allknownsapien

[allknownsapien]

Blockchain backend development

I might say this is the most logical part of the course. Coding this bit creates a skeletal foundation to your project. I could say it was a pain to get through it, mainly it being boring and the lectures were just talking about how important the programming logic used in this section, and that the experimentation part of this section is just limited.

You can’t play around with this section, just how simple it is. With the test driven approach in effect for this section, all you could do is to write some tests, get them to fail, and then code some logic to get them to pass.

Writing tests are easy within node.js languages, but implementing the code and logic was just really annoying. You will be destined to get some careless errors about some poor coding logic you used, or some fatal errors that corrupt your files. When I say “corrupt your files”, I really mean that they mess up the whole logic of the code, and all you can do is to sit there and scroll your eyes through some indigenous code that your feeble mind can't comprehend, only to discover that your code syntax was the one that was causing all the problems.

Well, the default code editor I used for this project was Microsoft Visual Studio on a Windows device…it takes at least 10 minutes to boot up, and to run the code it takes ages. Well, these problems disappeared after I changed to a non-windows device, which made things more productive.

Developing backend mostly requires coding with different modules, and different versions of that module. Well for example, we used Redis for PubSub implementation (which can be considered frontend, but heavy coding and logic is used), there are like different versions of Redis that Home-brew downloads. These versions have some differing syntax that affects code and logic. It was a pain to read the documentation, which was not elaborate, and to download the specific version (home-brew installs the latest version and the latest versions are generally unstable and they crash, redis-developers don't care enough).

Initially, when redis was not working in my terminal interface (I thought I can’t run redis on daemon, because the config file for it just threw up), I turned to PubNub for my PubSub implementation. It was straight forward to use, but it frequently crashed on my project, which led me to using redis again.

Most of my backend development was heavily supported by test driven development.

Thanks to stack overflow, bugs in my code were easily found. After about 3 days of work, my backend was ready. I fired it up and it worked considerably well.