Devs Do Something: Recent Episodes
Superfluid
Today's episode features Vitto Rivabella on the modern web3 stack.
Vitto on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VittoStack
Create Web3 Dapp: https://www.alchemy.com/create-web3-dapp
Today's episode is with Emily from the Consensys team on all things Linea - Consenys' new zkEVM.
Linea: https://linea.build/
Linea Docs: https://docs.linea.build/
On ZK Hardware: https://hackmd.io/@Cysic/BJQcpVbXn
Today’s episode is with Nick Dodson, co-founder of Fuel Labs and one of the minds behind the Sway language. We deep dive the FuelVM, Sway, and how Nick approaches his work as an engineer.
Stream salaries with Superfluid: https://use.superfluid.finance/payroll
00:00 Intro
5:14 How Nick got into crypto
8:36 Why build Fuel?
11:51 Where does Fuel fit in the web3 developer ecosystem, and how does it relate to Ethereum?
14:26 Parallel transaction execution
16:38 Register machine architecture
21:38 Sway
33:45 Scripts, predicates, & how they can improve UX
39:05 Fuel’s native asset model
48:00 Smart contract security with a new language
51:50 What does Nick hope people build on Fuel?
56:10 What should you be prepared for when building on Fuel
1:00:47 How has Nick leveled up as an engineer?
1:04:12 What bad advice should young engineers NOT follow?
1:06:15 What does nick hope our industry looks like?
Fuel Docs: https://fuellabs.github.io/fuel-docs/master/
EIPs implemented in Fuel that are still open for the EVM: https://fuellabs.github.io/fuel-docs/master/vs-evm.html#eips-implemented-in-fuel
Sway: https://fuellabs.github.io/sway/v0.31.1/
Nick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IAmNickDodson
Our Episode with Cami - Head of DevX at Fuel: https://www.devsdosomething.fm/episodes/cami-ramos-garzon-developer-experience-fuel-bringing-crypto-to-latam
Winter has been prolific on Twitter & in his web3 journey. He’s worked on projects for the Nouns and Loot communities, and produced really interesting projects of his own including ERC1155U, Runes of Ethereum, & Hot Chain SVG.
Stream salaries with Superfluid: https://use.superfluid.finance/payroll
In this episode, we talk about the benefits of building in public, gas optimization, innovating in NFTs, and how to succeed as an honest builder in web3.
Winter is legit, and if you’re looking for a podcast episode that takes you away from the mania that’s happened throughout the last week in crypto, this episode will do that for you. Winter will bring you back to what matters: building
So give it a listen, and let us know what you think.
Links:
EVM Course: evmfromscratch.com
Winter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/w1nt3r_eth
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
5:25 How Winter got involved in crypto
7:27 Winter’s NFT projects
9:57 Coming to crypto from big tech (Meta)
11:47 Deep diving the EVM
15:50 Where to get started with gas golfing - EVM.code, remix, and Winter
17:12 Solidity in the browser?!
23:43 Fighting centralization in the NFT space
30:38 How would Winter approach gas optimization for a new project?
34:37 Smart contract security
41:14 Leveling up as a solidity developer
46:10 Winter’s new EVM course
50:09 How to market your work without feeling like a shill
57:14 Favorite design patterns & optimization (ERC1155U)
1:01:07 What do people in web2 think about crypto?
1:05:23 What do crypto natives misunderstand about tech cycles?
1:08:30 What does Winter hope the industry achieves over the next 10 years?
Igor has a really interesting story. Babylon was a DeFi protocol that ended up shutting down after the Rari capital exploit, but the team gave the project a high integrity effort and it sounds like they learned many things during the journey.
Igor walks us through what it was like launching a new DeFi protocol during the bull market, and also talks us through the lessons he took away from the experience.
We cover subjects like testing smart contracts, preparing for audits, optimizations he’s product of, solutions to the sometimes oppressive contract size limit in solidity, & how he personally levels up as a solidity dev.
This ep is a treasure trove of information for DeFi founders and technical folks.
0:00 Intro
1:30 Who is Igor?
4:12 how Igor got involved in crypto
8:55 Early technical decisions with Babylon [decent soundbite here on audits]
13:44 Advice on testing composable systems
16:05 Advice for people about to launch a defi protocol [cost of solidity soundbite at 15:10 or so..probably winning soundbite]
19:45 Tooling Igor wishes people built for the space [soundbite on what to build] [gives a shoutout to defender around 20 min]
27:33 The perils of the solidity contract size limit (and potential solutions)
37:22 How to approach gas optimizations [decent soundbite there on how to handle this] [39 min a good one]
41:12 Preparing for audits
45:12 Favorite optimizations
50:48 How has Igor approached leveling up as a solidity dev? [really good soundbite here as well]
53:30 What do you hope the crypto DevX looks like in the next 5-10 years?
Igor on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ylv_io
Igor's Devcon Talk on Contract Size Limits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzlUNSt5pnA
Ethernaut: https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/
Damn Vulnerable DeFi: https://www.damnvulnerabledefi.xyz/
Paradigm CTF: https://twitter.com/paradigm_ctf?lang=en
Stream payroll with Superfluid: https://use.superfluid.finance/payroll
Today’s guest is Yorke Rhodes - founding engineer at Hyperlane, a protocol which serves as a platform for building cross chain applications.
Yorke is very knowledgable about building smart contracts. He was previously at Celo and has spent his career going deep on solidity before joining Hyperlane (which was previously known as Abacus), as a founding engineer.
In this episode, Yorke and I talk through the details of Hyperlane’s system for sending and receiving messages cross chain, and talk through cross chain tech more generally. We also talk through things like how Hyperlane thinks through developer experience & building APIs, and Yorke’s thoughts on smart contract security. Finally, we wrap up by asking Yorke what his favorite design patterns and optimizations are - something we always love asking.
If you’re a solidity developer with an interest in cross chain technology, this episode is for you.
Yorke on Twitter: @0xyorke
Hyperlane docs: https://docs.hyperlane.xyz/hyperlane-docs
Today we have Cami Ramos Garzon - aka Camiinthisthang on twitter. Cami is a Colombian-American engineer who began her career as a software engineer at Paypal before ultimately getting involved in web3. She’s a natural communicator who quickly found a fit in developer relations for some of the industry’s largest and fastest moving protocols like the Graph. Today, she works as a DevRel at Fuel Labs, where she’s helping to build out a high quality developer experience for engineers who want to build applications on top of the FuelVM. In addition to this, she’s prolific on twitter and before Devcon had a post go viral on why crypto needs to focus on Latin America if it wants to reach its full potential.
This episode was recorded live during Devcon week.
Stream salaries with Superfluid: https://use.superfluid.finance/payroll
Timestamps:
2:02 Intro
4:44 How Cami got involved in crypto
9:52 The welcoming nature of web3
11:11 A brief introduction to Fuel
12:31 Fuel's focus on developer experience with Sway & a vertically integrated toolchain
16:29 Writing libraries in Sway
17:36 How Cami prepares for developer focused workshops & talks
19:32 What can engineers do to become better at teaching & documentation?
21:35 Crypto & Latin America
23:38 Advice for engineers in LatAm who want to get involved in Web3
26:37 Where does Cami hope our industry accomplishes throughout the next decade?
Cami on Twitter: https://twitter.com/camiinthisthang
Fuel Docs: https://fuellabs.github.io/fuel-docs/master/
Today’s guest is Odysseas.eth, an engineer at Nomad who has provided a lot of value to the space as an engineer and open source contributor to various projects such as Foundry. Odysseas has a passion for decentralization, and in this episode, we discuss the technical details of what he calls the Sovereign Stack - a suite of tools he feels are important for crypto natives seeking to live decentralized lives.
We also dive deep on cross chain messaging, favorite design patterns in the Foundry codebase and Odysseas’ own work (which include a really cool script for tracing contract storage I thought was awesome), and the importance of focus for engineers working in the space. This is a wide ranging conversation that decentralization maxis and protocol engineers alike will enjoy.
This episode of DDS is brought to you by Superfluid. You can learn more about streaming payroll at https://superfluid.finance/payroll
4:00 How Odysseas got involved in crypto
10:00 The Sovereign Stack
14:30 What is urbit?
20:20 Radicle and decentralization around git
24:50 What do devs need to build into the sovereign stack?
27:20 Staying decentralized at the hardware level
30:40 Devcon and what we should be building
37:06 Avoiding getting distracted as a new solidity developer (decent SB)
44:10 Cross chain messaging
48:20 Advice on making open source contributions
51:30 High quality patterns in the Foundry codebase
54:00 Odysseas favorite design pattern: a bash script to print a txt file of your contract’s storage layout
58:15 the importance of focus, and why Odysseas doesn’t focus on gas golfing
1:00:00 Where Odysseas hopes the industry goes within the next 10 years
Odysseas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/odysseas_eth
Odysseas' Blog: https://odyslam.com/
Github: https://github.com/OdysLam/
Today’s guest is Vex, a software engineer, smart contract developer, and major contributor to Huff - a low level assembly language for the Ethereum Virtual machine.
Vex knows a ton about the EVM at the low level, and we go deep into why Huff is a great language to learn for building incredibly gas efficient contracts. Huff is also being used more and more as an educational tool, as it allows you to build programs that are, as Josh says, equivalent to ‘bare metal ethereum.’
If you’re interested in low level smart contract languages, and developing a deeper understanding of how the EVM works, you’ll love this episode.
Huff Links
https://huff.sh/
https://github.com/pentagonxyz/huffmate
https://github.com/huff-language
Writing a SNARK verifier in Huff:
https://github.com/whitenois3/huff-snark-verifier
Timestamps:
5:00 getting involved with huff & going low level
8:05 Huff overview
10:12 Writing a SNARK verifier in Huff
13:07 Good Huff use cases
16:20 Is the need to use low level assembly a failure of the higher level language?
19:05 Huff vs Yul - in Huff, you have to manage the stack yourself
22:01 Huff as an educational tool for understanding the low level
26:28 Optimizations and interesting design patterns
30:33 New EIPs for the EVM execution environment
34:16 Long term vision for Huff, and new feature ideas
41:10 Huff’s place in MEV
43:35 CTFs
48:52 Outside of Huff, what is Vex interested in?
52:30 Vex’s long term outlook on the industry
Dawson is the founder of Earnifi, a platform which helps you stay on top of airdrops in web3. He is a serial hacker and has contributed to/created many open source projects to improve his own life & the lives of dapp developers.
In this episode, we talk in detail about building high performance decentralized applications, and step through Dawson's journey becoming an indie hacker. If you're a full stack dev that wants to take a highly performant app to market - this episode is for you.
Links Discussed in the Episode:
Earnifi: https://earni.fi
Dawson's OSS Contributions: https://earni.fi/oss
Bun.js: https://bun.sh/
WASM: https://webassembly.org/
YC Startup School: https://www.startupschool.org/
Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/
0:00 Intro
3:17 How Dawson got involved in the space
9:01 Dawson’s first real crypto project: putting election data on chain
11:55 Earnifi’s early beginnings
16:13 What full stack web2 devs should know before building a web3 application
21:18 Re-writing ethers for optimal performance
24:18 "Typescript is mandatory at this point"
26:57 Dawson’s open source contributions
33:50 Approaching entrepreneurship as a developer
39:20 You just won a hackathon, and are considering building a business around your idea. What should you do next?
43:34 Creating space to pursue your own projects as a developer
47:53 Why now is the time to build privacy-preserving applications
52:31 What would Dawson work on if he had 6 months of free time?
55:12 WASM, Bun.js, and the future of web3 front ends
58:41 Why safe, high quality DeFi is important for the world
Today, we have Santiago Palladino, a lead developer at OpenZeppelin who has helped drive the development of OpenZeppelin’s Defender product. He’s also provided value as an educator for the space, and wrote a book on Ethereum for web developers in 2019.
In this episode, we discuss Open Zeppelin’s defender product, and it’s underlying design. We also dive into the role of devops & off chain infrastructure & the future of web3 development, and explore Santiago’s thoughts on the growth of the South American & Latin American crypto ecosystem.
Santiago has a deep understanding of building products at the intersection of web2 & web3, and if you’re interested in understanding how to build products that straddle both tech stacks - this episode is for you.
OZ Defender: https://www.openzeppelin.com/defender
Ethereum For Web Developers: https://link.springer.com/book/10.100...
Santiago on Twitter: https://twitter.com/smpalladino
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
2:26 How Santiago got involved in crypto
5:58 Getting started in web3 when coming from a traditional software development background
8:34 What tooling does Santiago wish existed?
10:39 Open Zeppelin Defender
13:58 So I’ve just deployed a smart contract to main net. What should I be thinking about next?
17:15 How to manage security & decentralization as your project evolves
22:24 The role of off chain infra in the next iteration of dapps
26:05 Decentralized backend infrastructure
30:24 The Defender architecture & some of Santiago’s favorite design patterns used in its development
35:43 How Santiago approaches API development
41:05 Why multi-chain governance & account abstractions NEED to get solved
46:28 The LatAm crypto ecosystem
52:19 Santiago’s long term vision for the industry
00:00 intro
3:09 How Sam got involved in crypto
5:16 Multi chain maker
9:36 Maker Teleport
12:37 Stepping through a specific tx lifecycle with Maker Teleport, and how that compares to other message passing bridges in the space
16:22 UX considerations of different cross chain message passing designs
19:19 RWA on Maker
21:46 Technical considerations of bringing real world assets on chain
23:51 Learning how to manage risk as a developer
28:28 What does the development process look like at Maker?
32:15 What does the Maker Engineering team prioritize when considering tradeoffs?
34:37 Sam’s advice for thinking about smart contract security
37:46 Tradeoffs with upgradable contracts
42:15 How to approach naming conventions in highly visible contracts
44:37 Good design patterns Sam wishes were used more often
49:34 Sam’s interest in MEV
52:22 Sam’s long term hopes for crypto
Links:
https://makerdao.com/
https://twitter.com/SebVentures
https://twitter.com/hexonaut
In this episode, we talk with a vyper contributor and compiler expert who pseudonymously goes by @big_tech_sux on Twitter.
Bts knows a lot about programming languages, and we go deep into vyper in this episode. We discuss things like vyper's evolution, standardized intermediate representations for web3 compilers, and titanoboa - a new contribution to the vyper development toolchain which is dramatically improving UX.
BTS on twitter: https://twitter.com/big_tech_sux
Vyper: https://vyper.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Titanoboa: https://github.com/vyperlang/titanoboa
Show Notes:
00:00 Intro
2:15 How BTS got into the space
4:13 Vyper's evolution
7:24 Standardized intermediate representations for EVM languages
15:47 How will the web3 language space evolve?
20:10 Vyper’s design decisions over time
37:01 Titanoboa & its features
50:31 Why the name Big Tech Sux?
52:02 BTS' long term vision for the space
Today's guest is Nicolás Venturo, a blockchain engineer at Balancer Labs and former engineer at Open Zeppelin - where he contributed to one of the first audits of the solidity compiler.
Nicolás is very well versed on the ins & outs of solidity, smart contract development, and best practiced for security. Prior to getting involved in crypto, he was an embedded systems engineer, and has spent most of his career thinking through low level systems.
In this episode, we discuss Nicolás' thoughts on how solidity has evolved over the years, Balancer's engineering process, Nicolás' favorite design patterns, and the dangers of gas golfing.
Shownotes:
00:00 How Nicolas got into the space
4:20 Parallels between solidity development & building embedded systems
12:21 Nicolas’ thoughts on assembly languages like Yul & Huff
19:21 Standard Libraries?
27:55 Nicolas’ favorite design patterns, and why readability matters!
41:33 The dangers of gas golfing
46:00 Balancer’s custom error’s library: revert strings without hitting byte code size limits
54:27 How Balancer makes use of batching in their codebase
1:00:40 How the Balancer engineering team approaches development cycles
1:08:31 If Nicolas couldn’t work on Balancer for 6 months, what would he work on?
1:15:24 What does Nicolas think the long term destiny of crypto will be
Links
Nicolas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrnventuro
Balancer: https://balancer.fi/
Balancer's custom errors library: https://github.com/balancer-labs/balancer-v2-monorepo/blob/weighted-deployment/contracts/lib/helpers/BalancerErrors.sol
Open Zeppelin defender: https://www.openzeppelin.com/defender
Today’s guest is Chris Maree, a senior engineer at UMA protocol. Chris got into crypto several years ago and is a wealth of knowledge on solidity development, DeFi, & cryptoeconomics. In this episode, we go deep on engineering at UMA, and got to ask Chris a ton of questions about smart contract design patterns. We discuss the cryptoeconomics of UMA’s optimistic oracle, the low level design of UMA’s Across bridge, gas optimization, security, and Chris’ long term vision for the space.
If you’re an engineer interested in smart contract development & DeFi, we think you’re going to love this one.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
3:10 How Chris got involved in crypto
6:50 UMA’s optimistic oracle
11:39 Examples of long tail data usage in web3
13:45 Walking through technical examples of how the optimistic oracle works
23:00 The use of ‘ancillary data' to turn the optimistic oracle into a ‘Turing complete’ oracle
27:31 Behind the scenes on the Optimistic Oracle design
31:53 What is Across: bridging as a lending problem vs bridging as a swapping problem
34:00 The Across Hub & Spoke Model For Liquidity
38:00 Can you pass call data across chains with Across?
39:30 The use of ‘bundles’ in Across
49:20 Favorite UMA design patterns
52:03 UMA engineering design practices
58:04 Chris’ approach to security and engaging auditors
1:00:06 Trends Chris is excited about (Cross chain MEV, NFT derivatives)
1:02:50 Chris’ long term vision for the future of crypto
Links: https://docs.umaproject.org/
Chris on Github: https://github.com/chrismaree
Today, we have Austin Griffith, dev tooling & dev education extraordinaire. He’s the creator of countless high value dev tools, including ETH.Build, Scaffold-ETH, and Speed Run Ethereum. In this episode, we discuss Austin’s process for building developer tooling, new developments that Austin is excited about at the application layer, and how to level up as a solidity developer.
00:23 How Austin got into Ethereum
2:23 Austin walks through the first dapps he ever built: games
4:28 Austin’s entry into dev tooling
8:15 ETH.Build
13:40 Scaffold-ETH
21:47 Speed Run Ethereum
27:45 Taking a PM approach to building dev tooling
30:36 Austin shouts out other great devrel resources
33:02 Becoming an elite web3 developer
40:40 The state of existing dev tooling
47:49 New developments in the application layer that Austin is excited about
49:30 Nifty Ink - using meta transactions to improve UX
56:03 Austin’s vision for web3 in 10 years: public keys will be as ubiquitous as an email address
Links:
Scaffold ETH: https://docs.scaffoldeth.io/scaffold-eth/
Speed Run Ethereum: https://speedrunethereum.com/
Austin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/austingriffith
Ethereum Resources: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/
On the Devs Do Something podcast, we bring you technical discussions with some of the best and brightest engineers in all of web3. Today, we have Rahul Sethuram - CTO & cofounder of Connext.
Connext is building the first fully trust-minimized Crosschain Communication protocol to make blockchains composable.
Rahul has been in the space for the better part of 5 years - he started his career at tesla and worked in various startups business before getting into crypto. In this episode, you’ll hear more about his journey through the proverbial idea maze as he iterated his way into building Connext, and you’ll also get an inside look into the technical side of building cross chain infrastructure.
In this episode, we hit on a ton of fascinating technical topics: you’ll hear us walk through optimistic bridge design, Connext’s engineering & design process (including how they navigated multiple re-writes), Rahul’s favorite non-EVM tech in the space, & we’ll even walk through the full lifecycle of a cross chain operation on Connext.
If you’re a web3 engineer or work alongside engineers, we think you’ll get a lot of value from this one.
00:00 Intro
3:13 How Rahul got into Web3
6:18 Connext origin story
9:00 The interoperability trilemma
10:29 Optimistic bridges
14:40 Walking through the lifecycle of a cross chain transaction using Connext
22:42 Cross chain callbacks and “asynchronous” solidity
27:14 Design patterns that Rahul is proud of (including a cool custom errors implementation)
29:46 Behind the scenes insight on how Connext iterated from their initial state channels implementation to their current model
34:49 How Connext handles development cycles
36:10 The Connext approach to managing security and protocol maintenance
39:12 Upgradable contracts vs full immutability
40:43 Beyond the EVM
45:28 Issues with validity proofs in cross chain infrastructure
48:53 Web3 tech that Rahul is excited about
50:41 Cross chain MEV and arbitrage opportunities
52:43 Rahul’s long term vision for the industry
Links
Connext: https://www.connext.network/
Rahul: https://twitter.com/rhlsthrm
The Interoperability Trilemma: https://blog.connext.network/the-interoperability-trilemma-657c2cf69f17
Optimistic Bridges: https://blog.connext.network/optimistic-bridges-fb800dc7b0e0
Problems with Validity Proofs When Used in Bridging: https://blog.connext.network/validity-proofs-are-not-effective-for-bridging-blockchains-85b5e3b22a35