Engineering Update (28-NOV-22)

Welcome to another exciting update on the engineering work being done with Andromeda. As we’ve been saying for a few weeks now, the platform is getting very very close to being ready for beta-prime-time. We’re still a few weeks away from being ready for audit, but test-net will be ready before then.

Documentation

One of the often overlooked parts of a software engineering effort is with documentation. When we started this venture many moons ago, we made sure to keep documentation at the forefront of our efforts. We can very confidently say that our documentation is industry leading and on a level that few other decentralized technologies can match.

This is because what Andromeda brings to the table is the ability for a new class of users that we internally call “creators”. A creator in our vocabulary is someone who maybe can’t program in Rust (the language that powers the Smart Contracts within the Cosmos), but is technical enough to design a moderately complex trade strategy or put together some business logic with some light if-this-then-that structure.

These creators are stepping into a vast new design space and we are going to be there every step of the way. In fact, our documentation rides alongside the entire interface. Yes, we have a dedicated website with documentation, but on top of that we bring that documentation into the same interface so you’re not having to go back and forth between tabs or do some parallel mapping. If you have a question or get stuck, boom, the documentation is right there.

Command Line Interface Updates

Just as we have included the documentation alongside the web interface, we have also brought the CLI along for the ride as well. Anything you can do in the easy to use web interface, you can also do on the command line. In fact, one of the core design principles is that we START with the command line and then integrate functionality into the web interface.

One of the classic lines we came up with during this venture is “you can’t run a billion dollar company through a Chrome plugin”. If we want to see DeFi and all of the promises of blockchain come to life, we need to think about our approach from day one. Keplr is great, but it’s not good enough for a lot of applications.

Public Infrastructure

One of the gaps that we see many projects gloss over is the fact that their GraphQL/Indexing Services are still centralized or are a “single point of failure”. From the very beginning, we planned on open sourcing our GraphQL/Indexing Services so that anyone can run them on their own hardware and then just hook it up to the Dapp/Web Interface. This way you aren’t having to trust anyone outside of your organization.

We make this easy by having a way in the web interface to switch what GraphQL server you want to use. Of course, we’ll provide this service, free and open to the public, but you’ve got that added option of being able to run it yourself.

Andromeda Developer Academy

We’re in our last week of the first academy. We’ve had some great results so far and look forward to sharing the fruits of the academy early next week. The amount of wide open design space that’s possible with Andromeda is astounding. Developers and creators are going to have a lot of fun with the system when it’s fully operational.

We’ll be opening up applications for the January Developer Academy soon, so be on the lookout for that! We’ve already have a lot of interest, so be sure to submit as soon as you can.

Back at it!