Jeffrey Fabian

Nfteasy

2 min read

october 5th, 2021

Lesson 1

  • the tools we use (or choose to use) is often understated — any builder has strong opinions for these

  • Git and its history gives us a lot of insight about crypto

    • git commit trees are basically merkle trees — changing the code in one commit will change the hash and the ones after
    • in some way git is the first primitive blockchain
    • people say IPFS was awesome because of having the data being “content-addressable”, but git has had that since 2005
    • blockchain isn’t actually new technology
    • the whole point of this is to differentiate between “easy” — it means near to you (like within grasp) and “simple” which ultimately means “fewtwists” which is more related to “complex” which means “many twists” (lots of nuances)
      • so “easy” meaning its within reach

  • Node

    • the javascript runtime environment — takes JS out of the browser and into its own process (JS no longer lives in script tags)

  • Hardhat

    • previously it was really hard to develop for Ethereum — it basically only talks hexadecimal
    • truffle presented a framework where you can compile, run, test and debug your smart contracts
      • then it became very biased towards specific frontend frameworks
    • they needed to be highly opinionated in the beginning (truffle & embark), started moving away from
    • hardhat is somewhat of the standard framework-agnostic tool — no assumptions made for frontend and instead built a community around plugins.
    • if you’re wondering about how to build communities, it’s really about having this open architecture and we’re really clear about how to add to it, to collectively contribute
    • Andy: in my opinion, community starts here (at the engineering, open-source level)
    • Q: where does the name hardhat come from? bitcoin → “hodl”, ethereum has “buidl” and it seems to come from that meme factor (plus constructor workers wear hardhats to build safely and hardhat’s intention is the same: “to give a safe environment to build on ethereum”)

  • on Linux…

    • each OS made some very specific choices that empower and limit people that use them
    • they are nuanced and complex, but the link makes you think about the importance of these deep, low-level decisions

  • interesting links dropped in chat (primarily for understanding history & context)

Graph View