Thread by @fadeev

I joined Tendermint (the company) three years ago, on June 17th, 2019. I started as a frontend engineer and progressed to building my own product (Ignite), leading an engineering team on a mission to improve the developer experience of @cosmos. We've succeeded. Here's a retro.

It all started with us winning first place in the Paris Blockchain Week hackathon in 2019. Against all odds, we've managed to build an SDK module and do a fantastic demo of it.

Shortly after I emailed @zcpeng, had a quick call, talked with @billyrennekamp, and got hired. I've never worked in a distributed company before and this was an incredible opportunity for me. Can't express how grateful I am to both of them 🙏

The first project I worked on was the company's website. It turned out pretty well and somehow after three years, it's online. I've also been maintaining cosmos.network 🌌

As a design team @zcpeng @oknass @_cyrusgoh, we implemented the website for the SFBW DeFi hackathon. Enjoyed every second of working with such talented people 🙌

I was very excited to go to San Francisco for the first time, meet the cosmonauts I've been working with in person, and participate in the biggest @cosmos event to date.

For a couple of months after, I've been working on a documentation system for @cosmos projects. It had a bunch of cool features no other docs system had at the time. Still being used by Tendermint Core, SDK, IBC, and dozens of other projects in the ecosystem.

In early 2020 I tried building a blockchain with Cosmos SDK and it turned out to be much harder than I imagined. The tutorials were not sufficient and the tooling just wasn't there. I decided to do something about it 🙂

As a side project, I designed and built the first real-time (!) IBC visualizer for the Game of Zones. You could send a token between chains and immediately see it on a graph. @zcpeng added a 3D mode and it was epic.

After months of hard work, in August of 2020, I released the first version of Starport, the friendly CLI tool for building Cosmos SDK blockchains.

The first version featured code scaffolding, automatic node reloading, the ability to scaffold CRUD for types, and a Vue-based frontend template integrated with a blockchain.

Starport received very positive feedback from the community, projects like @cryptocom, @sifchain and @BitCannaGlobal used the tool to build their projects and I'm grateful to everyone who used the first versions of Starport and helped to shape the direction of the project.

We created a Developer Experience team to focus on improving the tooling for building #cosmos blockchains. I've been lucky to find exceptional people who joined the team and made everything that followed possible. Thank you, @ilgooz, @lubtd, @subbyjr, and others 🙌 you rock 🤘

In the following months, we've released many versions of Starport, incrementally improving every feature to make it the power tool that it is right now. It has since become the de-facto developer tool for building Cosmos blockchains.

I've participated in numerous (as a judge and mentor): Hackatom India, V, Russia, HCMC, and others. With the tooling, technical support, tutorials, mentorship, and screencasts we've been able to onboard thousands of blockchain developers into the Cosmos ecosystem.

We've also made waves by participating in conferences and showing the latest what Cosmos/Starport had to offer: sending tokens between two newly created chains, launching a blockchain live on a conference with a dozen of validators, and much more.

In the meantime somehow I had the time for side projects that included the web UI for Gaia simulation testing and a web wallet I built over the weekend (sort of like mini-Lunie, still available somewhere on GH).

2021 was an incredibly productive year for the team. We added IBC support, created a developer guide with 7 tutorials, added many innovative features to the CLI, started working on our own blockchain, and created a growing community of Starport users.

Over the past two years, Ignite (Starport) has become one of the best developer tools in crypto. It provided the tools for dozens of teams to go from an idea to mainnet, inspired hundreds to experiment with @cosmos, and helped thousands of new devs to join the ecosystem 🚀

I'm immensely proud of everything my team has accomplished and it's exciting to see where the project will go next. Interestingly enough, you've probably only seen half of all the features we've built, because the rest hasn't been released yet 😉

github.com/ignite/cli

As for me, I'm excited to continue exploring the Cosmos further or go beyond. There is so much yet to build and I can't wait to embark on the journey 🌌