Building With Ethereum: Products, Protocols, and Platforms

Build products on top of Ethereum's new and expansive technological stack.

Writing any good web application requires planning, care, and deft technical skills, but Ethereum's execution model presents its own challenges for engineers wishing to build applications on top of its smart contract layer. Building performant and engaging product experiences is one of the most important – and often underappreciated – roles in any company.

This book looks at the full product stack needed to build such experiences on top of Ethereum smart contracts, weaving tutorials and case studies through more conversational discussions of the various constraints, trade-offs, and complexities involved in doing so. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of Ethereum from a new perspective, developing a strong understanding of how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) works and how it affects product engineering, as well as all the pieces of technology that go into decentralized apps (dapps) behind the front end: RPC nodes, wallets, indexers, application hosts, and more. You’ll be exposed to plenty of UI, JavaScript code, and idiomatic ways to bring on-chain data into your front ends. And you’ll be given up-to-date knowledge of the best practices and future possibilities that decentralized computation might offer the product engineer.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the EVM and how it works
• Gain insight into smart contracts and how apps connect to them
• Understand the difference between live data and indexed data
• How decentralization affects the UI of applications
• Build engaging, tasteful product experiences on top of Ethereum

Who This Book Is For

A confident – mid-level or senior – software engineer or web developer who hasn’t properly branched out into Ethereum; someone who might have scratched the surface, but wants a deeper understanding of the principles behind dapps, and who wants a head start on the hurdles faced while building them.

About the Author

Jamie Rumbelow is a software engineer and writer based in London, U.K. Until recently, he was a product engineer at Fei Labs, a major Ethereum protocol, where he built technologies and products at the intersection between the web2 and web3 stacks. He worked as a Founding Engineer and Senior Software Engineer in startups, responsible for training and mentoring as well as writing code. He has worked in the tech industry for over a decade, seeing organizations at varying levels of scale and the ways that teams and technologies get shaped by product decisions. He has also studied philosophy at the graduate level, which has given him the tools to think about computing in a deeper way. Over the past few years, he has built up a set of principles and opinions on what makes for great software and a great engineering culture.