My favorite topic 2020 : blockchain

Blockchain

When the 2020 year started, I wanted to nurture my knowledge of the cloud. I had some exposure to the topic in years before but recently, I've been mostly working in a lot of legacy apps. I still do have some very good intuition  but I may have lost some practices about how to do quickly this or that.

However, I profoundly believed the market is over reacted about the need for developer to be cloud knowledgeable. And I wanted to be aligned. That has justified my decision to find some  time during the year to start journey as a cloud certified developer. Unfortunately, it never happened or maybe I didn't truly convince myself it is worth it.. I still agree a basic understanding of cloud is more than an essential knowledge for today enterprise application  developers. Nevertheless I also recognize that this role is another relevant job title.

This is not the purpose of this post. The intent is how I came to fall in love with blockchain. I did know about block-chain back in 2015. I do spend some time learning bitcoin with a coursera MOOC class having some prior in-depth exposure of cryptography primitives. But I did not go deeper. In retrospective, I feel sorry and really a bit shortsighted. This seems so amazing and so aligned to my prior knowledge.

 I think we will hear about smart contracts as its makes block-chain technologies more relevant. It is a technology that brings back simple programming as a mean for real very good business value. Developers have a big and widely secure database with a a modern programming language to do anything they may want with almost no cost at all. With JavaScript single page or native applications in the front-end,  there is a wide range of what developers can do. 

So I'm self learning how to write smart contracts with solidity or other languages or blockchains. I started with https://cryptozombies.io. This was far than enough. Cheers to CryptoZombie. Now, I created my own local environment. I do not wanted to use web based IDE. I wanted to feel how everything is connected. I did waste some unnecessary times. But all is right that ends well. I have now a visual studio with windows WLS2 Ubuntu18. I love visual studio having working mostly with eclipse and intellij. You have a basic IDE customized later via extensions. Sounds crazy ? I complete some deployment with solidity-nodejs-truffle-ganache. It looks good. The dots seems to be connected. I created some initial projects and able to run locally some tests. I m feeling good.

So now, I m ready to write my first contract on flexible vote system that I think should allow us to have quick, cheap, free and elections for who ever may wanted. It is something that is important for me for some times. Coming from a 3rd world country -Haiti- where lack of good elections have worsened poverty in the populations with bad leaders in charge within all levels of government. So is my passion is set for 2020 :  block chain developer enthusiasm. I ll try to keep my blog up-to-date.

Merci