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Jumping back into Solidity and Ethereum Development

Join in if you need a refresher.

For reference this is a snapshot of Ethereum/Blockchain/Solidity development (circa early 2022) and it references the recent past (around mid 2017).

A few years ago when we were all young and covid was not a thing, Ethereum and it’s main programing language Solidity were just getting off the ground, back then I wanted to learn how to make Smart Contracts but couldn’t find a decent book so I wrote one “Ethereum, tokens & smart contracts: Notes on getting started.” ( it even was a bestseller for a couple of weeks !), I also did a couple of real life projects ( mainly a real estate ICO that went nowhere ) and became part of other crypto related projects that happily dragged me into Data Science and Quant development so I stopped developing in/for Solidity.

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Jump forward to today and I find myself wanting to get back into blockchain development, in part because it’s even cooler today and there are some projects I thought would be ready by now, so I want to dig further.

To be honest a few years back the Solidity/Ethereum Developer experience was not great, missing libraries, breaking change, lack of documentation and tooling etc, etc. So in part this is me checking back with the ecosystem to see how it has evolved.

What has changed

From the business case perspective a lot ( and will probably still change ) but weirdly it has remained a new frontier without the widespread acceptance we envisioned ( I believe it’s a mix of generational/institutional resistance plus transaction costs ), instead of replacing the bottom layer of finance ( ie your average payments) crypto as a whole is happily replacing the top layer of finance ( Banking ,trading, investing ) which has not seen any real innovation in decades so I expect a good chunk of development and innovation to happen there…but then there’s this other facet to crypto…