The inevitable march towards blockchain watermelon zombies
(Bear with me on this title, ok? I wrote my waffle then titled it, so it’ll all make sense by the end, honest.)
There’s an old portfolio trope of designing a weather app. Everyone knows the basic concept of what such an app does, allowing the designer to instead focus on all sorts of stylish data visualisation, achingly cool minimalism, or cartoon weather-reporting zombies etc. The reason it’s a bit of a trope is that this usually makes a really bad piece of work to include in a portfolio: the focus is typically on making something that’ll look great presented in an iPhoneX frame on Dribbble, not on solving pain points for a user. No amount of cartoon-weather-zombies will have any effect on the accuracy of the weather info. Sadly.
But we’re not here to talk about weather apps, so what about blockchain apps? Why aren’t there many examples of them springing up in portfolios? Why do conference talks about blockchain apps contain a lot of bullet points of things that you should do, but very few examples of apps that speaker has designed? My cynical answer is that right now it’s a lot easier to speak vaguely about the importance of “instilling trust through UX” or “designing with immutability and permanence in mind” than it is to draw a blockchain app. Why is this? Why aren’t designers of weather apps trapped in the same limbo of bullet-pointed slides opining the importance of “embracing the linearity of the water-cycle” or “evoking the feeling of warmth”?
My short answer: well-established, readily-available domain-level APIs.
In my longer answer, I shall explain what that means ;)
If you want to write a blockchain app, you typically hit an immediate stumbling block: where do I get hold of some data, on a blockchain, about the subject I want to make an app for? Say I want to make an app that tracks the shipment of watermelons across the globe: where do I get the info that I will render in my app? Where is the data about watermelon shipping located, and how can I get API access to it?
Often, the answer is “that API isn’t available yet”. Grudgingly, app developers must now start to learn smart contract development first, to define the manner in which watermelon information is stored in a blockchain ledger and interacted with via transactions like “receiveWatermelon” and “recordMelonRipeness”. (Look, I’m not an expert on watermelon supply chain, ok?)
In fact, in a recent conference talk, I uttered the phrase “the first thing many blockchain developers will code is a smart contract”. I went on to demo the work my team is doing on a VSCode extension for smart contract development (shameless plug, you should check it out: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=IBMBlockchain.ibm-blockchain-platform).
The important thing to remember is that “developers will start with smart contracts” is a point-in-time statement. There was a time when anyone designing or developing a weather app would first had to solve the problem of “how can my app actually get at some data about the weather?”. Today, well…
In fact, going back to Weather Zombie, notice that little detail on the screenshot:
Right now, these sources of information are not as readily discoverable and usable for blockchain app developers. We’re still in the age where the equivalent would be every weather-app-developer also learning how to set up a rudimentary weather-station in their back garden.
But we’re already seeing evidence that this will change, as production enterprise blockchain networks establish a foothold. IBM’s Jerry Cuomo recently stated that there are now 100 such active networks running on IBM Blockchain Platform (catch the full talk here: https://www.ibm.com/events/think/watch/replay/120181706/ — it also includes my previously cited bit about developers). As networks establish themselves across a wide variety of industries, it’s a reasonable prediction that we’ll see the following things happen in the future:
- There will be more blockchain networks
- There will be even more blockchain networks
- “Crap, did we actually need this many blockchain networks? There are, like, 12 different watermelon-tracking networks now!”
- “Ok, let’s consolidate our networks and join them together — blockchain is all about establishing shared sources of truth after all”
- There will be fewer individual blockchain networks, but with larger groups interested in each one
- “Hmmm, what if we opened up API access to these networks, not at a level of blocks and states, but in terms of business-level abstractions like shipWatermelon and tradeCommercialPaper and transferTicketOwnership?”
- Blockchain devs will shift from mostly writing smart contracts to mostly writing apps that consume business-level APIs
- “Watermelon-tracker Zombies” will be released on the app store
You see? It’s inevitable.
