At Hedera we want to encourage developer contributions and community engagement. In our new world of incentivized design, one tool we have is to create a program to reward those that do so with a small amount of hbar.

Hedera Heroes is one result of this effort – your chance to earn hbars for sharing how-to articles, lessons learned, and anything else you think can help other developers get the job done.

To get started we created a few example topics in the Hedera Heroes GitHub repo's issue section that you’re welcome to sign up for or get inspiration from. As our first example of Hedera Heroes in action, here’s a video on getting started with smart contracts and the Java SDK by wonderful community member, Ben Chevallereau (@bchevallereau).

MEMO: to whom it may concern, a cheerful challenge

What better way to test this then a cheerful challenge. Of the applications currently available on the Hedera mainnet, projects like Armada Chain, AdsDax, and others are taking advantage of an under the radar option for writing data to Hedera, the memo field.

If you aren't familiar, each cryptocurrency transfer call has the option to add an arbitrary string to the memo field. One of the common use cases, which AdsDax shared their architecture for in this blog post, is using the memo field, with zero value hbar transfers, to form a trusted audit log with consensus timestamps.

You can use the Hedera Java SDK `setMemo()` like so, or try out the nearly version 1.0, but less mature Hedera JS SDK:

TransactionId transactionId = new CryptoTransferTransaction()
.addSender(OPERATOR_ID, amount)
.addRecipient(recipientId, amount)
.setMemo("happy holidays")
 .execute(client);

While we're excited for the Consensus Service to soon make this more accessible and unlock more opportunities, the memo field is a good option for those exploring use cases that require the transparency of a public ledger with a high write workload.

Over your holiday break, if you're so inclined to grab your cup of hot chocolate and code, we’re looking for simple, open source demo applications that take advantage of this. In turn we’re rewarding up to 5 projects with 10,000 hbars for those that successfully:

• Open source a working application that uses the memo field
• Create a blog post that steps through how it works

Sound easy enough? We’ll give you a month from now until January 21st to submit your application, if you need any help don’t hesitate to reach out in Discord or through the Hedera Heroes form. Happy ℏolidays.