Shipping 6 Blockchain projects in 2 months - halftime report!
New year, new bold objectives: with the start of 2018 I’ve embarked on an ambitious learning quest in the realm of Blockchain technology. The first objective of the year is to design, code and deploy 6 Blockchain projects in 2 months, especially focusing on the Ethereum network and smart contracts. One month down the road is now the time to check-in on this first challenge — one that happily load-tests my cerebral plasticity.
The plan: learning by teaching
To start this journey, I’ve oriented my efforts towards projects making Blockchain technology more understandable and user-friendly.
Concretely, this means I have focused my efforts on projects that play with and expose foundational elements of the Blockchain technology:
- How are cryptographic functions used in the Blockchain?
- What are the steps required for mining a Block, and how does the mining sequence work for Ethereum in particular, knowing it supports not only transactions but also code execution?
- How does one compile and deploy a smart contract?
- What are the most common coding building blocks to build DApps (decentralized applications) on the Ethereum blockchain, using the Solidity and Javascript languages?
With this background, I now feel I’ve gained enough understanding to start shipping real-life projects; furthermore I’ll keep updating these initial projects as I develop a better understanding of the ecosystem. But let’s move on to the actual projects!
The 3 first projects: groundwork
Etherlearn
Etherlearn is my favourite so far. It lets you actually simulate the workings of the Blockchain, mine Blocks, play with cryptographic hashing functions to understand why they’re so widely used (and why crypto-currencies are called this way), and deploy your very first smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. All of this in a simple, fun and visual way.
It has immensely helped me wrap my head around some key concepts, especially when it comes to the role of mining to guarantee transactions integrity, and to understand how the original Bitcoin Blockchain has been extended to support code execution with Ethereum smart contracts.
I hope you’ll find Etherlearn interesting as well — note that I’ll use this site as a companion for future smart contract workshops; hence it sometimes lacks explicit guidance on what you should understand on each step of the way, and it’s not mobile optimized ;)
CryptoHoax
This is the funky dude around. Purely focusing on generating random predictions for crypto-currencies evolution, CryptoHoax has been fun to develop. The aim with it was mostly to get familiar with the Vue.js framework that I use in mostly all the other projects for the front-end part.
CryptoHoax uses APIs from CryptoCompare to get random crypto coins names and from RandomUser to generate fake names. The rest is a bunch of personal random creations inspired from sleepless nights.
Ethereum.mom
A quieter one for sure, mummy from Ethereum.mom is THE shoulder you can cry on when Solidity and Javascript kill you in your smart contracts development.
The genesis of this idea is actually pretty random: I just scouted domains on NameCheap until I found an available ethereum.*** domain. It just turned out to be this absurd “.mom” DNS. From there on the legendary Mom was born, and you can now ask her pretty much anything as long as it revolves around Ethereum development.
I love this project because I feel I’ll still have plenty of snippets to add to it, and I’ve made it explicitly open-source so others can contribute as well.
Looking ahead & bonus stuff
With these projects in my rucksack, I feel ready to jump on the 3 next challenges for the month to come. They will be much more sizeable and will interact with the Blockchain in more profound ways, like real DApps do.
Expect a random Belgian-flavoured ICO, Oracles, Blockchain-as-a-Backend, and other niceties :)
Oh yeah and the bonus stuff. From my young experience, no crypto project is really perfect unless it includes these random flying particles on a sexy landing page. So here’s my shot at it: Cryptizens.io will be my flagship and portfolio for the projects to come. Hope you like the particles. See you soon !
