Presented at All Things Open 2022 Presented by Andrew Day Title: DevEx in Ethereum - a look at the developer stack Abstract: A look into the current developer experience for Ethereum, focusing on the Javascript/Typescript ecosystem of tools and tooling available to developers. We will explore the Ethereum ecosystem from a developer standpoint by looking at 3 Javascript based tools for interacting with Ethereum: - Back-end - The EthereumJS libraries form building blocks for developer tooling, allowing Javascript developers to build with every part of the Ethereum core infrastructure. These libraries cover everything from transactions and blocks, to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (the heart of Ethereum's value proposition), to the networking layer (devp2p) and an experimental Ethereum client. - Front-end - The Ethers SDK is used by a large swath of Ethereum dapps to interact with the blockchain and is one of the premier toolkits for dapp builders needing a swiss army knife of of tools for pulling data from the chain and also creating transactions to interact with the chain. - Full-stack- Hardhat is a fully fledged development environment for Ethereum dapp developers built in Javascript/ Typescript. It provides everything you need to prototype and build smart contracts, deploy them in a local testnet, and then deploy to mainnet when ready. Attendee takeaways: Coming out of this session, attendees will have an overview of the Ethereum ecosystem told from a Javascript developer's point of view and have a starting point for digging deeper into the tools available to them as they starting building on Ethereum.

1. Ethereum
Built on Javascript (not really, but let’s roll with it)

2. Show of hands if you:

3. Show of hands if you:
have ever written Solidity

4. Show of hands if you:
have ever written Solidity
have Metamask installed (on mobile or web)

5. Show of hands if you:
have ever written Solidity
have Metamask installed (on mobile or web)
know what geth is

6. and that they overthrew the quarians?

7. Definitions
Blockchain – distributed ledger
Smart contract platform – a distributed database with stored procedures that can be deployed and
executed on-chain
Clients/Nodes - an application that maintain a local copy of the blockchain and participate in the peer to
peer network
Wallet - an application or piece of code that maintain’s a user’s private key that allows them to sign
transactions and interact with the blockchain

8. Fundamental concepts
History - blocks and transactions
State - current account balances and contract storage
Consensus - coming to agreement on the current tip of the chain and who gets to create the next block

9. The anatomy of an Ethereum (d)app
The chain - the server
The smart contract - the backend code (Solidity/Vyper/etc)
The frontend - your React/Vue/Svelte/etc app

10. Javascript in Ethereum
Backend - EthereumJS/Hardhat/Remix/Truffle/Ganache
Frontend - Ethers/Web3js

11. Backend
Ethereum primitives
Transactions - tx library - instructions for updating the state of the chain
Blocks - block library - units of chain history
Blockchain - blockchain library - the history of the chain
Merkle-Patricia Trie - trie library - the current state of the chain
VM - vm / evm / statemanager libraries - what runs the bytecode
Full Node - client - a Javascript implementation of the Ethereum full node
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12. vm
client
devp2p
block
blockchain
trie
statemanager evm
tx

13. Hardhat
Ethereum development environment – built on top of EthereumJS
Local development blockchain
Solidity compiler - built in smart contract compiler/deployment tools
Ethers plugin for easy smart contract testing (with types if you’re into that sort of thing)

14. Frontend – Ethers
A swiss army knife full of tools for connecting web apps to Ethereum
Provider - a standard API for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain
Can use a full node or a remote service provider
Contract - a wrapper object that simplifies interacting with smart contracts
Utilities - formatters and conversion utilities for switching between hex, bytes, and numbers

15. The bonus
All of the above are written in Typescript

16. Links

17. These slides

18. EthereumJS

19. Hardhat

20. Ethers