My foray into Ethereum and creating something of value for a global ecosystem

In December 2015, I left the company world of banking. I would spent the earlier 10 or so years constructing expertise platforms within the monetary providers trade, a spot that was filled with sensible folks, however a working surroundings that wasn’t conducive to my manner of being — too many conferences and processes. 

I am the type of one that thrives with selection and wanted to seek out an out (in reality within the years since then I’ve being formally identified as being on the autistic spectrum, which little doubt performs into this). 

The primary out was a failed startup, Huffle with a few nice co-founders. We tried to launch a brand new dwelling mortgage product in Australia, however shortly realized that convincing a financial institution to launch a product primarily based on a monetary mannequin you will have is just not simple. Particularly when a) you’re a tiny startup and b) this product received’t considerably transfer the needle initially for them so far as quantity is anxious. 

Because of this failed experiment, I would determined to begin wanting into this blockchain factor as Huffle was wound up. 

What I noticed then (this was round Could time 2016) was that Ethereum appeared to be the blockchain platform that many of the buzz was about — in the event you searched blockchain in Google, I am fairly positive Ethereum was the very first thing that got here up. Though it wasn’t notably clear what it was from the web site again then.

 

 My Ether mining rig

Articles like this have been frequent, even again in 2016 

Given my expertise, I observed a transparent hole out there. How have been all of those monetary providers corporations which had spent the earlier 15 years constructing platforms on Java going to hook them into the Ethereum community — in my opinion probably the most promising blockchain expertise? 

Scratching beneath the floor, it was clear there was no simple manner for Java builders to work with Ethereum. I used to be shocked! It was such an apparent alternative! Absolutely another person will need to have considered it by now? In any case, this was halfway by 2016, the Ethereum community had been stay for a 12 months (it launched on the thirtieth July 2015). 

I frolicked researching quite a few code repositories on GitHub and located libraries for JavaScript, Microsoft’s .NET platform, however nothing for Java (Notice: there was an early Ethereum node implementation — EthereumJ, however this was for working a node, not merely integrating with the community which is totally different). 

I used to be jittery with pleasure. Often, the issue that engineers face when making an attempt to do greenfield improvement (constructing one thing from scratch), is that invariably somebody has overwhelmed you to it and it would not make sense to handcraft every part your self.

It was time to begin making a prototype. 

With a purpose to speak to a node on the Ethereum community, it’s a must to join with a protocol known as JSON-RPC. JSON-RPC is similar protocol that’s used to speak with nodes on the Bitcoin community (quite a lot of implementation particulars of Ethereum have been copied from Bitcoin, similar to JSON-RPC, and the Secp256k1 elliptic curve used for cryptographic operations). 

There have been a ton of various technique requests and responses I wanted to implement, starting from getting details about the node software program being run to the transactions inside a block. As soon as I would applied a couple of and nonetheless hadn’t discovered a library doing something comparable, I used to be able to commit, and make this mission a actuality. 

I spoke to my spouse, we would had our first child a couple of months earlier and I mentioned to her that I will must correctly get my head into it for a couple of weeks to get this primary model achieved. This meant spending as a lot time as was humanly attainable dedicated to the library.

I used to be at dwelling, so after I wanted a break I might hang around with my son which was lucky in these early years of his improvement. 

In these weeks the times simply whizzed by, I would get in entrance of my pc as early as I might, put my cans on, get into the zone, and earlier than I knew it one other day was over. 

The primary commits to Web3j

This carried on till I had one thing that supplied the core performance to work with Ethereum. In my naïvety, I had thought the JSON-RPC implementation was all that was required. 

Nonetheless, I shortly found that to do something significant with Ethereum, you needed to additionally help the creation of wallets, signing of transactions and the power to create, deploy and work together with sensible contracts. This saved me busy. Particularly as I did not simply wish to create any outdated integration library, I needed to create a high-quality library, with glorious documentation and construct a group round it. 

The naming of the library was simple — Web3j. The reason being that just about anybody who labored with Java was conscious of the main logging library — Log4j, plus you additionally had the JavaScript integration library web3.js. Web3j spoke to what the library was completely in my opinion.

Web3j’s first ever situation!

Momentum slowly began to construct. By the top of November, 4 totally different folks I had by no means met earlier than had contributed to the library, and I needed to begin focusing my energies past simply writing the library and fixing bugs. 

The primary pull requests submitted by folks I had by no means met to Web3j!

It was time to take a position time within the documentation and take into consideration how I might promote Web3j and construct a group round it, such because the beneath speak I gave in early 2017 (which has has over 60k views). 

That is the place the exhausting work actually began, and seven years in I’m glad to say the mission remains to be going robust. We’ve been lucky that just about 200 folks have made contributions to the library and it’s been downloaded over 2 million instances! While I’m now not contributing to it myself as of late, the crew at Web3 Labs are. There may be additionally a gentle stream of recent customers.

Earlier this 12 months I used to be at an occasion the place workers from a serious American financial institution talked about how helpful they have been discovering Web3j for his or her work with blockchain. This and quite a few comparable conversations over time reaffirm that I made the precise choice all these years in the past in creating it. 

The overwhelming majority of open supply software program is a present to the world. It solves an issue that individuals have. In Web3j’s case it was utilizing one of many world’s most generally used programming languages, Java to develop on Ethereum. I’m proud that I took the time to create this all these years in the past, and I wouldn’t change something in that respect.