Curating the Kadena.js Dev Experience: 2022–2023
"The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it”
Abraham Lincoln
I knew I had a tough challenge ahead when I joined the Kadena team in April 2022 with the goal of creating a unique Dev Experience team. I was new to crypto and had to learn the ins-and- outs of a wildly complicated industry. I also knew I could bring great value because of my extensive engineering background and passion for front-end development. With the confidence and freedom the founders of Kadena, Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, gave me, I knew that I could flourish and that I could create something quite special.
For the first couple of months at Kadena, I took time to learn about the industry and the current dev experience. I researched other companies, looked at how they tackled similar problems, and found inspiration for many great ideas to improve the Kadena dev experience. Soon after, in June 2022, I turned my focus to developing and growing our Javascript community. We have hired some of the industry’s most brilliant and visionary developers, both crypto and non-crypto, and have established different insights and created a diverse team.
Shortly after, the team began migrating all the old libraries to a new Monorepo called KadenaJS for the purpose of adding TypeScript support. We migrated pact-lang-api and subsequently created a whole new JavaScript experience for interacting with our smart contracts with @kadena/client and @kadena/pactjs-cli, clearing the path for enabling interaction with deployed smart contracts without the need to write Pact code. In addition, we also created and designed new tools, tutorials, and apps, such as Cookbook, @kadena/chainweb-node-client, @kadena/cryptography-utils, and much, much more. All the details of what we accomplished in the last 6 months are outlined in our 2022 Year in Review.
Perhaps most excitingly, in December 2022, the team launched the Kadena Learning Tutorials Platform, a new comprehensive educational program specifically designed to provide developers and users with a fun and lighthearted introduction to Pact and Kadena.js. Since our announcement, we have worked very hard to release our first tutorial, which we will test internally in the coming weeks. If it pans out, we will select 20 community members to gain access to our beta platform, who will hopefully help us find bugs and improve our learning experience.
Going forward in 2023, our Kadena.js community can expect some amazing advancements. Specifically, we aim to launch new tools (IDE support for VSCode, IDE Support for IntelliJ etc.), apps (Multi-tx signing tools, Balance Checker, Rebuild of the Transfer Tool, etc.), and tutorials (Todo App, Wallet, Voting, ZK, and more). Be sure to check out Kadena’s 2023 Live Roadmap for a list of all the amazing things the developer experience team will achieve this year!
I can honestly say the developer experience team is on the road to creating something breathtaking. I am proud to say that we are now 12 devs strong and have made enormous progress since our department launched. My fellow Kadenians… 2023 will be the year we take the biggest leap yet to improve our ecosystem, and with your help, we will facilitate growth as we have never seen before.
🚀 🚀 🧑🏾🚀 Let’s create a future together! 👩🏻🚀 🚀 🚀
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