the development environment according to their preferences, from native localhost setting to VS Code dev container or GitHub Codespaces.
Live Workshops
The Findy Agency team has organized the workshop also in a live setting. We invited developers from our company interested in future technologies to technical sessions for learning together. These sessions took place in both Helsinki and Oulu during Spring 2023.
The events started with Harri explaining the basic SSI principles and then Laura presenting demos of agency client applications that the team has built in the past. The introductory presentations generated many exciting questions and discussions that helped the participants better understand the concept.
Harri introducing SSI principles.
After the introduction part, the participants could pick the track they were going to work on, and they had a chance to advance with the tasks at their own pace. The developers could use a shared agency installation in the cloud, so, in principle, setting up the development environment was relatively effortless.
Unfortunately, during the first session, we encountered challenges with the shared cloud agency and observed a few inconsistencies in the instructions for configuring the development environment. We addressed these findings before the second session was held, which proved highly successful. In fact, the second workshop was so seamless that the instructors found it almost uneventful, as nearly no participants needed assistance.
The happy bunch at Helsinki event.
Both events received good feedback, as working hands-on helped the participants understand more deeply the idea behind the technology and how one can integrate the tooling into any application. The participants also thought these workshops were an inspiring way to learn new things. Future ideas were to organize a hackathon-style event where the teams could concentrate more on the actual use cases now that they understand the basic tooling.
Are You Ready to Take the Challenge?
We recommend the workshop for all developers who are interested in decentralized identity. The tasks require no special skills and have detailed instructions on how to proceed to the next step. Even non-technical people have been able to do the workshop successfully.
We are happy to take any feedback on how to make the material even better! You can reach us via SoMe channels:
