

Blockchain tech is getting chief officers hot and heavy. When itโs your turn to show them your stack, will you distress or impress?
Hereโs 11 tools for building on the Ethereum blockchain
Store Ether, send transactions, deploy contracts and more with Mist. You can use the native application to play around on the blockchain or testnet while you get the hang of this whole blockchain thing. Super useful for quick transactions.
When youโre ready to ditch the training wheels, switching to the command line will make you look like a real hacker. Geth can do anything Mist can do plus some important functionality like serving as an RPC endpoint to connect to the blockchain over http.
Parity is an ethereum client written in the new low level language Rust. Formed by Dr. Gavin Wood, the former CTO of Ethereum, this client is a fast, lightweight way to run an Ethereum node. Run Parity and hop over to localhost:8080 to play around in their web UI. Honestly, itโs a pain in the ass to install, but once itโs up and running Parity is a big upgrade from Geth.
MetaMask is ๐ If youโre building a รapp you actually want people to use. MetaMask support is a must-have. This little chrome extension drastically improves how easily people can interact with your รapp (distributed app). If you havenโt already, go download MetaMask and try it out for yourself. Iโll wait.
If you want to build a รapp, youโre going to get very personal with the web3 library. Web3.js is going to be the interface youโll use to interact with blockchain if youโre trying to make something people wonโt hate.
If youโve got a tool belt full of development tools, Truffle is your sonic screwdriver. Truffle provides the building blocks to quickly create, compile, deploy, and test blockchain apps.
Before you start throwing your ether around like ones in the club ๐ธ try testing your code in a test blockchain. Since writing to the blockchain costs Ether, itโs a good idea to test out your smart contracts in a test blockchain spending test Ether.
Solidity code may be designed to look like javascript, but you still have to compile it. Solc is your translator from the smart contract language solidity to Ethereumโs byte-code.
Your mom doesnโt live in the blockchain. Donโt expect her to clean up your mess. Since you pay by the size for all of your writes to the blockchain, contracts included, itโs in your interest to make sure youโre not wasting your money uploading shitty code.
Microsoft has been stepping up their blockchain game. They recently started offering BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) in their Azure cloud suite and theyโre bringing more heat with ether.camp, a fully fledged Ethereum IDE.
Everything in the blockchain is visible by everyone, so donโt you want to take a peek? BlockApps has some API endpoints that are pretty nifty for things like checking wallet balances, writing transactions, and reading contract states. With just some addresses, you can go all Sherlock Holmes on peopleโs wallets.
The following are tools not on the original list but still deserve recognition
Need some structure in your รapp? Embark is another popular framework for building, testing, and deploying your app.
โ[Embark is] a framework for developing Decentralized Applications that is one of the most popular tools to develop Ethereumย DAppsโ
Itโs one thing to use โpassword123โ for your personal bank account (plz donโt), but when youโre writing a smart contract that holds other peopleโs money you want to be sure itโs secure. Zeppelin is library for writing secure contracts. Especially easy when youโre already working with truffle.
Special thanks goes out to Jim Huang for helping me compile the list. And thank you to Tim, Brandon, Lyndon, Casey, and Arjun for driving HappyCha.in forward and inspiring me to work harder every day.โค๏ธ
If you found this article useful or entertaining please drop a โค๏ธ or a share. Please comment with any feedback or tools youโd like to see added to the list.
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