A place for talking about the Ethereum Virtual Machine on Farcaster.

- Keep all strings under 32 bytes
- Replace modifiers with internal functions
- Linked libraries 😈  

(cc @maks)

- Keep all strings under 32 bytes
- Replace modifiers with internal functions
- Linked libraries 😈  

(cc @maks)
https://warpcast.com/maks/0xb0fda8ff

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

terminally.online

What was your journey for mastering Solidity?

Chasing Curiosity. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Fullstack Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7. 
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

Would also love to know your answer to this @horsefacts.eth!

(cc @tayyab) I wouldn't claim mastery, but some influential steps along my path so far:

1) Several years of experience writing non smart contract software. Nothing too hardcore, mostly Ruby/Python/Clojure. Learned about testing, design, and not to fear weird languages and paradigms.

2) Working on an EVM indexer. This exposed me to different abstraction layers of the EVM stack and how data crosses each boundary: execution client internals, EVM, Solidity, dapp architecture. I didn't know at the time, but I learned a lot that was later useful to understand Solidity.

4) Cheap EVM chains. Sidechains like xDAI and Polygon made it easier for me to build and experiment. Prior to these I had lots of projects that never made it off testnet. I think I paid $300 to deploy my first serious mainnet project, now I had a place I could do it for ten cents.

5) Working in public, following others, reading a lot of code. There are still not that many EVM devs and everyone is interested in each other's work. Sharing what I'm working on and reading code from other projects has always been important. A lot of knowledge is still folklore.

6) Participating in @code4rena contests. I'm a pretty midwit auditor, but this exposed me to lots of interesting code and new patterns from different domains, taught me a lot about thinking adversarially, and helped me calibrate my own intuition. Every dev should try it.

To summarize and extract some themes here:

- A good background in testing to feel confident I was building safely
- Learning about the abstraction layers below Solidity in the EVM stack
- Finding cheap ways to experiment and iterate
- Reading a lot of code and learning from others

3) NFTs. Although I thought smart contracts were interesting, I was hesitant to write my own for a long time. The teams I'd worked with had a very high bar for safety and I didn't feel ready to program other people's (fake internet) money. Suddenly there was a domain that wasn't quite as high stakes as DeFi.