HyperSDK: A company, not just a product, that’s revolutionizing Blockchain VM creation.
Why? Because it makes the design to be user-focused rather than foundation-focused.
Very recently I had my first opportunity to interact with HyperSDK. If you aren’t familiar with HyperSDK, it is a powerful tool developed by Ava Labs for creating your own Blockchain VMs. You can read more about it on the GitHub.
As I set to explore the intricacies of HyperSDK, I was blown away by the powerful capabilities of HyperSDK. It black-boxes and abstracts many complexities of Blockchain and Consensus, providing users with a clean and efficient tool for building their own chains.
Even though my impression of HyperSDK as a product is very high, I’m still bugged by its appeasement to developers. As a DevRel, for the past 5 years, I can almost instantly assess if a project will be a technological success or failure; and would love to share my thoughts on appeasement of developers.
HyperSDK — A company. Not a Project.
Ok! This might raise eyebrows for some people. Why would you want to treat your project/product as a company? My answer is simple. Companies listen to their customers; which are developers in this case. In contrast, projects tend to listen to their foundations or organizations. Nothing bad, but it just makes them a bit more kickback and relax than they should be!
Why should we care?
As a DevRel, I have mastered the art of carefully balancing between the needs of customers (developers) and the priorities of core developers. This is a delicate yet most appealing task. If you strike a correct balance, you get the most harmonious relation between both customers and core developers.
Let us take two examples, which I personally saw through in my DevRel career — Ignite CLI & CometBFT / Tendermint.
Ignite CLI
When I joined Ignite team; we had built an amazing product. Ignite CLI would scaffold chain within minutes and it gave you all amazing modules and IBC inbuilt. All the user would have to do would be to plug their application logic and run the chain. Everything else was abstracted from the user — beautiful!
But Ignite had 2 problems. Poor tutorials and not listening to customers. For example, the first hello world tutorial on Ignite would take you hours (if you’re lucky) upto a day or 2 to fully understand and run it. This is just made the onboarding process bizarre. As one of my first task as DevRel for Ignite, I started building tutorials which would advance gradually, with complexity added at each level. Win!
The second problem Ignite saw was lack of customer focused development. For example, Ignite supported WASM smart contracts out of the box. This feature was rolled-back even though it saw a lot of criticism from developer community. I partly blame this on Ignite not being treated as a company. Because if it were, it would heed to developer community more than anything else.
PS: Years later, WASM smart contracts have made it back to Ignite CLI. Hurray!
CometBFT / Tendermint
When I joined CometBFT, it had already forked from Tendermint to become CometBFT. Tendermint was plagued with a similar problem — being too foundation focused rather than customer focused. What happened? Tendermint released 3 versions — v0.35, v0.36 and v0.37 which could never be used in production because it mismatched what customers wanted and what the team was building. Result? Almost 2 years of work never used in production!
One of my first task as DevRel for CometBFT was to understand what customers wanted. We did regular calls with all applications building through us, plus made an attempt to incorporate their input / needs in our future release. Result? ABCI++ introduced with v0.38 saw huge acceptance.
How DevRel can help?
In my opinion this is one of the problems, a DevRel can or should be able to solve.
Because DevRel is all about listening to customers, digesting their ideas and relaying it back to the developers. And they also beautifully tell the story back to customers which paint a picture of why and how developers are building.
To conclude, I think HyperSDK is an amazing product. All it needs is a good DevRel to showcase it. Plus treating it as a company would mean we care for developers more than anything else in the world.
Thank you for reading. Cheers!
