Blockchain Developer Monthly Newsletter ⛓

The Inaugural (aka 1st) Edition of Blockchain Developer Monthly!

What's this all about?!

Well there are lots of blockchain newsletters out there that will hype you up on the latest NFT project or predicting some new token that's going to the moon.

They're not all shills though. Some are really great reads... ex: the guys at Milk Road do a great job.

But it's hard to find any that actually go deep into things that are relevant for developers working in the space.

That's why I created this - a newsletter dedicated to developers who want to stay up-to-date and excel in the world of web3.

Why me? I've spent my whole career as a Developer and been a full-time Blockchain Engineer since mid 2018. In crypto years, I'm ancient! I'm already constantly trying to stay up-to-date for my own growth so I figured why not share my findings and learnings with others.

In case you aren't already convinced... Being a solidity, blockchain, & ethereum developer is a fantastic career option.

Regardless of whether you love or hate crypto, there's no denying blockchain is an exciting technology with tons of job opportunities. You can work around the world, you get to work on solutions to big problems, and you're on the cutting edge of the tech sector.

But things move FAST.

So staying up-to-date with the constantly evolving ecosystem can be tough. If you're still reading this, you probably want to be a top-performing developer within the web3 landscape, but probably don’t have time to find, read, and synthesize all the articles, videos and podcasts that come out each month.

So this monthly Blockchain Developer Newsletter is born.

I'll keep you up-to-date with what's happening within the web3 industry, without wasting your valuable time, by curating the most important articles, guides, news, resources, podcasts and videos from the past month.

This newsletter was inspired by Andrei's Web Developer Monthly + Python Monthly and Daniel's Machine Learning Monthly so I hope I can live up to those. If you haven't checked those out yet, do it!

Ok, let's dive into this 1st issue. I hope you enjoy!

Let's dive in. Here's what you missed in July 2022 as a Blockchain Developer…

ETH 2.0? That's so last year. Welcome to ‘The Merge’ 🙌

As you may know, Ethereum is undergoing an upgrade that has often been referred to as ETH 2.0. But the term ETH 2.0 is not officially used anymore since it has been announced that the upgrade will happen in several stages, rather than one single big upgrade.

The upcoming first upgrade is called ‘The Merge’ and will be the point in time where Ethereum fully transitions from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake (I explain the difference between PoW and PoS here), a historic moment for anyone in the blockchain ecosystem.

The last month has seen continuous successful progress without major issues.

The Goerli testnet will have The Merge somewhere between the 6th and 12th of August. This is supposed to be the last big test.

And September 19th (yes, 2022!) has been suggested as the target date for The Merge upgrade. The week of September 19th was suggested as a planning goal on the recent consensus devs call.

Bonjour Blockchain! Paris Crypto Week with EthCC 👨‍🎨

July 18th was the fifth EthCC conference, held again in Paris. I managed to attend myself, and it was larger than I expected.

The best thing one can do in a bear market is join these conferences and see just how many intelligent people are in this space and how many interesting projects are currently in development. Nothing could make one more confident about the long-term future and success of crypto than this.

You can see all talks here, but definitely check out Vitalik’s talk on the future of Ethereum. A transcript is available here. He explains the short, medium and long-term future of Ethereum in five stages:

1. The Merge is Proof of Stake.
2. The Surge is sharding.
3. The Verge is Verkle trees.
4. The Purge is things like state expiry and deleting old history.
5. The Splurge is all of the other fun stuff.

Besides EthCC, there was a lot else happening as well. Other chains like Polkadot, Cosmos and Solana had their own conferences in Paris. And many projects were hosting events that week in Paris.

(Hey that's me!)

Quick Hits ⚡

• The HardHat VSCode plugin is out of beta.

• Solenv is a new tool for using the common Dotenv pattern together with Solidity and Foundry.

• sol2ink is a new project that only just started and is not yet usable, but someone in Paris told me about the development. This would allow you to compile Solidity smart contracts into Ink!, the native smart contract language of Polkadot chains. This could be super interesting once finished, as you could then easily re-use existing Solidity contracts and deploy on any Polkadot chain.

• Events Deep Dive: In the spirit of learning about events, this post goes into a lot more details if you are interested. Not just on a conceptual level, but how the details in Geth, the Ethereum node software, are actually implemented.

• Huff is a new language that was released for writing Ethereum smart contracts. It’s very low-level and intended for experts to save more gas. You can find example contracts here.

The Graph... decentralized 📈

Events on a blockchain are a very efficient way to add data without having to store it in every node, which is very expensive. This is done through the use of a bloom filter and a client is able to parse blocks and transactions to quickly find data they are looking for.

(I also explain this in more detail in my Solidity, Blockchain and Ethereum Developer Bootcamp if you're interested in going deeper).

But using these events still requires parsing through a lot of blocks, so one alternative is having a server index the data and store it in a database. Put GraphQL on top as a very convenient query language and you have The Graph, but as a centralized service.

Now enter the decentralized version of The Graph. This is The Decentralized The Graph, and here's a guide to it that explores how it works conceptually, how you can use it today, and what the future holds.

If you don't already know what The Graph is, no worries just check out this post.

The Ultimate zkSync Guide 📝

Have you heard of zkSync and its new zkEVM? The new zkSync EVM enables Zero-knowledge proofs for any smart contract executions.

This means having a side chain with similar (but not exact) guarantees of the Ethereum mainnet chain.

The launch of zkEVM represents an essential turning point for crypto. Up until recently it was still considered merely a theoretical possibility that will take years to become real. But over the last year, the pace of the entire zero knowledge proof ecosystem has exceeded even experts’ expectations.

If you want to read more on this, check out this article.

See you next month!

I hope you enjoyed this inaugural edition of Blockchain Developer Monthly.

What did you think? Give us some feedback on Twitter.

• Pretty good = Like 👍
• Loved it = Re-tweet ❤
• Something missing? Have an idea of what to include in a future post? Let me know in the comments

The more comments I get, the better I can make next month's edition!

See you next month, Markus

By the way, I teach people how to code in Solidity and get hired as a Blockchain Developer in the most efficient way possible. Come check out a few of our Blockchain & Web3 Courses below and try out some of the free preview lessons.