Innovation From Insights: Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)
How a Simple Insight Led to the Birth of Ethereum
The first principle any developer learns is to not repeat yourself. When building any application, the moment you need to use code that you’ve already written, you would abstract it away into a function to be reused. This makes life easier for yourself and for those you work with.
Back in 2013, the blockchain industry as a whole was not adhering to the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle. The original Ethereum Whitepaper highlighted the issue that blockchain applications back then required developers “to bootstrap an independent blockchain, as well as building and testing all of the necessary state transition and networking code.” Vitalik observed that there were commonalities in the requirements of blockchain developers and simply wanted to solve that need. In his words, “Ethereum does this by building what is essentially the ultimate abstract foundational layer”. The creation of Ethereum was just based on this key, yet retrospectively, rather obvious and simple insight. I guess therein lies its beauty.
Just like how interviewers should avoid administering tests that assess performance based on a binary outcome of an interviewee ‘seeing the trick’, or ‘finding the one key insight’, we should avoid assessing people based on this. I don’t deny, Vitalik is an absolute genius, but that doesn’t mean that any of us couldn’t become ‘geniuses’ as well.
Isn’t it more inspiring to imagine that one day, any of us could be the right person at the right time and the right place to change the world just from a simple observation too?
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