Ep. #106, Blockchain Infrastructure with Anthony Campolo of QuickNode

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another episode of the JAMstack Radio. On the line we've got Anthony Campolo back again. Welcome, how are you doing?

Anthony Campolo: Hello, I'm doing great. It's been almost close to two years now since I was on, last time I was with you was September, 2020. We were in the thick of the pandemic still and I was just getting started really.

I hadn't even gotten a job by that point, I wasn't even on the Redwood team by that point, so it was really great to get a chance to have a platform like that as a pretty much total noob. But I'm on my second job now so you missed me on my first job, I'm over here, went straight to the second one.

Brian: Yeah, we never had you on for StepZen, which StepZen is a great product. Folks definitely check it out. But today we're actually talking about QuickNode. I also want to make one quick point, for anybody who listened to the Redwood.JS episode years ago with Anthony, when Anthony reached out to me in a DM he was like, "Hey, let's talk about Redwood," so I invited him.

I think I got halfway through the conversation and realized he wasn't on the core team at that point, so I was like, "What's your involvement in the project?" Then since then you've joined the core team, I've chatted with Tom and David separately and mentioned how amazing that conversation was and how great of a job you were doing advocating Redwood.JS.

Anthony: That's awesome. Happy to hear that.

Brian: I just wanted to say that out loud. But we're not here to talk about Redwood or StepZen, we're here to talk about QuickNode. So do you want to give us what is a QuickNode or what is QuickNode?

Anthony: Yeah, so this can be a pretty big pivot for some people getting into what's known as the Web 3 world, so this is related to Blockhains, it's related to cryptocurrencies, it's related to all those different topics and we'll define a lot of these things as we go.

But the main thing is that QuickNode is infrastructure to build applications with all that stuff, so it's kind of like spinning up a digital ocean server or hosting something on Netlify. It's a dev tool that allows you to quickly and reliably and easily interact with production applications, these ones specifically being blockchain related.

Brian: Excellent. We're going to have to talk about the blockchain, so I'm curious, perhaps we could even start with dApps, what are dApps?

Anthony: Yeah, so a dApp is like an application you would have on the internet, on a phone app or just a web app that is interacting with some sort of data so you're thinking about... Lets just go with a to do app, so you have a to do app, it would usually be attached to a backend out there somewhere in the world which could be FIRE based or it could be a PostgreSQL database, or it could just be a static file on a CDN somewhere.

But a dApp is an application that has all this data living on the blockchain, so what does that mean, to be on the blockchain? The blockchain is not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's really just-- think of a database that a bunch of people have on their computer that needs to constantly stay in sync.

So I have a database, you have a database, we have one other buddy who has that same database. We would each have it on our computers and they would constantly stay in sync. So if you think about it, you could use it to record a ledge of transactions, so if you, me and your friend each have $10, I want to give you $5, then we would change my balance to $5 and your balance to $15.

We would need to do that on all three of the computers, and the idea being that if we all sync up on the state then no one can tamper with it, because if there's 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 of us all have this, if someone tries to introduce a fraudulent transaction, giving them say like $1,000,000, they couldn't do that because the rest of the nodes would connect together and say, "Hey, this is wrong. This is what people's actual balances are."

That's why it started as a mechanism for cryptocurrencies, but is now being used for more general purpose applications because now you can embed programs in the blockchain. It's not just like an account balance with an arbitrary number in it, it's actually a fully embeddable programming language that allows you to do any kind of logic you can think of that you can write in a computer program.

That's what Ethereum is. Ethereum is what introduced the concept of dApps, which is actual applications and not just currency. But now there's Solana, there's Avalanche, there's Polygon, there's a whole set of other blockchains, and QuickNode is multichain. So we have 13 chains that we support right now and that allows you to build dApps in a wide variety of different ecosystems.

Brian: Okay. How have you hit the ground running? What sort of things can people expect or how can people get started and jump in?

Anthony: Yeah, so the first thing I did actually is, the week before I actually started working there, they were like, "Hey, do you want to go do a talk in Amsterdam for ETH Amsterdam?" And I was like, "Uh, yeah." I'd actually never been to Europe, so this was my first chance traveling as a dev rail kind of person, because I've been doing this job only during the pandemic time so it was a chance to go to an actual in person conference, meet a ton of people, give an in person talk where I was actually in front of a projector screen with my slides and whatnot.

That is now recorded and online, so you can drop the link for that in the show notes. But the main stuff that I'm doing on a regular basis now is hanging out on the Discord, so just answering questions, making sure that people have a lifeline if they need it, and then I'm producing a weekly stream now.

Actually I just finished the first episode a couple of hours ago and that's going to be a range of solo streams where I build stuff out with QuickNode, the first one I did was deploying a smart contract to the Avalanche blockchain. It's just a Hello World, literally it says, "Hello," and you can change it to say a different message if you want to.

Then we'll also have guests on, so we're going to have Ben Holmes from Astro is going to be one of our first guests, so I'm going to show how to connect Astro to a blockchain. It's kind of a Learn With Jason or Alex Trost's Frontend Horse style stream, those are two influences that I have.

But I really love streaming, I actually led some streams for StepZen, which didn't really go super well. I think because there was this need to always shoehorn StepZen in in a way that I felt was inorganic. Whereas with these it's a little easier to just not have to make it all about QuickNode all the time, so that's a fine line to walk.

Brian: Yeah. I don't come across a ton of streams or a lot of content around blockchain, I know Natter did a great job last year doing tons of great content for introducing folks to the blockchain and folks who were familiar with JAMStack and other places. So I see a great way for QuickNode or any other blockchain adjacent company to just expand the same because I think, at the moment...

My gripes against blockchain are very similar to everybody else's, it's very dense and sometimes it can be very opaque on how to get started. But what I love is your approach to it, connect it to JAMStack on locations because by default, I don't know if you've said this since we hit record, but you said it before we hit record, by default blockchain is JAMStack because it is separating your concerns.

Anthony: Yeah, because it has to be decoupled because you have the whole blockchain and then you have the frontend which is querying it. This is another thing that I definitely got from Natter because when Natter first made his full stack Ethereum tutorial, he did a very similar exercise to what I did today with Avalanche.

He had a simple bullet contract written in Solidity and then you have Hard Hat and Hard Hat is like your developer environment. It's a CLI and it has a configuration file so you can do configuration as code to take your RPC URL which is what actually connects you to the blockchain, and that's what you get from QuickNode, is the RPC URL.

You also have your private key for your wallet because you have a wallet, and then Hard Hat takes all of that and then deploys the contract for you with a short, little JavaScript script. Then once you've done that you have a contract address for the contract that you include in your React application that then can query it with another library called Ethers.js. So there's a handful of libraries that you have to learn but they're aimed at JavaScript devs, Hard Hat and Ethers.JS especially.

They work very, very similarly to any kind of JavaScript library CLI that you may have used. Then the only challenge is learning Solidity, which is its own programming language as to how you actually interact with the smart contract. But that's actually not the only one, there's also RUST based languages too for Solana, but Solidity is the first one most people learn.

Brian: Yeah. I did the full stack JavaScript core series that Natter put out, I did skim through your series of blog posts as well. I think what this comes down to is I think developers themselves, they want to be cutting edge, they want to know what the next thing is. I think that's very prevalent in the React ecosystem and the frontend JavaScript framework. But I'm curious, what is the ecosystem? What are we looking at when it comes to people getting started? Is there like React Inner View but for blockchain frameworks and services?

Anthony: There are lots of different chains, and that tends to be the organizing factor between people. So people who are into Ethereum, and then there's people who are into Solana and there's some crossover there, but there's also a competitive nature there because everyone's trying to be what's called the Ethereum Killer.

Because Ethereum, it was the first one to really establish itself as a way to write dApps with smart contracts and pioneered this whole paradigm and so they had a huge headstart and they're now the second most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. So there's also market caps associated with the coins that are associated with these blockchains, and so that tends to be what people get really riled up about because people have money in these things and it can be very challenging if you're putting your money into something that you don't really understand, you have no idea what it's going to do or how it's going to behave.

So you want to look at things that are established and have communities around them, and so I would say Ethereum community is the good one to look at and the Solana community is up and coming, the Avalanche community is really good. There's the Polygon community, there's a whole bunch of others that I'm still learning about, some of the other chains that we have on QuickNode.

But then there's also the dev tooling companies, those other companies that do kind of what QuickNode does. Most people will know about Alchemy or Fura if they're going to look for this kind of thing, so that's where you kind of have your Netlify versus your VerCell, versus CloudFront or Pages kind of thing. Then you have Open Sourced libraries which are the Hard Hats, the Ethers.js and those are more like the JavaScript frameworks because those are just GitHub things that you can just pull down, or MPN packages you install.

So there's basically a lot of Open Source stuff associated with it and then the blockchain itself has to be Open Source. This is actually one of the things that I actually find really interesting about this whole paradigm. While a lot of people will say, "What's the point of all this? What's the use case? Why are we doing all this?" We didn't really say any of that throughout this conversation yet.

For me, it's a really great way to have an application that is permissionless. Basically anyone can put up and interact with it and then you don't really need a company behind it necessarily. There are companies that are formed after the blockchains are created, but the blockchain is like a single, self sustaining entity that does its thing.

Once it's out there in the world it's going to behave in exactly the way it's coded, and everyone can see the code and there's no weird proprietary stuff that you don't really understand that is behind it. So I think that there's a level of transparency that comes along with it if you actually wrap your mind around what is this thing, and I just think that's really, really important for where we're going in the web and the need for transparency in the applications we're using.

Brian: Yeah, for sure. I'm curious, QuickNode, going back to the product that you work for. Folks can deploy blockchains in a lot of different places, and I think even in Azure and AWS, and I know that Google has an offering. But they all have an offering of how to get things deployed on chain, so why use QuickNode over an AWS?

Anthony: Yeah, so with an AWS you're going to be really managing that server, so you're going to need to pick your flavor of Linux, you're going to have to actually install the software for whichever you want to use and then you have to figure out how to expose it through an endpoint which then involves Node Route 53 or one of those things.

And so with QuickNode it's more like with something with Netlify where you just get an endpoint right away, you can start interacting with and it let's you basically pick whichever chain you want to connect to and then it'll spin up a node for that chain specifically. Then they give you an HTTP endpoint and then a web sockets end point and you also have the ability to add authentication to it, you can do any of that kind of measure... if you need to roll your key because it's been compromised or something like that, you can do that so that's really good.

Basically having tooling to quickly do any of these kind of tasks that are specific to blockchain, then also installing the software and getting it set up and attached to an endpoint right away. That's all the stuff that you would have to do yourself if you were using something like Amazon or if you were just hosting these nodes yourself.

Brian: Cool. Yeah, I'm curious though, what are examples of projects that you'd want to put on? Is there any benefits to putting stuff on chain as opposed to just reaching for some backend server like Railway, which I know you're a fan of, or other things?

Anthony: Yeah. So NFTs have become a really big use case right now and for me I think they're interesting. I don't think they're necessarily the be all, end all of what you can do with this stuff but I think it's a good mental exercise for people because it allows you to basically have an image be associated with a chunk of data on the blockchain.

This is a way to signify ownership because what it basically does is, because you have a wallet with keys and a password that you can sign transactions, it gives you the ability to do all this really advanced cryptography stuff that encryption experts have been able to do for a while. So PGP, pretty good privacy. We have a public key you can expose and then someone can basically send a message to that, but then they can keep themselves encrypted, you can be encrypted, it's that whole thing.

So you are able to really pinpoint and say, "I own this thing," because you can point to it on the blockchain, you can prove that it's yours by verifying and signing transactions, and that allows you to then use it as a way to either value and sell art between people because, if you think about it, it's ownership of a single, individual object.

So it's like owning a painting in that respect, so people associated it with images. Then there's communities that then get formed because they do a generative art project. The most famous was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Crypto Coven is another good one where they'll generate 10,000 images that are slight variations on a theme, like a bunch of bored looking apes or a bunch of wishes, something like that.

Then they sell their 10,000 of them and they have a starting price, then people buy in and they're in this club. There's also benefits that can come along with that, like you can get into events or things like that. So then it makes the NFT itself valuable, so if the group is something that people actually want to be in... The DeveloperDow is one that Natter formed, I'm in the DeveloperDow, I had to buy an NFT, that NFT was a couple hundred dollars which can seem like a lot.

It's actually extremely cheap for what some people are paying for NFTs, but the thing you get is you get access to a community of thousands of other blockchain developers who are all creating content and working on initiatives and putting together working groups.

It's a huge, huge thing so if you want to be a part of that then you have to get this NFT. But there's also usually scholarships that go along with it, so people want to get sponsored to get a DeveloperDow NFT, that's also possible. So this is all stuff that we can all just do ourselves with these tools and it doesn't require a company sponsoring these things or putting it together or doing any of that, so it's like a self organizing force.

So yeah, it's a whole thing. When people talk about NFTs they talk about certain, individual aspects of this whole thing, but you have to take it all together to get what's going on.

Brian: Yeah. We keep alluding to Natter too as well, because we both obviously chatted with him. He seems like he'd be the person that's brought a lot of folks in, and I'm familiar with the DeveloperDow because I had chatted with Natter last summer about using NFTs, rather than selling artwork but more of like, what do you call them? The community coins, like with the Marines they have the coin check where if you're part of a certain cohort or battalion... I didn't serve so I'm not sure what I'm saying right now.

But you get basically a challenge coin and the challenge coin is to show that you're part of a community, and I think the DOWs, it's a very similar experience where, yes, you buy in but it's also like a fraternity or a sorority where now you're part of a cohort of developers which can be very, very valuable. But also it sounds like a union, doesn't it?

Anthony: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. It sounds like a lot of things, so it's really unique in the blockchain world but it's not unique in the regular world. It's like people who work in clubs and in professional societies and things like that. But the interesting blockchain stuff can come in where then once you have an NFT you can also then have ability to vote on changes or initiatives or things like that so there's also this whole governance aspect that goes along with this.

To where there's going to be a specific coin for the DeveloperDow, so based on how many coins you have you can vote on different issues, so this stuff can get dicey if it becomes kind of like a mob rule thing. There was a case recently where basically someone was accused of something and then a bunch of people voted to just take their funds away essentially, and so because the governance mechanism was set up against the blockchain, it actually allowed the manipulation of someone's balance which is what the blockchain was supposed to guard against in the first place.

But if you don't have something like that, then you can't even stop it, it just goes and runs, you can't change it, you can't update it. So the built in governance mechanisms and the ability to change the blockchain is really important, but you have to really think about what do you want to give the ability to do after the fact once its deployed. So yeah, there's so much stuff.

Brian: Yeah. It sounds like even in your role where you said, would it make sense for developer communities? Not just DeveloperDow, obviously, but imagine, pick a random React library or a JavaScript library, create a DOW around that library in general. Do you think that's a possibility that people move forward with more developer communities picking up DOWs as a governance model?

Anthony: I mean, it's a possibility. It would be a question of would this be a separate DOW that would be set up, that's separate from the core team, where the core team try and create a DOW because... It wouldn't really make any sense unless it's the people who are actually working on it actually are the DOW, and I don't see that happening any time soon with most of these projects.

Mostly because a lot of people in Web 2 are actively hostile towards Web 3, and there's plenty of bad things about Web 3. I haven't really given the disclaimer and all that kind of stuff, but I've been working in this space, I believe in this space, there's a lot of good things that can come from it, but like anything in life it can lead to bad things as well.

Giving people more control or more power and more autonomy over their funds can actually be a bad thing because then it means it's easier to lose it, it's easier to spend it on something dumb and so you really have to take this stuff seriously and go at it carefully and do your research and understand what you're actually getting involved in because you can lose a lot of money.

A lot of people lose a lot of money really fast. There's this huge, ridiculous scandal with the Terrablock form.

Brian: I'm not familiar.

Anthony: This is tense. This is an idea of an algorithmic stablecoin, so this is the idea that you want to have a coin that doesn't go up and down in price because cryptocurrencies are very volatile, they're always going up and down and you want to have one that's like... If I have a dollar, I want it to be a dollar tomorrow so you peg it to the US dollar. Although this has been done previously with things like Tether, you have collateral.

So there was a company that said, "We have a billion dollars so you can use a billion Tethers. If anyone wants to cash out, we can give you the actual dollars." But Terra has an algorithmic stablecoin that basically means there's one coin associated with the blockchain and another coin that's the stablecoin. So as the stablecoin needs to be balanced up or down, the other coin gets burned so it's like the opposite of printing money.

The way that the Fed usually changes the money supply is it prints more money or they raise interest rates, and so it's like quantitative easing. It's a way to try and create a financial mechanism built into the coins. But basically it didn't work. It had $40 billion in it and it's gone almost totally to zero, it's just been a complete travesty, just wiped out huge, huge, huge amounts of people's money and now there's a huge scandal around it. It's really bad, and so this is the type of stuff that makes people look at blockchain, cryptocurrency and say, "This is all a scam. This is all a Ponzi scheme."

I understand that, because it's bad news and people were betting on something incredibly risky without really understanding the risks and the possibilities. People were saying this could've happened, there were a lot of people who also predicted this so it's not like this stuff comes out of nowhere. It's that people don't do the proper research and didn't really understand what they were getting into.

Brian: Yeah, even what you mentioned, a little pushback on the Web 2 hostility. I think the hostility towards blockchain is... I agree there's risk involved, but also I think we need to solve problems together and when the hype is higher than the actual contribution to the code then you don't really get a lot of progress. You get a lot of hype, and I think we saw that. Now, at the recording of this podcast, Bitcoin is less than 30K I think. At least it was this morning, and it was 69 in the last year or something like that.

So I guess what I'm getting at is people were probably writing less code on blockchain last year and they might be writing more code now, but it might just be the people who are really invested in solving the problems. I know there's an environmental impact for things like Ethereum, that's a problem that can't be solved. The answer could be to not use Ethereum, use something else. Or the answer could be, "Hey, let's contribute code to solve this problem." But at the end of the day, when there's so much noise and hype and no ones actually really talking about solutions but more about issues on top of issues, then there's not a lot of progress.

I did a whole series on building on... I built a Next.JS app on top of the Zorb protocol, which is an NFT protocol and in my experience in doing this, I found that caching is really challenging. So if you get an NFT that's like four gigabytes because it's a moving video, where am I going to deploy that? And then as soon as someone uses it, I run through all their bandwidth or something like that?

So there wasn't a real good solution and I think CloudFlare, they offered a solution for IPFS to be able to cache that in cache IPFS URLs, which is a good solution to step forward. If you want to draw a distinction between Web 2 and Web 3, a Web 2 company is now supporting Web 3, but at the end of the day, I think we all win when there's no Web 3 or Web 2, it's just the Web.

Anthony: Yeah, that's why I try and be conscious of people who are hostile to Web 2 and understand it, and not take it as an insult or a sleight because they're completely entitled to think that. It's like they're saying, "You need to prove to us that this actually does what you're saying it all does." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's totally valid. You people should be skeptical of this stuff, people should ask the hard questions."

That's why I really try and focus on creating content that actually shows you how to do this stuff, actually what is a smart contract, how do you deploy that smart contract. Because people can talk about these things, but until they actually start working with them it's all very abstract.

I'm trying to explain this stuff to my girlfriend, and I'm like, "You need to create a Coinbase account and buy like $5 in some cryptocurrency. That's all you gotta do. You're going to understand it so much more, so much better." I recommend people do that, and then you can start to form a more nuanced opinion of it, and then start to try and see, okay, what is the hype? What is not the hype? Why are people actually not this? Why are they excited by it? And always keeping that dialog open.

Now I have tons and tons of Web 2 friends and people who aren't really into blockchain at all, and it's really interesting, having conversations with people about it because some people think it could be interesting, could be good. Some people are just like, "No, I don't want to have anything to do with that." So yeah, we're still working on earning trust and that trust can be easily lost and so we need to think really carefully about how we promote this stuff and how we talk about it.

Brian: I appreciate you being in this space and talking about it and sharing, because I enjoy your content, follow you on Dev and Twitter as well so I would love for you to keep it up and would love for folks to check out QuickNode because it's definitely a tool and it's making it easier for you to build stuff on top of the blockchain. With that, I want to transition us to picks. This is music, food, can be tech related. Everything's on the table basically.

Anthony: All of the things?

Brian: Yeah. And speaking of all the things, you've got a couple of picks so do you want to go ahead and go first?

Anthony: Yeah, my picks are some developer Discords, and you were one of the first people that got me into developer Discords with Open Sauced. I had joined that and then started joining some others right around the same time, so the ones that I'm going to recommend are, first is Lunch Dev. This is originally the React Podcast Discord from Michael Chan, and he now has this Discord that we rebranded to Lunch Dev because it's not React specific really.

There's all sorts of channels and topics related to JavaScript or TypeScript or GraphQL or CSS, different frameworks or just career advice, life advice, or just hang out, movies, music, all that kind of stuff. So that's great, then there's also the Frontend Horse Discord which is Alex Trost, and they're more heavy on creative coding and more of like the front of the front end, CSS and stuff like that.

But there's also lots of JavaScript conversations going on there. Since this is JAMstack Radio, we should mention the JamStack Discord which now has been running for a couple of months and replaced the JAMStack Slack which not a lot of people were really using. So I'm really happy to see that.

Brian: Didn't even know they had a Slack.

Anthony: Yeah. So there's a Discord now, and yeah, Demetrious is heading that up. This is all I want to do, I'm in so many developer Discords now, I don't have the time for all of them. But they're a great way to connect with people, to have a lifeline to others who are doing similar stuff and maybe will help you fix bugs or you can just have a jam. But then also-

Brian: No pun intended.

Anthony: Yeah. It's a way to get your content out there and a way to get people to see your content and give you feedback on it, then you start building partnerships and just all sorts of good stuff.

Brian: Yeah, for sure. The Slack thing threw me because when I was a Netlify we didn't have a Slack, the one thing I noticed in dev rail is a lot of companies have Slacks with 10,000 plus people and it's cool, but hard to manage and it becomes a customer support nightmare. What I love about Discord is there's an evolution of access which makes it really nice for having folks who only talk in this corner or have this corner that they own, but then they can the rest of the Discord for mods and admins and stuff like that.

So it's a great dev rail tool, so if anybody is not in these Discords, definitely check them out. I did have some picks too as well. My first pick is Fig, Fig.io, it's a terminal. They started with autocomplete, so it provides autocompletion to your terminal in a way that it just works. I love it. It's Open Source and you can provide extensions and plugins to it. So definitely check it out if you work on any sort of CLI tools, a great extension for Fig.

Their goal, it works in every terminal, they just added JetBrains. But what I love about it is when I started, I set up my new machine, I got the new M1 MacBook Pro. I went with the 16, but I kind of wish I went with the 14, but that's a whole nother conversation. I got the 16 M1 and I set up my machine pretty quickly, the one thing that threw me off is that the M1s now come with ZSH by default, no longer BASH.

They haven't changed that since 2000 and something. So I had to think of a whole nother set up for setting up GSH, and I'm like, "If I'm going to start new, I should just install Fig and let that install everything for me."Well, it doesn't install, so not really. But it gives you autocomplete to know what is available to you. I'm not giving it the best justice, but you should definitely check out Fig. I don't know. Anthony, have you checked out Fig?

Anthony: Yeah, I did try Fig. I thought it was good. There's a lot of terminal tools out there these days. I don't think they all work together, so you have to go with one. This one I'm using, Warp, right now. I really like it, I'm already used to it, so it's super hard to get me to switch off of it. But Fig was really cool too. I don't use a regular terminal, let me just put it that way. There's much better options out there.

Brian: Yeah, for sure. I don't think I'd ever go back to just normal terminal. I do also have Warp installed on the machine. I haven't used it. I'll need to use it for a couple of projects because I know it's bringing a lot more to the table and that's what I wasn't ready for yet, so I'll have to give it another try. I did want to also do one more pick which, funny enough, I was talking to Michael Chan at the recent Reactathon and we were talking about keyboards and how he uses DVORAK and also uses blank key caps, and how much better a typer he is because of the blank key caps.

So I'm just going to shout out my keyboard which is the KeyChron Case X. I love it because it connects to my Mac and my PC, so I don't know if you've ever noticed while I'm streaming that I can just click this one little slide button and it goes back and forwards between the PC and the Mac. So you can connect multiple keyboards to one, I used to have the whole streaming setup where I had two keyboards on the desk at the same time and then tons of water cups. It was a mess. Well, the water cups are still here but at least I only have one keyboard.

Anthony: Yeah. It reminds me of Mavis Beacon, learning the home row.

Brian: Yeah, it goes a long way. I don't think I really took it seriously until I started writing code. I could probably type papers pretty good, like 50 words per minute, 60. I don't know what's good. But for writing code it's perfect, especially if you use VIM which I do use VIM.

Anthony: Yeah, never got into VIM but I can type pretty fast. I did a lot of Mavis Beacon in middle school.

Brian: We should have a competition for developers' typing words per minute and see, because I bet you there are some devs out there who probably, including yourself it sounds like, have some serious Dev EPM.

Anthony: Yeah, I could get up to 90, I think, when I was back in my prime. I might not still be there, but yeah, it's fun. It's useful if you spend as much time typing as I do.

Brian: Excellent. Well, I really enjoyed having this conversation about just general blockchain, but also exposing us to QuickNode. Folks, again, check it out, reach out to Anthony, he's on @AJCWebDev on Twitter and pretty much everywhere else I believe.

Anthony: Yeah, yeah. And check out QuickNode.com. You can get started and just host a node and see what it's like. Right now we have a seven day free trial and then after that it's $10 per node, but we may be adjusting our pricing structure soon so keep an eye out for that.

Brian: Okay, excellent. And listeners, keep spreading the Jam.

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another episode of the JAMstack Radio. On the line we've got Anthony Campolo back again. Welcome, how are you doing? Anthony Campolo: Hello, I'm doing great. It's been almost close to two years now since I was on, last time I was with you was September, 2020. We were in the thick of the pandemic still and I was just getting started really. I hadn't even gotten a job by that point, I wasn't even on the Redwood team by that point, so it was really great to get a chance to have a platform like that as a pretty much total noob. But I'm on my second job now so you missed me on my first job, I'm over here, went straight to the second one. Brian: Yeah, we never had you on for StepZen, which StepZen is a great product. Folks definitely check it out. But today we're actually talking about QuickNode. I also want to make one quick point, for anybody who listened to the Redwood.JS episode years ago with Anthony, when Anthony reached out to me in a DM he was like, "Hey, let's talk about Redwood," so I invited him. I think I got halfway through the conversation and realized he wasn't on the core team at that point, so I was like, "What's your involvement in the project?" Then since then you've joined the core team, I've chatted with Tom and David separately and mentioned how amazing that conversation was and how great of a job you were doing advocating Redwood.JS. Anthony: That's awesome. Happy to hear that. Brian: I just wanted to say that out loud. But we're not here to talk about Redwood or StepZen, we're here to talk about QuickNode. So do you want to give us what is a QuickNode or what is QuickNode? Anthony: Yeah, so this can be a pretty big pivot for some people getting into what's known as the Web 3 world, so this is related to Blockhains, it's related to cryptocurrencies, it's related to all those different topics and we'll define a lot of these things as we go. But the main thing is that QuickNode is infrastructure to build applications with all that stuff, so it's kind of like spinning up a digital ocean server or hosting something on Netlify. It's a dev tool that allows you to quickly and reliably and easily interact with production applications, these ones specifically being blockchain related. Brian: Excellent. We're going to have to talk about the blockchain, so I'm curious, perhaps we could even start with dApps, what are dApps? Anthony: Yeah, so a dApp is like an application you would have on the internet, on a phone app or just a web app that is interacting with some sort of data so you're thinking about... Lets just go with a to do app, so you have a to do app, it would usually be attached to a backend out there somewhere in the world which could be FIRE based or it could be a PostgreSQL database, or it could just be a static file on a CDN somewhere. But a dApp is an application that has all this data living on the blockchain, so what does that mean, to be on the blockchain? The blockchain is not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's really just-- think of a database that a bunch of people have on their computer that needs to constantly stay in sync. So I have a database, you have a database, we have one other buddy who has that same database. We would each have it on our computers and they would constantly stay in sync. So if you think about it, you could use it to record a ledge of transactions, so if you, me and your friend each have $10, I want to give you $5, then we would change my balance to $5 and your balance to $15. We would need to do that on all three of the computers, and the idea being that if we all sync up on the state then no one can tamper with it, because if there's 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 of us all have this, if someone tries to introduce a fraudulent transaction, giving them say like $1,000,000, they couldn't do that because the rest of the nodes would connect together and say, "Hey, this is wrong. This is what people's actual balances are." That's why it started as a mechanism for cryptocurrencies, but is now being used for more general purpose applications because now you can embed programs in the blockchain. It's not just like an account balance with an arbitrary number in it, it's actually a fully embeddable programming language that allows you to do any kind of logic you can think of that you can write in a computer program. That's what Ethereum is. Ethereum is what introduced the concept of dApps, which is actual applications and not just currency. But now there's Solana, there's Avalanche, there's Polygon, there's a whole set of other blockchains, and QuickNode is multichain. So we have 13 chains that we support right now and that allows you to build dApps in a wide variety of different ecosystems. Brian: Okay. How have you hit the ground running? What sort of things can people expect or how can people get started and jump in? Anthony: Yeah, so the first thing I did actually is, the week before I actually started working there, they were like, "Hey, do you want to go do a talk in Amsterdam for ETH Amsterdam?" And I was like, "Uh, yeah." I'd actually never been to Europe, so this was my first chance traveling as a dev rail kind of person, because I've been doing this job only during the pandemic time so it was a chance to go to an actual in person conference, meet a ton of people, give an in person talk where I was actually in front of a projector screen with my slides and whatnot. That is now recorded and online, so you can drop the link for that in the show notes. But the main stuff that I'm doing on a regular basis now is hanging out on the Discord, so just answering questions, making sure that people have a lifeline if they need it, and then I'm producing a weekly stream now. Actually I just finished the first episode a couple of hours ago and that's going to be a range of solo streams where I build stuff out with QuickNode, the first one I did was deploying a smart contract to the Avalanche blockchain. It's just a Hello World, literally it says, "Hello," and you can change it to say a different message if you want to. Then we'll also have guests on, so we're going to have Ben Holmes from Astro is going to be one of our first guests, so I'm going to show how to connect Astro to a blockchain. It's kind of a Learn With Jason or Alex Trost's Frontend Horse style stream, those are two influences that I have. But I really love streaming, I actually led some streams for StepZen, which didn't really go super well. I think because there was this need to always shoehorn StepZen in in a way that I felt was inorganic. Whereas with these it's a little easier to just not have to make it all about QuickNode all the time, so that's a fine line to walk. Brian: Yeah. I don't come across a ton of streams or a lot of content around blockchain, I know Natter did a great job last year doing tons of great content for introducing folks to the blockchain and folks who were familiar with JAMStack and other places. So I see a great way for QuickNode or any other blockchain adjacent company to just expand the same because I think, at the moment... My gripes against blockchain are very similar to everybody else's, it's very dense and sometimes it can be very opaque on how to get started. But what I love is your approach to it, connect it to JAMStack on locations because by default, I don't know if you've said this since we hit record, but you said it before we hit record, by default blockchain is JAMStack because it is separating your concerns. Anthony: Yeah, because it has to be decoupled because you have the whole blockchain and then you have the frontend which is querying it. This is another thing that I definitely got from Natter because when Natter first made his full stack Ethereum tutorial, he did a very similar exercise to what I did today with Avalanche. He had a simple bullet contract written in Solidity and then you have Hard Hat and Hard Hat is like your developer environment. It's a CLI and it has a configuration file so you can do configuration as code to take your RPC URL which is what actually connects you to the blockchain, and that's what you get from QuickNode, is the RPC URL. You also have your private key for your wallet because you have a wallet, and then Hard Hat takes all of that and then deploys the contract for you with a short, little JavaScript script. Then once you've done that you have a contract address for the contract that you include in your React application that then can query it with another library called Ethers.js. So there's a handful of libraries that you have to learn but they're aimed at JavaScript devs, Hard Hat and Ethers.JS especially. They work very, very similarly to any kind of JavaScript library CLI that you may have used. Then the only challenge is learning Solidity, which is its own programming language as to how you actually interact with the smart contract. But that's actually not the only one, there's also RUST based languages too for Solana, but Solidity is the first one most people learn. Brian: Yeah. I did the full stack JavaScript core series that Natter put out, I did skim through your series of blog posts as well. I think what this comes down to is I think developers themselves, they want to be cutting edge, they want to know what the next thing is. I think that's very prevalent in the React ecosystem and the frontend JavaScript framework. But I'm curious, what is the ecosystem? What are we looking at when it comes to people getting started? Is there like React Inner View but for blockchain frameworks and services? Anthony: There are lots of different chains, and that tends to be the organizing factor between people. So people who are into Ethereum, and then there's people who are into Solana and there's some crossover there, but there's also a competitive nature there because everyone's trying to be what's called the Ethereum Killer. Because Ethereum, it was the first one to really establish itself as a way to write dApps with smart contracts and pioneered this whole paradigm and so they had a huge headstart and they're now the second most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. So there's also market caps associated with the coins that are associated with these blockchains, and so that tends to be what people get really riled up about because people have money in these things and it can be very challenging if you're putting your money into something that you don't really understand, you have no idea what it's going to do or how it's going to behave. So you want to look at things that are established and have communities around them, and so I would say Ethereum community is the good one to look at and the Solana community is up and coming, the Avalanche community is really good. There's the Polygon community, there's a whole bunch of others that I'm still learning about, some of the other chains that we have on QuickNode. But then there's also the dev tooling companies, those other companies that do kind of what QuickNode does. Most people will know about Alchemy or Fura if they're going to look for this kind of thing, so that's where you kind of have your Netlify versus your VerCell, versus CloudFront or Pages kind of thing. Then you have Open Sourced libraries which are the Hard Hats, the Ethers.js and those are more like the JavaScript frameworks because those are just GitHub things that you can just pull down, or MPN packages you install. So there's basically a lot of Open Source stuff associated with it and then the blockchain itself has to be Open Source. This is actually one of the things that I actually find really interesting about this whole paradigm. While a lot of people will say, "What's the point of all this? What's the use case? Why are we doing all this?" We didn't really say any of that throughout this conversation yet. For me, it's a really great way to have an application that is permissionless. Basically anyone can put up and interact with it and then you don't really need a company behind it necessarily. There are companies that are formed after the blockchains are created, but the blockchain is like a single, self sustaining entity that does its thing. Once it's out there in the world it's going to behave in exactly the way it's coded, and everyone can see the code and there's no weird proprietary stuff that you don't really understand that is behind it. So I think that there's a level of transparency that comes along with it if you actually wrap your mind around what is this thing, and I just think that's really, really important for where we're going in the web and the need for transparency in the applications we're using. Brian: Yeah, for sure. I'm curious, QuickNode, going back to the product that you work for. Folks can deploy blockchains in a lot of different places, and I think even in Azure and AWS, and I know that Google has an offering. But they all have an offering of how to get things deployed on chain, so why use QuickNode over an AWS? Anthony: Yeah, so with an AWS you're going to be really managing that server, so you're going to need to pick your flavor of Linux, you're going to have to actually install the software for whichever you want to use and then you have to figure out how to expose it through an endpoint which then involves Node Route 53 or one of those things. And so with QuickNode it's more like with something with Netlify where you just get an endpoint right away, you can start interacting with and it let's you basically pick whichever chain you want to connect to and then it'll spin up a node for that chain specifically. Then they give you an HTTP endpoint and then a web sockets end point and you also have the ability to add authentication to it, you can do any of that kind of measure... if you need to roll your key because it's been compromised or something like that, you can do that so that's really good. Basically having tooling to quickly do any of these kind of tasks that are specific to blockchain, then also installing the software and getting it set up and attached to an endpoint right away. That's all the stuff that you would have to do yourself if you were using something like Amazon or if you were just hosting these nodes yourself. Brian: Cool. Yeah, I'm curious though, what are examples of projects that you'd want to put on? Is there any benefits to putting stuff on chain as opposed to just reaching for some backend server like Railway, which I know you're a fan of, or other things? Anthony: Yeah. So NFTs have become a really big use case right now and for me I think they're interesting. I don't think they're necessarily the be all, end all of what you can do with this stuff but I think it's a good mental exercise for people because it allows you to basically have an image be associated with a chunk of data on the blockchain. This is a way to signify ownership because what it basically does is, because you have a wallet with keys and a password that you can sign transactions, it gives you the ability to do all this really advanced cryptography stuff that encryption experts have been able to do for a while. So PGP, pretty good privacy. We have a public key you can expose and then someone can basically send a message to that, but then they can keep themselves encrypted, you can be encrypted, it's that whole thing. So you are able to really pinpoint and say, "I own this thing," because you can point to it on the blockchain, you can prove that it's yours by verifying and signing transactions, and that allows you to then use it as a way to either value and sell art between people because, if you think about it, it's ownership of a single, individual object. So it's like owning a painting in that respect, so people associated it with images. Then there's communities that then get formed because they do a generative art project. The most famous was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Crypto Coven is another good one where they'll generate 10,000 images that are slight variations on a theme, like a bunch of bored looking apes or a bunch of wishes, something like that. Then they sell their 10,000 of them and they have a starting price, then people buy in and they're in this club. There's also benefits that can come along with that, like you can get into events or things like that. So then it makes the NFT itself valuable, so if the group is something that people actually want to be in... The DeveloperDow is one that Natter formed, I'm in the DeveloperDow, I had to buy an NFT, that NFT was a couple hundred dollars which can seem like a lot. It's actually extremely cheap for what some people are paying for NFTs, but the thing you get is you get access to a community of thousands of other blockchain developers who are all creating content and working on initiatives and putting together working groups. It's a huge, huge thing so if you want to be a part of that then you have to get this NFT. But there's also usually scholarships that go along with it, so people want to get sponsored to get a DeveloperDow NFT, that's also possible. So this is all stuff that we can all just do ourselves with these tools and it doesn't require a company sponsoring these things or putting it together or doing any of that, so it's like a self organizing force. So yeah, it's a whole thing. When people talk about NFTs they talk about certain, individual aspects of this whole thing, but you have to take it all together to get what's going on. Brian: Yeah. We keep alluding to Natter too as well, because we both obviously chatted with him. He seems like he'd be the person that's brought a lot of folks in, and I'm familiar with the DeveloperDow because I had chatted with Natter last summer about using NFTs, rather than selling artwork but more of like, what do you call them? The community coins, like with the Marines they have the coin check where if you're part of a certain cohort or battalion... I didn't serve so I'm not sure what I'm saying right now. But you get basically a challenge coin and the challenge coin is to show that you're part of a community, and I think the DOWs, it's a very similar experience where, yes, you buy in but it's also like a fraternity or a sorority where now you're part of a cohort of developers which can be very, very valuable. But also it sounds like a union, doesn't it? Anthony: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. It sounds like a lot of things, so it's really unique in the blockchain world but it's not unique in the regular world. It's like people who work in clubs and in professional societies and things like that. But the interesting blockchain stuff can come in where then once you have an NFT you can also then have ability to vote on changes or initiatives or things like that so there's also this whole governance aspect that goes along with this. To where there's going to be a specific coin for the DeveloperDow, so based on how many coins you have you can vote on different issues, so this stuff can get dicey if it becomes kind of like a mob rule thing. There was a case recently where basically someone was accused of something and then a bunch of people voted to just take their funds away essentially, and so because the governance mechanism was set up against the blockchain, it actually allowed the manipulation of someone's balance which is what the blockchain was supposed to guard against in the first place. But if you don't have something like that, then you can't even stop it, it just goes and runs, you can't change it, you can't update it. So the built in governance mechanisms and the ability to change the blockchain is really important, but you have to really think about what do you want to give the ability to do after the fact once its deployed. So yeah, there's so much stuff. Brian: Yeah. It sounds like even in your role where you said, would it make sense for developer communities? Not just DeveloperDow, obviously, but imagine, pick a random React library or a JavaScript library, create a DOW around that library in general. Do you think that's a possibility that people move forward with more developer communities picking up DOWs as a governance model? Anthony: I mean, it's a possibility. It would be a question of would this be a separate DOW that would be set up, that's separate from the core team, where the core team try and create a DOW because... It wouldn't really make any sense unless it's the people who are actually working on it actually are the DOW, and I don't see that happening any time soon with most of these projects. Mostly because a lot of people in Web 2 are actively hostile towards Web 3, and there's plenty of bad things about Web 3. I haven't really given the disclaimer and all that kind of stuff, but I've been working in this space, I believe in this space, there's a lot of good things that can come from it, but like anything in life it can lead to bad things as well. Giving people more control or more power and more autonomy over their funds can actually be a bad thing because then it means it's easier to lose it, it's easier to spend it on something dumb and so you really have to take this stuff seriously and go at it carefully and do your research and understand what you're actually getting involved in because you can lose a lot of money. A lot of people lose a lot of money really fast. There's this huge, ridiculous scandal with the Terrablock form. Brian: I'm not familiar. Anthony: This is tense. This is an idea of an algorithmic stablecoin, so this is the idea that you want to have a coin that doesn't go up and down in price because cryptocurrencies are very volatile, they're always going up and down and you want to have one that's like... If I have a dollar, I want it to be a dollar tomorrow so you peg it to the US dollar. Although this has been done previously with things like Tether, you have collateral. So there was a company that said, "We have a billion dollars so you can use a billion Tethers. If anyone wants to cash out, we can give you the actual dollars." But Terra has an algorithmic stablecoin that basically means there's one coin associated with the blockchain and another coin that's the stablecoin. So as the stablecoin needs to be balanced up or down, the other coin gets burned so it's like the opposite of printing money. The way that the Fed usually changes the money supply is it prints more money or they raise interest rates, and so it's like quantitative easing. It's a way to try and create a financial mechanism built into the coins. But basically it didn't work. It had $40 billion in it and it's gone almost totally to zero, it's just been a complete travesty, just wiped out huge, huge, huge amounts of people's money and now there's a huge scandal around it. It's really bad, and so this is the type of stuff that makes people look at blockchain, cryptocurrency and say, "This is all a scam. This is all a Ponzi scheme." I understand that, because it's bad news and people were betting on something incredibly risky without really understanding the risks and the possibilities. People were saying this could've happened, there were a lot of people who also predicted this so it's not like this stuff comes out of nowhere. It's that people don't do the proper research and didn't really understand what they were getting into. Brian: Yeah, even what you mentioned, a little pushback on the Web 2 hostility. I think the hostility towards blockchain is... I agree there's risk involved, but also I think we need to solve problems together and when the hype is higher than the actual contribution to the code then you don't really get a lot of progress. You get a lot of hype, and I think we saw that. Now, at the recording of this podcast, Bitcoin is less than 30K I think. At least it was this morning, and it was 69 in the last year or something like that. So I guess what I'm getting at is people were probably writing less code on blockchain last year and they might be writing more code now, but it might just be the people who are really invested in solving the problems. I know there's an environmental impact for things like Ethereum, that's a problem that can't be solved. The answer could be to not use Ethereum, use something else. Or the answer could be, "Hey, let's contribute code to solve this problem." But at the end of the day, when there's so much noise and hype and no ones actually really talking about solutions but more about issues on top of issues, then there's not a lot of progress. I did a whole series on building on... I built a Next.JS app on top of the Zorb protocol, which is an NFT protocol and in my experience in doing this, I found that caching is really challenging. So if you get an NFT that's like four gigabytes because it's a moving video, where am I going to deploy that? And then as soon as someone uses it, I run through all their bandwidth or something like that? So there wasn't a real good solution and I think CloudFlare, they offered a solution for IPFS to be able to cache that in cache IPFS URLs, which is a good solution to step forward. If you want to draw a distinction between Web 2 and Web 3, a Web 2 company is now supporting Web 3, but at the end of the day, I think we all win when there's no Web 3 or Web 2, it's just the Web. Anthony: Yeah, that's why I try and be conscious of people who are hostile to Web 2 and understand it, and not take it as an insult or a sleight because they're completely entitled to think that. It's like they're saying, "You need to prove to us that this actually does what you're saying it all does." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's totally valid. You people should be skeptical of this stuff, people should ask the hard questions." That's why I really try and focus on creating content that actually shows you how to do this stuff, actually what is a smart contract, how do you deploy that smart contract. Because people can talk about these things, but until they actually start working with them it's all very abstract. I'm trying to explain this stuff to my girlfriend, and I'm like, "You need to create a Coinbase account and buy like $5 in some cryptocurrency. That's all you gotta do. You're going to understand it so much more, so much better." I recommend people do that, and then you can start to form a more nuanced opinion of it, and then start to try and see, okay, what is the hype? What is not the hype? Why are people actually not this? Why are they excited by it? And always keeping that dialog open. Now I have tons and tons of Web 2 friends and people who aren't really into blockchain at all, and it's really interesting, having conversations with people about it because some people think it could be interesting, could be good. Some people are just like, "No, I don't want to have anything to do with that." So yeah, we're still working on earning trust and that trust can be easily lost and so we need to think really carefully about how we promote this stuff and how we talk about it. Brian: I appreciate you being in this space and talking about it and sharing, because I enjoy your content, follow you on Dev and Twitter as well so I would love for you to keep it up and would love for folks to check out QuickNode because it's definitely a tool and it's making it easier for you to build stuff on top of the blockchain. With that, I want to transition us to picks. This is music, food, can be tech related. Everything's on the table basically. Anthony: All of the things? Brian: Yeah. And speaking of all the things, you've got a couple of picks so do you want to go ahead and go first? Anthony: Yeah, my picks are some developer Discords, and you were one of the first people that got me into developer Discords with Open Sauced. I had joined that and then started joining some others right around the same time, so the ones that I'm going to recommend are, first is Lunch Dev. This is originally the React Podcast Discord from Michael Chan, and he now has this Discord that we rebranded to Lunch Dev because it's not React specific really. There's all sorts of channels and topics related to JavaScript or TypeScript or GraphQL or CSS, different frameworks or just career advice, life advice, or just hang out, movies, music, all that kind of stuff. So that's great, then there's also the Frontend Horse Discord which is Alex Trost, and they're more heavy on creative coding and more of like the front of the front end, CSS and stuff like that. But there's also lots of JavaScript conversations going on there. Since this is JAMstack Radio, we should mention the JamStack Discord which now has been running for a couple of months and replaced the JAMStack Slack which not a lot of people were really using. So I'm really happy to see that. Brian: Didn't even know they had a Slack. Anthony: Yeah. So there's a Discord now, and yeah, Demetrious is heading that up. This is all I want to do, I'm in so many developer Discords now, I don't have the time for all of them. But they're a great way to connect with people, to have a lifeline to others who are doing similar stuff and maybe will help you fix bugs or you can just have a jam. But then also- Brian: No pun intended. Anthony: Yeah. It's a way to get your content out there and a way to get people to see your content and give you feedback on it, then you start building partnerships and just all sorts of good stuff. Brian: Yeah, for sure. The Slack thing threw me because when I was a Netlify we didn't have a Slack, the one thing I noticed in dev rail is a lot of companies have Slacks with 10,000 plus people and it's cool, but hard to manage and it becomes a customer support nightmare. What I love about Discord is there's an evolution of access which makes it really nice for having folks who only talk in this corner or have this corner that they own, but then they can the rest of the Discord for mods and admins and stuff like that. So it's a great dev rail tool, so if anybody is not in these Discords, definitely check them out. I did have some picks too as well. My first pick is Fig, Fig.io, it's a terminal. They started with autocomplete, so it provides autocompletion to your terminal in a way that it just works. I love it. It's Open Source and you can provide extensions and plugins to it. So definitely check it out if you work on any sort of CLI tools, a great extension for Fig. Their goal, it works in every terminal, they just added JetBrains. But what I love about it is when I started, I set up my new machine, I got the new M1 MacBook Pro. I went with the 16, but I kind of wish I went with the 14, but that's a whole nother conversation. I got the 16 M1 and I set up my machine pretty quickly, the one thing that threw me off is that the M1s now come with ZSH by default, no longer BASH. They haven't changed that since 2000 and something. So I had to think of a whole nother set up for setting up GSH, and I'm like, "If I'm going to start new, I should just install Fig and let that install everything for me."Well, it doesn't install, so not really. But it gives you autocomplete to know what is available to you. I'm not giving it the best justice, but you should definitely check out Fig. I don't know. Anthony, have you checked out Fig? Anthony: Yeah, I did try Fig. I thought it was good. There's a lot of terminal tools out there these days. I don't think they all work together, so you have to go with one. This one I'm using, Warp, right now. I really like it, I'm already used to it, so it's super hard to get me to switch off of it. But Fig was really cool too. I don't use a regular terminal, let me just put it that way. There's much better options out there. Brian: Yeah, for sure. I don't think I'd ever go back to just normal terminal. I do also have Warp installed on the machine. I haven't used it. I'll need to use it for a couple of projects because I know it's bringing a lot more to the table and that's what I wasn't ready for yet, so I'll have to give it another try. I did want to also do one more pick which, funny enough, I was talking to Michael Chan at the recent Reactathon and we were talking about keyboards and how he uses DVORAK and also uses blank key caps, and how much better a typer he is because of the blank key caps. So I'm just going to shout out my keyboard which is the KeyChron Case X. I love it because it connects to my Mac and my PC, so I don't know if you've ever noticed while I'm streaming that I can just click this one little slide button and it goes back and forwards between the PC and the Mac. So you can connect multiple keyboards to one, I used to have the whole streaming setup where I had two keyboards on the desk at the same time and then tons of water cups. It was a mess. Well, the water cups are still here but at least I only have one keyboard. Anthony: Yeah. It reminds me of Mavis Beacon, learning the home row. Brian: Yeah, it goes a long way. I don't think I really took it seriously until I started writing code. I could probably type papers pretty good, like 50 words per minute, 60. I don't know what's good. But for writing code it's perfect, especially if you use VIM which I do use VIM. Anthony: Yeah, never got into VIM but I can type pretty fast. I did a lot of Mavis Beacon in middle school. Brian: We should have a competition for developers' typing words per minute and see, because I bet you there are some devs out there who probably, including yourself it sounds like, have some serious Dev EPM. Anthony: Yeah, I could get up to 90, I think, when I was back in my prime. I might not still be there, but yeah, it's fun. It's useful if you spend as much time typing as I do. Brian: Excellent. Well, I really enjoyed having this conversation about just general blockchain, but also exposing us to QuickNode. Folks, again, check it out, reach out to Anthony, he's on @AJCWebDev on Twitter and pretty much everywhere else I believe. Anthony: Yeah, yeah. And check out QuickNode.com. You can get started and just host a node and see what it's like. Right now we have a seven day free trial and then after that it's $10 per node, but we may be adjusting our pricing structure soon so keep an eye out for that. Brian: Okay, excellent. And listeners, keep spreading the Jam.