What I've built — and how it felt

Reflection

During this period I've focused heavily on system design and deep hands-on work. Working on the ledger problem, I gained a deeper understanding of idempotency, the ACID properties of transactions, and race conditions when persisting to a database. I also developed a better grasp of security concerns in communication between internal and external services. exchange-core is a large problem: how do you build an exchange that handles 100,000 to 1,000,000 concurrent users? It forced me to rethink how data is stored — especially at the Linux kernel level, how current data-storage models work, and how processes in Linux share data with one another. In this stage I also had time to set up the project on AWS, covering everything from networking (VPC, gateway, VPN) to distributed databases, snapshot volumes, and IAM.

Reflection

In late 2022, while still working as a DevOps engineer, I had the chance to work on a blockchain infrastructure project — specifically deploying nodes for various blockchain networks for a node-provider service. That's how I gradually moved deeper into blockchain. The first thing I did was clone Uniswap v2 and v3. It's a large project packed with interesting pieces: smart contracts, web3 libraries, subgraphs, IPFS, Chainlink, NFTs, and more. After that I joined many other blockchain projects across different networks — EVM, zkSync (in the early days there were several zkSync issues that broke Uniswap's contracts, such as the create2 function on zkSync), Sei network, Solana, and others. My role and responsibilities varied from project to project, but I put the most effort into research and writing smart contracts. I had to make sure the contracts I wrote were of the highest quality possible. I built my own self-audit process, and contracts had to pass it before being handed off to the external audit team — because without careful checks, the team would incur much higher audit costs.

Reflection

I learned a great deal during this time. I gained a broad view of the components that make up a large system and the way they interact, picked up the principles of designing for scale, and got hands-on with the tools used to deploy and monitor systems — building everything from the infrastructure up to the applications. Just as importantly, I learned to thrive in a large team, communicating and collaborating with others to ship a project together. I was fortunate to have a wonderful boss and mentors who helped me grow enormously along the way. (Respect to my boss at Zinza Technology and my mentors — they are the best!)