Make Something Cool on the Blockchain — Now!

This is a guest post by a member of the GoChain community, Brock McBlockchain. If you’d like to contribute a guest post about developing on GoChain, please let us know!

I love to build things. It started at a young age and once I found tried building things digitally. I felt like it gave me super powers — I was hooked. Many times when learning something new I would spend hours making mistakes and learning valuable lessons but that’s not always something many have time to take on. That’s why whenever I can — I try to leave breadcrumbs behind for the next person.

I didn’t learn this on my own, it was modeled after some really smart people at Twitter. Back in 2011 they created a tool called Bootstrap which took off when responsive web design gained popularity. Bootstrap helps many people building upon the web create websites more quickly. It’s still being worked on even today and continues to be a foundation for many developers building on the web to use as a spring board into a project. I think this is a great approach as it saved not only their internal teams time but has saved thousands of hours helping even non-developers just build something.

It’s in this same fashion, that I decided to build a series of example dApps (Decentralized Applications) to help people see how they are built and provide a shell to use for getting started just building without all the wasted time learning the tiny details. Build now! Fast! and once you get the time — learn the details. This technique helps people build on momentum before they grind to a stop without getting early success in learning.

The first build uses the Vue.js framework and web3.js to interact with the GoChain blockchain. If you’re not familiar with GoChain, it’s an enterprise level blockchain that’s really fast, cheap to use (less than a penny!), and also nice to our environment than many of it’s peers.

Check out this project for free here on GitHub.

Video Guide on Getting Started

Getting Started In Text

If you prefer to read instead, lets get started!

Step 1: Clone the Repo.
In your terminal type:

git clone https://github.com/brockmcblockchain/gochain-dapp-vue

Step 2: Enter the Directory

cd gochain-dapp-vue

Step 3: Install Dependancies

npm install

Step 4: Run Develoment Environment

npm run dev

Step 5: Visit Local URL
In your browser navigate to http://localhost:8080

And — blockchain away! You can interact with the smart contract using the plus and minus buttons and MetaMask (how to use GoChain with MetaMask). Once you get your bearings on what does what — you can create your own smart contracts and swap out the UI to do whatever you can think of!

Wrapping up — I hope that this helps someone get into blockchain development or gain a better understanding of how a dApp can be built. I hope to continue building resources to help new and current blockchain developers — Feedback is appreciated!