Reach — September Update
The day has come, we are ready for users to try out Reach. Even though we’ve been building Reach out in the open and making sure we always had a working version, we are now ready for more users to put it through the paces.
Since this is our first update there is a chance that you don’t know who we are. If you do know who we are you can skip to the updates. I have also created a recording and put it on YouTube if you would rather watch the update.
Introduction
Blockchain is the future of tech. There are many things that we can already think of, and many things we haven’t come up with yet that blockchain will make better.
But there is a huge problem.
Blockchain development is unapproachably hard. There are tools out there that try to make it easier, but the truth is that if you want to build a blockchain application you have to manually program every small step. Something that would take a day to build in a centralized way takes weeks to build on the blockchain.
Not only is it hard to build, but it’s very punishing if you make a mistake. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost because of small mistakes in the code, and because of the immutable nature of the blockchain, there is no way to easily get it back.
That is why we built Reach. Reach is a blockchain development platform that is built around a programming language.
Rather than follow the traditional product development route of analyzing the pain points and incrementally make them better we thought that just wasn’t good enough. Blockchain development is so bad that making it incrementally better won’t make a big enough difference.
So we asked ourselves how can we make blockchain development 10X or even 100X better.
Jay McCarthy my co-founder has spent the last 15 years of his life researching how to fix similar problems in different industries. But they weren’t quick fixes that could be applied overnight.
This is why it has taken us a year before we were ready to release our documentation.
But we believe it was worth the wait.
A recent game was developed on one of the chains we support and it took the developer 3 weeks to develop working 3–4 hours a day to make it happen. It is a great application, and it’s quite impressive what he built, but I asked Jay to see if he could recreate the application in Reach and he had it built within an hour of work. Not only that, but it was mathematically guaranteed to be correct AND we could launch it on multiple chains at once.
I’ve been pretty quiet while Jay and Dan, one of our engineers, pumped out new features, but now that it’s ready we decided to start pushing out a monthly update. I will update you on the progress from the previous month, and on what we plan on accomplishing in the next month. We believe in transparency and being open, so I will also give summaries of known issues and future work. Our goal with these updates is to succinctly explain the value add of everything we are working on.
Product Updates
Feature Updates
Jay and Dan have been working their butts off to get Reach ready for users. Their main focus in the last month has been developer experience. Everything worked if you colored within the lines, but we have taken the time to improve the overall developer experience. Jay rewrote the compiler to support more JavaScript-like features, which adds many quality of life improvements that come with JavaScript. Jay and Dan have also been working on building out a very smooth development workflow and error messaging.
I’m extremely impressed by the amount of work that they’ve done and how efficiently they have done it.
Documentation Updates
Jay has finished the first draft of our documentation, and you can really tell that he’s done it before. It’s divided into five sections:
- The Overview gives the developer a taste of what Reach has to offer
- The Tutorial gives the developer a multi-step line by line explanation on how to build an app on Reach
- The Guides do a deep dive into certain features of the language
- The Workshops give the developer guided tasks to confirm their learning
- The Reference document contains the language specification.
I was even able to follow along, and I haven’t developed in more than eight years. I recommend you check it out.
Community News
CDL Accelerator Acceptance
Creative Destruction Labs (CDL) is an accelerator that is normally based onsite in Canada, but because of COVID, they decided to do this cohort over Zoom. We are honored to have been accepted into the program after going through their two-week boot camp. This is a 10-month program that will introduce us to a lot more mentors, and potential investors. Also, we might be adding an MBA to the team through this program.
Received Algorand Grant
One of the best things that have happened recently is that we have further solidified our partnership with Algorand. We have received a grant to finish building the connector to Algorand and to continue to add features to Reach. They have been incredibly helpful so far, and we are weeks away from onboarding Algorand developers onto Reach.
Submission to Cardano Language RFP
The only way we can achieve our goal of being the go-to for all blockchain development is to build connectors to all of the best protocols. Recently Cardano released an RFP for another language for smart contracts. This RFP felt like a perfect fit for Reach so we sent over a proposal.
Tutorial Beta Cohort
We are working with a group of developers from multiple industries to build their first applications with Reach. We gave them a sneak peek and asked for their feedback. The process has gone well, which is why we decided to make the official announcement of our documentation.
One of my favorite quotes so far:
It took about 20 minutes to understand having only read the intro to Reach and never having built a DApp in my life. -Gabriel Somoza
Discord Community Setup
We chose Discord to be the home of our community chat because it gave us the most tools to moderate and build out our community. So please join to follow our day-to-day progress or ask any questions that might come up: https://discord.gg/AZsgcXu
Reach Services
Now that we have Reach ready for users, we decided to start offering services to help people build on the blockchain. This is just the beginning. We plan on being selective with the companies we work with, but we have already started the conversations with our partners to be on the preferred vendor list. This is something that I have a lot of experience with since one of my previous companies was a software service provider. We recently added a webpage that goes into more detail on the services we now offer.
Next Month
Start the CDL Accelerator
Part of the benefits of the CDL is that we get access to a bunch of MBA interns. We are going to interview them over the next couple of weeks to see if we can find a match. We are also going to prepare for the first mentor session.
Start Onboarding Developers to Reach
My goal is to get 30 new people to go through the tutorial. If we average 10 a week this should be possible before the end of the month.
Gitcoin Grant Round 7
I’d like to use this round to get the word out about Reach. Here is our grant page. We will make sure we tweet about it, too.
Marketing Push
I’m going to start pushing harder on Twitter, and Linkedin. This isn’t my specialty, so if you have any tips while you read our tweets, I’m all ears. You can reach out to me on Discord. https://discord.gg/AZsgcXu
Finish the Workshops
Jay is going to finish the Workshop materials. The goal of the workshops is to apply what you learned from the tutorial and give you more ideas on what to build next.
Algorand Launch
We can currently output Algorand TEAL contracts, but there are still a few features we need to add. Our goal is to be able to output basic Algorand applications by the end of this month.
Needs
The biggest challenge we have is convincing more developers to try out our tutorial. We believe once they do, they will never turn back. So please help us get the word out, and shoot me over any tips you might have to make this process easier.
