Journal

12 Nov 2021

• TIL
• General

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TIL

I spent this morning’s deep work session practicing Solidity. I’ve been following along to this freecodecamp youtube course and have created two basic smart contracts so far. I was able to connect the remix IDE with metamask by using the injected Web3 environment, deploy the smart contracts, and go through mock transactions.

• the first smart contract was really just about learning the basics
• main takeaways:
  • coming from vim, IDE’s aren’t too shabby (played around with remix)
  • if you want a negative integer, use int instead of uint (unsigned integer)
  • there are four different visibilities for functions (public, private, internal, external)
  • you can have 2 types of functions that don’t cause a change in state therefore doesn’t cost any gas (pure and view)
  • contract is like a class
• basically the first contract created a list of people that contained mappings of their name and favorite number, the best way for me to visualize this is through hashicorp’s configuration language:

locals {
  people = [
    {
      lynn = 8
    },
    {
      john = 5
    },
  ]
}

• here’s the code for the first smart contract

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

pragma solidity ^0.6.0;

contract SimpleStorage {
    
    // this will get initialized to 0!
    uint256 favoriteNumber;
    
    struct People {
        uint256 favoriteNumber;
        string name;
    }
    
    People[] public people;
    mapping(string => uint256) public nameToFavoriteNumber;
    
    function store(uint256 _favoriteNumber) public {
        favoriteNumber = _favoriteNumber;
    }
    
    function retrieve() public view returns(uint256) {
        return favoriteNumber;
    }
    
    function addPerson(string memory _name, uint256 _favoriteNumber) public {
        people.push(People(_favoriteNumber, _name));
        nameToFavoriteNumber[_name] = _favoriteNumber;
    }    
    
}

• the second smart contract built on top of the concepts of the first
• main takeaways:
  • had the second contract grab all of the functions and vars from the first through import and inheritance
  • created an instance of the first contract from the second and pushed it onto an array
• here’s the code for the second smart contract

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

pragma solidity ^0.6.0;

import "./SimpleStorage.sol";

contract StorageFactory is SimpleStorage {
    
    SimpleStorage[] public simpleStorageArray;
    
    function createSimpleStorageContract() public {
        SimpleStorage simpleStorage = new SimpleStorage(); // creating object of type SimpleStorage contract named simpleStorage and that it takes no imput parameters
        simpleStorageArray.push(simpleStorage);
    }
    
    function sfStore(uint256 _simpleStorageIndex, uint256 _simpleStorageNumber) public {
        // Address
        // ABI
        SimpleStorage(address(simpleStorageArray[_simpleStorageIndex])).store(_simpleStorageNumber);
    }
    
    function sfGet(uint256 _simpleStorageIndex) public view returns (uint256) {
        return SimpleStorage(address(simpleStorageArray[_simpleStorageIndex])).retrieve();
    }

}

• thoughts
  • would I be able to replicate these smart contracts without looking back at the walkthrough video or source code? probably not.
  • I typed simple storage in so many different ways; a combination of upper case, camel case, underscore prefixes and a variety of postfixes
    • I understand each way you type it means something completely different but for readability and not touching object oriented programming in a long time, I get easily confused
    • just like human languages, if you don’t use it you lose it! I used to be fluent in vietnamese and now I only know how to order food 😋

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General

Currently feeling … disarrayed. I don’t know what I want from my career. I simultaneously want a promotion while not wanting one. I know I love learning and want to continue moving upwards in my career but maybe I’m afraid that with a promotion, I’ll be moving away from an engineering role and moving closer to a customer facing and leadership role. While I think that’s a positive direction for most people, I don’t think it aligns well with my personality and my current passions. Or maybe it’s just my imposter syndrome telling me that I don’t deserve my current position LET ALONE a higher one! But this reminds me of a quote by Naval Ravikant:

If I always did what I was qualified to do, I’d be pushing a broom somewhere.

I’ve lived my life continuously putting myself in uncomfortable positions and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. It has served my very well up to this point but maybe there’s something to be said about being content and accepting with where and who you are now. Hmmm.. didn’t mean to be so introspective today.

I had a lot of fuck ups recently and I think I just need to power through this trough.

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