Leveraging Blockchain Infrastructure
A conversation about transitioning from bootcamps into full stack RedwoodJS development and exploring how blockchain infrastructure underpins Web3 applications.
Episode Description
Anthony Campolo discusses his path from musician to developer advocate, his work with Redwood JS, and breaks down Web3, blockchain, and smart contracts for beginners.
Episode Summary
In this episode of Compressed FM, Amy Dutton interviews Anthony Campolo, a developer advocate at Quick Node, about his unconventional journey into tech and his current focus on Web3 infrastructure. Anthony shares how he transitioned from a music education background to coding through Lambda School, then built his reputation by writing extensively about Redwood JS, eventually joining its core team without deep JavaScript expertise — instead owning the DevRel and deployment integration space. The conversation naturally shifts into a Web3 primer, where Anthony breaks down the relationship between blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts in accessible terms, comparing blockchain to BitTorrent and framing Web3 development as fundamentally similar to Jamstack architecture. He walks through what it looks like for a JavaScript developer to write and deploy a hello world smart contract using tools like Hardhat and Quick Node, emphasizing that interacting with a blockchain is essentially making API calls from a React front end. The discussion also covers data ownership, the trade-offs of decentralization, common misconceptions fueled by scams and bad actors, and practical advice for anyone curious about getting started with cryptocurrency safely.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and Anthony's Background
The episode opens with Amy welcoming Anthony Campolo, developer advocate at Quick Node, who shares his winding path into tech. Originally a musician with a music education degree, Anthony got into coding in his mid-to-late twenties through Lambda School, where he learned React and JavaScript. He explains how the income share agreement model worked for him financially, noting he couldn't have afforded a traditional bootcamp while driving for Uber.
The conversation broadens into the value of bootcamps versus traditional computer science degrees, with both Amy and Anthony reflecting on how bootcamps move more nimbly with curriculum while potentially skipping fundamentals. Amy reveals her own degree is in radio TV broadcasting with a focus on motion graphics, and Anthony notes how a music background ironically prepares people well for developer relations work — combining performance skills with an educational mindset.
00:07:39 - Joining the Redwood JS Core Team
Anthony details how he became part of the Redwood JS core team without being an expert JavaScript developer. He started by writing blog posts about the framework, which caught the attention of David Price and others on the team. After being invited to contributor meetings, he eventually dropped out of Lambda School to focus on Redwood full-time, and within about six months he was invited onto the newly formed core team.
The key insight Anthony shares is that contributing to open source is about finding an area you can own rather than understanding an entire codebase. His niche was DevRel — doing podcasts, meetup talks, and community outreach — and later he took charge of deployment integrations. He explains how Redwood evolved into a "universal deployment machine" supporting seven providers including Netlify, Vercel, Fly.io, and Render, and how he learned Docker specifically to build the Fly integration.
00:16:00 - Deployment Platforms and the Render Experience
Amy shares her own experience deploying a Redwood application across Vercel, Netlify, and Render, ultimately landing on Render because it could host the front end, back end, and database in a single location. Anthony enthusiastically validates this choice, noting he had predicted over a year earlier that Render would be a game changer for Redwood for exactly that reason.
They discuss how Render's preview environments allow separate databases per branch or pull request, protecting production data during development. Anthony then describes how Flight Control, Fly, and the Serverless Framework offer similar full-stack deployment experiences through different approaches — Flight Control and Serverless abstract over AWS, while Fly uses a globally distributed network of Docker containers running on Firecracker. The theme throughout is how deployment tooling has matured to let developers focus on building rather than infrastructure.
00:19:10 - Web3 Fundamentals: Blockchain, Crypto, and Smart Contracts
Anthony pivots to defining Web3 terminology for listeners unfamiliar with the space. He explains that blockchain functions like a peer-to-peer distributed database — similar to BitTorrent — that is both transparent and tamper-proof. This is what made it ideal for representing money, leading to Bitcoin in 2008. He then introduces Ethereum, which arrived around 2014 and introduced smart contracts: programs deployed to the blockchain that anyone can access but no one can alter.
He frames Web3 as Jamstack by default, since it always involves a decoupled front end calling a back end through API-like interactions. Anthony explains that cryptocurrencies exist not as speculative assets but as incentive mechanisms to compensate the people running network infrastructure. The conversation traces the arc from Bitcoin through the ICO boom and crash of 2017 to the current NFT era, with Anthony explaining wallets, transaction signing, and why the financial layer can't be separated from the technology.
00:28:48 - The Promise of Decentralization and Data Ownership
Amy asks where Anthony sees Web3 heading, and he pushes back on the idea that it will replace Web2 entirely. Instead, he argues it serves specific use cases around censorship resistance, permissionless access, and true data ownership. He references the incident where Cloudflare's CEO unilaterally removed a website, illustrating the problem of centralized gatekeepers controlling internet access.
The discussion centers on how current social platforms effectively own user content, and how Web3 architectures could return that ownership to users — though with the trade-off that ownership also means responsibility. Anthony notes he's become less interested in the financial speculation side and more drawn to the data sovereignty possibilities, while acknowledging that decentralized systems are typically slower, less efficient, and more expensive because they provide stronger guarantees around access and control.
00:36:00 - Building a Hello World Smart Contract
Anthony brings the conversation back to practical developer experience, recommending that anyone curious about Web3 should build a simple hello world smart contract. He walks through the process: writing a contract in Solidity, deploying it using Hardhat with a Quick Node endpoint and wallet private key, choosing which blockchain to target (Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, etc.), and then interacting with the deployed contract from a React front end.
Amy draws helpful parallels to concepts she already understands, comparing blockchain state to React's useState and Redux's action history, and comparing the immutable transaction ledger to Git's version history. Anthony introduces IPFS as a peer-to-peer distributed hosting option for front ends, noting that while purists prefer full decentralization, most developers make practical trade-offs by using centralized services like Netlify or Quick Node alongside decentralized infrastructure.
00:43:04 - Navigating Skepticism, Scams, and Getting Started Safely
In closing, Anthony addresses the skepticism surrounding Web3 head-on, acknowledging that bad actors and scams are real but arguing they represent a separate group from the builders creating the technology. Amy offers a helpful analogy: phone scammers don't make people stop using phones. Anthony emphasizes that education is the key to staying safe, from not sharing wallet keys to being cautious about connecting wallets to unknown sites.
He offers practical advice for newcomers interested in cryptocurrency, recommending established exchanges like Coinbase as a starting point before exploring hardware wallets or more advanced self-custody options. He walks through the spectrum of security trade-offs from browser wallets to USB hardware wallets to paper wallets in bank deposit boxes, illustrating that every level of security involves convenience trade-offs. Anthony wraps up by plugging Quick Node, Redwood JS, and his blog at AJC Web Dev, where he writes tutorials spanning blockchain, front-end frameworks, and deployment platforms.
Transcript
00:00:00 - James Q Quick intro/sponsor reads
Welcome to another episode of Compressed FM, a weekly podcast about web development and design with a little bit of zest. In this episode, we're going to be talking about leveraging blockchain infrastructure with decentralized Web3 applications featuring Anthony Campolo.
00:00:16 - Theme-song VO
Web development and design. Who would have guessed what we can do on both? Even add a little zest. So turn up the volume. Get ready for the best. Let's get it started in this episode of Compressed.
00:00:27 - James Q Quick intro/sponsor reads
Before we move on to hearing from Amy and Anthony, I just want to mention that this episode is sponsored by two amazing sponsors, Hashnode and Daily Dev. Hashnode is my favorite place for developers to create blog content and share with other developers in the community. Daily Dev is an extension that you can add to your browser to keep up to date with the latest news and tech. It's also a great way to potentially promote your content that you create as well. So more from Hashnode and Daily Dev in the episode.
00:00:57 - Amy Dutton
Today we're super excited to have Anthony join us on the podcast. Anthony, welcome. Do you want to introduce yourself?
00:01:03 - Anthony Campolo
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of the show and have been listening and hanging out in the streams for a little while now. I am a developer advocate at a company called QuickNode, and before that I was at a company called StepZen, which is a GraphQL company. I also work a lot on RedwoodJS, which is pretty GraphQL based. So I do a fair amount of stuff these days. But right now, the whole Web3 blockchain world is really where I'm spending most of my time because QuickNode is an infrastructure company for blockchains specifically.
00:01:35 - Amy Dutton
Interesting. And let me tag on. You also have your own podcast too, right?
00:01:40 - Anthony Campolo
Yes. The episode hasn't aired yet, but James is on and will be coming on soon. We should have you on as well and talk about all the stuff you're doing. I actually started doing the podcast before I had any jobs, even before I was on the Redwood team. It kind of started as me interviewing people from Redwood, like David Price and Tom Preston-Werner and others on the team. Then we started talking to Prisma people, then FaunaDB people, then Amplify people. We started to see that there were a lot of projects all aiming towards making front-end developers more full stack, and it wasn't something that people seemed to have defined yet.
So that's why FSG is the Full Stack Jamstack, which is kind of funny because Redwood actually does not use the term Jamstack anymore. They used to say they were bringing full stack to the Jamstack, and that's where we got the term Full Stack Jamstack from.
00:02:31 - Anthony Campolo
But that is scrubbed from the website now. You won't see that anywhere. So we were kind of the sole owners of that branding.
00:02:37 - Amy Dutton
Now that's awesome. What's interesting is you said that, and that's basically the title of the talk that I'm giving at Prisma Day: how front-end developers can be full stack with Redwood and Prisma.
00:02:49 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I saw that title. All right, she gets it.
00:02:53 - Amy Dutton
I say I get it. Nicolas also helped me with the title, so he gets it even more so. We've had him on the podcast too. There are just some quality people right now that are creating quality projects. James and I say it all the time, but there really is no better time than now to be involved in web design and development.
00:03:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. I came in with more history here. I was someone who originally was a musician and had a music education degree, then got into coding in my mid to late 20s. I went to a boot camp and learned React, JavaScript, that kind of stuff. That is how I learned how to do web. I was one of those people who learned React way too soon, didn't know enough JavaScript, and just kind of got thrown right into it. So Redwood was like, hey, if you know a little bit of React, we'll give you everything else. That was really enticing to me.
Then I started realizing there's a whole team of people having meetings, and I could write content, get noticed, and become the Redwood guy. If I was the Redwood guy, I could get a job because someone thinks I'm the Redwood guy.
00:03:57 - Anthony Campolo
And that's actually what happened. At StepZen, the CEO, Anant, sent me a message saying, are you with Redwood? Are you open to other opportunities? Because he didn't realize Redwood wasn't paying me.
00:04:06 - Amy Dutton
Very cool. What boot camp did you go to?
00:04:10 - Anthony Campolo
It was called Lambda School. It is now called BloomTech. I don't know if you're familiar with it at all.
00:04:16 - Amy Dutton
I have heard of Lambda School.
00:04:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's an income share agreement. I'm not sure if it still is, but at the time, you wouldn't pay any money at the beginning and you would go through the whole program. Then once you got a job, you would pay a certain percentage of your income for a certain amount of time.
The contract I signed said it was going to be 30 grand over the course of two years, but after I did 15, they were like, you're done. They actually gave the contract to a different company and they had my debt. So I ended up saving a bunch of money somehow. I don't know. It's a whole interesting thing. Some people are kind of against the whole model, and I don't really understand it very much because, for me, I couldn't have done anything else. I was driving for Uber at the time. I had no money, so I could not have paid for a boot camp.
00:05:01 - Anthony Campolo
I think having programs like that available to people is really important. Whether Lambda is a good example of it or not is kind of debatable because they got a lot of bad press, which is why they changed their name. But that's a whole entire podcast unto itself.
00:05:15 - Amy Dutton
So in Zeal, we partner with Learn, which is a boot camp based out of San Diego. They definitely have a special place in my heart just because of our partnership with them and some of the people that I've met through their program.
00:05:27 - Anthony Campolo
Cool. I love boot camps. It's not entirely the future of education, but it's definitely a big part of what's going to be the future of education because it makes a lot more sense to give someone a concentrated, almost trade school-like experience so they can learn a skill and get the exact skills that the jobs want.
The great thing about getting a classical education is you spend four years learning theory and history, all the stuff that is important to have a foundation for your whole career, but then you may get out of college and you don't really know how to code. I know a lot of people who have computer science degrees and got out of it and they're like, I didn't really do a lot of coding. I did a lot of algorithms. I learned how to manage memory with pointers, but they didn't know how to just create a website and deploy that.
00:06:11 - Anthony Campolo
So I think if you could do both, if you could get a CS degree and then also study what you would learn in a boot camp on the side, that's the ultimate. That person will get a job immediately. But if you have just one or the other, it can be tough. If you only have the boot camp experience, then you're not going to be able to pass an algorithms challenge at all. You may be able to do fizzbuzz if your boot camp spent a week on for loops, but you really just learn what a website is and how you work with a website and tools like Netlify.
Vercel made it so easy for me to get a website up that I learned a little bit of HTML and CSS, but I could at least see something live and have it work. So I think that, like you said, it's a great time to get into dev.
00:06:49 - Amy Dutton
Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I appreciate most about boot camps is it seems like they're able to move a little bit more nimbly when it comes to getting curriculum and things like that approved. Dev moves so quickly that sometimes I feel like universities are far behind when it comes to what's current.
00:07:11 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, the accreditation processes can't really keep up with it because the boot camps can barely keep up with it. They're mostly just asking the jobs that they're feeding into, like, what do you need? That's why they're saying, we need React developers. So, well, I guess we'll teach the developers React. That is good because it ensures you're actually learning the thing that the companies want. But then you may skip over fundamentals that are important and would actually make it easier to learn React. There's always that balance.
00:07:39 - Amy Dutton
And the boot camp that we work with, we're so tightly coupled that they have real-world experience that I'm not sure I even got in college. I think most of my real-world experience came from stuff that I did on the side in the real world.
00:07:54 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So you have a CS degree?
00:07:56 - Amy Dutton
I do not. This surprises everybody, including my parents. I think they forgot what I did, but my degree is in radio TV broadcasting. In their defense, I say my parents forgot that was my major. But a lot of the classes that I took were not directly tied to that. For example, the degree is called radio TV broadcasting. I did absolutely nothing in radio other than the history of radio and mass communications. The TV part, I really only had two, maybe not even that, maybe just one TV pro class. My concentration was really in motion graphics and animation and things like that, so I had a lot more classes in that. My minor is in art, so I did a lot more classes in art and things like that. So even though that's the title, it's not very representative of what I did.
00:08:46 - Anthony Campolo
All right. That makes sense. That makes sense why that would set you up fairly well to get into this whole world, because you're coming off that designer perspective, which is so valuable and a lot of devs don't have. Knowing music doesn't get you anything.
00:08:59 - Amy Dutton
I don't know if it's just being in Nashville, but a lot of developers and even designers that I've worked with have some sort of music influence background.
00:09:08 - Anthony Campolo
I have a blog post about this. It's literally called, "Why Do So Many Musicians Become Programmers?" I think it's not because learning music sets you up to program. It's because learning music sets you up to be broke.
00:09:22 - Amy Dutton
Oh, that's funny. The industry does lend itself nicely because I've had friends that have gone on tour running sound or even playing on stage, and then they're able to do freelance stuff on the side with development or design.
00:09:36 - Anthony Campolo
I think it does set you up for DevRel. Having a performance background and an education background like that is the ultimate combo for DevRel because you're always like, this is a performance, but it's also something you're hopefully educating people while you're doing it. So I think that is what enabled me to find a niche that I could sink my teeth into with this whole DevRel, dev advocacy type stuff.
00:09:59 - Amy Dutton
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Very cool. Let's pivot that a little bit then. I did want to ask a little bit about Redwood, just because you said that's kind of where you plugged in, and that's kind of been where my brain has been at recently.
00:10:59 - Amy Dutton
You said you're on the core team. What did that process look like in order to be able to join their core team?
00:11:05 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. David Price especially is just such a fantastic community manager and has really thought a lot about how to get people engaged and sticking around in a project. For me, I started by writing blog posts about Redwood, and then people on the team noticed and they would retweet it or message me, like, oh, this is really cool. After I was doing that for a month or two, David invited me to the contributors meeting.
There's public meetups. There's contributor meetups, which are invite only, and then there's a core team meetup, which is only for the core team. So there's basically multiple levels that you can get in. After I got into the contributors meeting, I was like, okay, this is cool. I am really into this. I actually dropped out of Lambda to do Redwood instead because I was getting so much more traction from the Redwood stuff. And then after being a quote-unquote contributor for a couple months, they decided they needed a core team.
00:12:04 - Anthony Campolo
There was the founding team, which is Tom, Peter, David, and Rob. The four of them built Redwood for a year before anyone else was really involved. Then there was a group of people who started forming, like a dozen or so people who were sticking around and really contributing. They eventually created a core team, and then they invited a handful of us onto the core team.
I first started blogging about it in the summer of 2020. I was doing the contributor stuff by fall, and then by the end of the year, I was on the core team. I remember because I did Learn with Jason, like December 1st or second or something, and it was the day I got on the team, so I was able to announce it on Learn with Jason, which was really nice.
00:12:44 - Amy Dutton
That's awesome. We can link to that in the show notes. So I'm curious. Being a part of the core team sounds like you have to be super smart in JavaScript.
00:13:02 - Anthony Campolo
See, that's not the case.
00:13:03 - Amy Dutton
Okay, so what would you say for somebody trying to jump in?
00:13:06 - Anthony Campolo
The thing is, you have to find an area you can own. No one person on the Redwood team understands the entire code base. It is too large and too complicated. There's too much stuff happening. Certain people own different areas. Right now, Danny's trying to figure out how to integrate Vite, and he's having all these problems with the router. He's like, I don't like learning how the router works. Someone who knows the router, help me with this part. He's a really, really good dev.
I owned the DevRel part specifically, which is like, no one was doing DevRel for Redwood. So I went out and I did podcasts, I did meetup talks. I did like 20 meetup talks on Redwood, and then that got me onto the core team. But once I was on the core team, the area I spent a lot of time on was the deployment integrations.
00:13:50 - Anthony Campolo
Redwood was known as the, Tom uses this term, the universal deployment machine, which I really like. The idea is that you can write your app and it will function as a self-contained unit with its code, and then you can deploy it to different places. The framework and the providers figure out what it takes to do that, but you don't have to actually change your code.
This originally was just for Netlify. Netlify was the first and only thing that you could deploy Redwood to for a while. It was like it's a universal deployment machine if you use Netlify. But now it's supported by seven providers: Netlify, Vercel, Flight Control, Layer0, the Serverless Framework, and Fly.io. Now there are deployments where you deploy it to a Lambda handler, you deploy it to a server, and you deploy it to a Docker container. All of that is basically managed by these setup commands. So you'll run something like yarn redwood setup deploy netlify, and then it'll create a Netlify.toml for you and then change your endpoint.
00:14:51 - Anthony Campolo
It'll do the stuff so you can actually just write your project and then make like three branches and run the different deploy commands and deploy to each of the different providers. That was really cool because I got to be involved in figuring out how to do that with a couple, especially Fly. I was pretty involved in that and actually learned Docker specifically to do that because you create a Dockerfile and then Fly looks at the Dockerfile and figures out what to do with it.
I had no idea how to write a Dockerfile, let alone how to write a Dockerfile for Redwood, which was kind of complicated because it has two package.json files, or three actually. There's a website, an API side, and then a root. I did that. I also worked a decent amount on the Layer0 one. For that, it was really cool to see what it's like working with these companies to figure out how you actually integrate a framework with a deployment provider.
00:15:39 - Anthony Campolo
They all do things kind of differently, and all the frameworks do things kind of differently. So there's a lot of communication of like, how is your thing doing it? Here's how we do it. With the other thing, you get some kind of like, that thing is like, oh, you can do this thing. It's actually slightly better than that other person who does that thing. And then they all kind of optimize around each other. Now we have a really nice deployment story for almost all of them.
00:16:00 - Amy Dutton
I can definitely be a witness to how great and smooth that situation is because we actually did an episode all about this CI/CD pipeline. I had experimented with putting a Redwood application on Vercel, Netlify, and Render, and I did it basically exactly what you said. I did it on one and then moved it to the other and then moved it to the other. We ended up landing on Render, mainly because it allowed us to host the front end, the back end, and the database all in a single location.
00:16:32 - Anthony Campolo
You have no idea how happy it makes me to hear that. I was on a podcast over a year ago talking about why the Render deployment was going to be a game changer for Redwood, specifically for that reason. For most of the other ones, you spin up the front end, then you spin up a database in an entirely separate place, take that environment variable and put it into your front end. Whereas Render is actually a full-stack deployment platform.
00:16:53 - Amy Dutton
Yes, yes. And that's exactly why we did it. The other nice thing about Render, and again, we went into a lot of details in this episode, was that it allowed you to do previews so that you could have a separate database for each branch or PR that you create on your project. So any updates that we were making were not going to affect production or anybody else's work when you're talking about Prisma models and databases and things like that. So well done. It was very easy and just very well done.
00:17:22 - Anthony Campolo
Today, the Flight Control one and the Fly integrations and the Serverless integrations actually do a similar thing and they give you the whole thing all together. With Flight Control and Serverless Framework, they're just giving you an abstraction on top of AWS. They're saying, you're going to deploy this stuff to your AWS accounts, you can go into the AWS console and actually see this stuff, but we're going to give you some dev tooling to make that nicer.
Fly is like they built their own globally distributed network of multiple Docker container nodes that are running on Firecracker. It's a really crazy mad science kind of experiment, but they allow you to just shove the entire thing into a Docker container and then that's it.
00:18:07 - Amy Dutton
Interesting.
00:18:08 - Anthony Campolo
Interesting.
00:18:09 - Amy Dutton
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00:19:10 - Amy Dutton
I could definitely talk about this all day, but I did want to pivot to Web3 because I know that was really the heart of what you wanted to talk about and where your headspace is right now. I was telling you pre-show, I'm still a noob when it comes to those things, but do you want to give an overview of your part in that? I know Web3 encapsulates a lot of stuff.
00:19:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Before I do that, let me define terms here. People may or may not actually know what these terms mean. They know that there's this amorphous blob of Web3 and blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and they don't quite understand how those all relate to each other.
This is the way that I would describe it. Web3 is the whole shebang. It's all the stuff that we build around blockchains and also cryptocurrencies and these types of things. But it involves a lot more than just the underlying architecture. The underlying architecture is the blockchain. The blockchain is, you can kind of think of it like a database. The difference is that it's a database that is a peer-to-peer distributed database that different people have on their computer at the same time.
Did you ever use BitTorrent?
00:20:20 - Amy Dutton
I did. I don't know if I should admit that or not, but I did.
00:20:24 - Anthony Campolo
You can torrent legal things. I'm sure we all did.
00:20:27 - Amy Dutton
Yes, yes. It's all legal.
00:20:29 - Anthony Campolo
With something like BitTorrent, like The Pirate Bay, it's not on a single computer. Everyone is running it together. When you download something, you seed it and then they can download it from you or other people, or a combination of people who have that content on their computer. So that's what a blockchain is.
The bigger, more important thing is that it's both a distributed database, but it's also a linked list that you can't change after the fact. This is why the first use case for it was for money and for transactions. It was a way to have people have an account with a certain amount of funds in it, and it's just an arbitrary number, like ten bitcoin. That can mean whatever. I have ten bitcoin. I want to give five bitcoin to my friend.
You have to make sure that someone can't just change that and say, well, I have 100 bitcoin now, because you can't do that with money. So it needed to be tamper-proof. It also needed to be transparent because it had to be running on everyone's computer, so the code couldn't be hidden. The access to it couldn't be restricted. This is what made it really unique and interesting, and it became really big for people who are into libertarian kind of stuff. Some people say it's going to replace the Fed, and that's not the pitch I'm trying to make here. I'm kind of more interested in the smart contract stuff.
So there's cryptocurrencies and there's also smart contracts. When you think of Web3, the thing that makes Web3 possible is smart contracts. A smart contract is a program that you put on the blockchain. If you think of a hello world application, you may have a string that will say, "Hello from Compressed," and then you can read it. Or you can write to it and change the message to say, "Hello from Quick Node."
00:22:20 - Anthony Campolo
That's kind of when I do my example of how you get started with this stuff. I do a simple hello world contract written in a specific programming language called Solidity. The main thing is that there's an actual programming language that allows you to write programs that you could write with any programming language, and then once it's on the blockchain, anyone can access it, but no one can change it. You can deploy an upgraded contract, you can make a new one, but the old one will still be there.
This is why it's called a contract. It's a way to ensure that when people are buying into these programs and are using them, they're always going to function the way that we anticipate them to function because the code itself is immutable on the blockchain. That is what allows the creation of dApps. That's a whole application that is running on the blockchain altogether.
00:23:12 - Anthony Campolo
So when people talk about Web3, they're talking about the blockchains which allow both cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. Then you can have a client library that's just a JavaScript thing that's interacting with it through method calls. That's why I say Web3 is Jamstack by default, because everything is decoupled. You always have a front end that's a client calling a back end through some sort of API. So if you think about it from that angle, it's very comprehensible to developers today.
The problem is no one ever gets shown that kind of hello world example. They hear all these terms and they see the markets and they see numbers going up and down and they're like, what's going on here? You have to take a little time to dig into the actual tech. Then the numbers start to make more sense because the cryptocurrency needs to exist to compensate the people running the network. This is really important.
You have to pay what is called gas to write to a blockchain because computing power is not free. People are running massive servers to do this and spending a lot of energy, which is also a big problem. So there are incentive mechanisms built into it. That's why you can't really get away from the cryptocurrencies. You shouldn't think of it like a pump-and-dump scheme. You should think of it more like a way to actually incentivize the thing to continue to exist at all. So yeah. Questions.
00:24:32 - Amy Dutton
That's a lot. I do love that you gave the history. I appreciate you talking a little bit about the terms because I didn't quite understand how all of those pieces fit together. But when you describe the underlying blockchain, that makes sense, how that shift applies to crypto and even NFTs and all these other pieces.
00:24:50 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Let me fill in some things with that. Bitcoin was the first blockchain. This is why people for a long time associated blockchains and cryptocurrencies. They were essentially synonymous terms for a while. That was in 2008. It was right after the financial crisis. It wasn't until six years later, five or six years later, that Ethereum was created, and Ethereum was the first one to have smart contracts.
So cryptocurrencies were around for many years, but they were this weird, esoteric thing that only hardcore security computer nerds were using. It was created by cryptographers because it's all encrypted. That's what allows people to have control over their funds. This is encrypted by default.
Once you introduce the Ethereum stuff, then you start getting the ICO boom. The ICO boom was the initial coin offerings where anyone could just take Ethereum and create their own token, basically by almost just forking it. This is actually a huge problem because then you had all these people raising funds with an ICO, and all these people bought into these ICOs, and like 99% of them ended up going to zero.
00:25:57 - Anthony Campolo
So that was bad. But what was good is that it got a lot of attention on what this tech actually is. This is when I first got into it, back in 2017, and people started to actually see what you could do with this technology. But then because all the ICOs crashed and the whole market crashed, it took another two or three years for it to pick back up. Now it's picking back up with NFTs because you're able to use this to represent ownership of a work of art, or just an avatar. If you look at my Twitter now, you'll see I have a moon duck. A moon duck is an extremely cheap NFT that is just a little avatar that I can have online.
People always say, well, I can just copy and paste the JPEG. It's like, well, yeah, you can, but you can't actually prove it's yours because you can't sign it with your wallet like I can. I can say I own this and I can prove I own this because I can verify the transaction that I purchased through my wallet.
A wallet is kind of the last piece of the puzzle. It's a way to manage all of the cryptography that goes around this. When you're sending funds to someone or you're buying something, you need to sign into your wallet and sign the transaction. This is why you don't ever want to give out your wallet private keys. If someone gets your wallet, they get your money and you don't get it back.
00:27:14 - Amy Dutton
So we can take the conversation several different ways.
00:27:20 - Anthony Campolo
So you'd asked, what is my role in all of this?
00:27:22 - Amy Dutton
That's right. Yes. Let's go there.
00:27:24 - Anthony Campolo
My role in all of this is I work as a developer advocate for QuickNode, and I see QuickNode as something like Netlify or DigitalOcean. Some people call it AWS for blockchain. No one wants to be AWS. I don't think anyone wants the dev experience of AWS. So I don't usually make that comparison. But it's a dev tool company that allows you to click a button, and then they give you an endpoint saying, here's your Ethereum endpoint. Just hit it and then interact with it.
This is really nice. With something like Netlify or Vercel, you can sync your git repo and then it deploys the site, and then it just gives you a URL. You don't have to know anything about DNS or VPCs or any of that kind of stuff. This is the same thing with something like Quick Node. You don't have to know how to spin up a server that's running an Ethereum node, that's then attaching to the Ethereum network, and that is then interacting with it, because that's a whole DevOps task.
00:28:22 - Anthony Campolo
It takes a year to learn. So if developers are going to build stuff with this, they need dev tooling that's going to make it simple for them. That's where QuickNode comes in. I do guides and things like this, meetup talks and Twitch streams, the whole content pipeline around this. Then of course, talking to people who are using it, figuring out their pain points, what they want from it. So that whole DevRel life cycle is what I'm doing.
00:28:48 - Amy Dutton
Okay. Very cool. This is a big question.
00:28:53 - Anthony Campolo
I like the big questions.
00:28:54 - Amy Dutton
Where do you see all of this going?
00:28:57 - Anthony Campolo
Some people will say Web3 is the future of the internet. I don't think that's the case in the sense that Web3 is not going to replace Web2 because for most applications, it doesn't make sense to put it on a blockchain. It's for very specific reasons, usually based around things like you want to be censorship resistant or you want to be permissionless.
Something that happened a couple years ago, four or five years ago now, is there was a time when Cloudflare's CEO basically decided to take down a website from Cloudflare because they were white supremacists. It was one of those moments where he was like, I'm going to do this because I think this is the right call. I should not actually have the ability to do this, though, because if we actually want the internet to be something for everyone, it doesn't really make sense to have these powerful gatekeepers that decide what goes on the internet and what doesn't.
00:29:54 - Anthony Campolo
That's a really big thing for a lot of people in this space. The other big one is you want to be permissionless in the sense that you don't need to get permission from it, but you also want to be portable and you want to actually own your data. This is a problem with things like all of the current social networks. When you use it, all of your data isn't really yours. Your videos on YouTube aren't really yours; they're YouTube's videos, and YouTube can do whatever they want with them. If you want to save them, that means you're ripping a file to your computer and it's just sitting there.
With Web3 stuff, you actually own your content in a very real sense. This is also why you can get owned and you can lose your content because you own it, so you're responsible for it. There are trade-offs with this, of course. But it allows people to have both visibility into what's happening to their data and control over if they want to move that data to another platform.
00:30:55 - Amy Dutton
Yeah. We had Nader Dabit on the podcast a few weeks ago and he was talking a lot about ownership towards the end, which just kind of blew my mind a little bit in terms of being able to truly own your content, exactly what you're describing.
00:31:12 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, totally. It's kind of funny because in one sense you own it, and in another sense, it's just on the blockchain for everyone to see. But if you use your wallet and you do the security stuff correctly, then you're always associating your wallet with whatever is happening on the blockchain. That's why you have to sign a transaction when you actually change something.
In my hello world example, if you want to read from the blockchain, you just connect your wallet and then you read from it automatically. But if you want to write to it, you have to sign a transaction. That means there's a ledger of everyone who changed it, when they changed it, and what they changed it from and to. This goes back to why it was for money, because it's a distributed ledger. It's a counting of transactions that are all associated with a specific account, which is your wallet.
00:32:05 - Amy Dutton
Okay. So what gets you excited about all of these things?
00:32:11 - Anthony Campolo
It's been changing throughout the years. What's funny is I got into all this stuff before I even knew how to code. I got into Ethereum back in 2017. I didn't learn to code because of blockchain, but I was interested in tech, blockchain, and deep learning especially. This is when AlphaGo was a thing.
Do you know the game Go? It's the board where it's just white and black pieces.
00:32:38 - Amy Dutton
Cassidy Williams is really into that. She's talked about it before. I think she even did a Kickstarter project where she had her own little custom boards that she was selling.
00:32:48 - Anthony Campolo
Anyway, there's more moves and game spaces than there are atoms in the universe versus chess, where computers beat chess like 30 years ago. Computers didn't beat Go until like five years ago. That's deep learning. That's kind of orthogonal.
I was interested in it because I had never thought about money. I was in my mid 20s and I was being confronted with this idea that money can be a digital asset that is decoupled from a nation state entirely. I didn't even know what any of those words meant and how to even think about that. I was hearing people having these conversations about it, and I was seeing the numbers go up, and I was like, what is happening here? Why? It really fascinated me. It wasn't until years later, though, that I actually learned how to code.
00:33:38 - Anthony Campolo
Now I can actually get a sense of how this stuff works. At the time, I was listening to people talk about it and I was like, this seems like something really interesting. It seems like something that has promise. It seems like the way these people are describing it is something that has value and will continue to gain value.
But I couldn't really make that case to my friends or family. I was trying to explain Ethereum to my family in 2017 and they're like, you sound crazy. Why would you ever do this? Why would you ever put money into this? If anyone had listened to me, they would have like 100x their money, by the way.
00:34:09 - Amy Dutton
Billionaires, yeah.
00:34:11 - Anthony Campolo
So that was the first thing that got me interested in it. But now I'm less interested in the financial aspect and more interested in the data ownership and the ability to have permissionless access to networks.
People complain so much about Silicon Valley tech companies and all the kind of evil they're doing. I think there's a lot of nuance to that conversation, whether what they're doing is actually evil or not. But there are technologies that people are creating now to mitigate that stuff. I think a lot of people want to talk about that and they'll want to legislate around it. I don't think that's necessarily the way to go because the Silicon Valley companies can just work around the legislation. As soon as they implement something, they find a way to work around it. So you really have to fundamentally re-architect something to give ownership back to the users and away from the platforms.
00:34:58 - Anthony Campolo
This doesn't need to be for everything. There's going to be lots of good reasons to use Google and YouTube and Twitter and whatever. But it's good that people will now have the option to actually own their things and have control over what's being done with their data, and possibly start to profit off of that data. These companies make a ton of money off of our data, selling it to advertisers and creating this whole churn. They always say, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. That's why you do have to pay to use the blockchain because you are not the product. The product is the whole sum total of the network that everyone is using together.
It usually is slower and more inefficient and more expensive, but that's because it gives you very strong guarantees around who owns it, who can change it, who can access it, and all that kind of stuff.
00:35:49 - Amy Dutton
Yeah, that's a great description. Let me turn the tables a little bit. Where would you like to drive the conversation in some of this? My brain is exploding and I'm not exactly sure the best direction to take the conversation.
00:36:00 - Anthony Campolo
Let's take it back to something that a developer can actually understand because there's a catch-22 here. To really explain the tech requires all these heady, philosophical conversations, and people are always like, well, what's the use case of it? It's not really that simple to just say this is the use case. But I do think if you want to actually understand this stuff, you should build a hello world smart contract.
What I mean by that is you want to have a simple contract that can read and write. That's kind of what I was talking about earlier. You also want to get that thing onto the blockchain. This is something that Moralis has been really great about. Moralis created a ton of tutorials with lots of JavaScript-heavy tooling to show how to do this. I'm starting to create some of my own guides and tutorials that are fairly similar in the sense that they're aimed at someone who knows Node and JavaScript and React, and you can have this dev tooling that will allow you to interact with the blockchain.
00:36:59 - Anthony Campolo
You don't have to entirely understand how the blockchain works under the hood. It's the same thing with AWS. We want to be able to run a server without having to worry about how to run the server. I'll be able to link to some guides in the show notes. I did one where you write the contract and then you use what is called Hardhat to deploy it.
With Hardhat, you input a URL which is what gets you connected to the blockchain. That's something that QuickNode provides, and there are other companies that provide it as well. Then you also include your private key from your wallet. This is all stuff that is easier if you see it in action. But imagine it's like an API key. You have an API key and you have an endpoint, and then you take that and shove it into this config file. Then you tell that config file what chain you want to connect to.
This is another important thing. There's Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, Algorand, Polygon, all of these different blockchains now that all have different trade-offs around speed and cost and reliability, and QuickNode supports 14 of them right now. If you want to work with multiple chains, QuickNode is very good for that. Hardhat as dev tooling is very good for that because you can just say, I want to deploy this contract to Avalanche or I want to deploy this contract to Ethereum.
It's like with Redwood where you just say set up deploy Netlify and it does it. So that's really cool. It allows someone to have an end-to-end experience of deploying a smart contract and then getting to interact with it in a very short amount of time.
Once the smart contract is deployed, you get an address. The address is just a long string of random integers and letters. That is what your front end can then talk to. When you write your contract, you can have a hello function that will send you a hello message, and you can have a set hello function which will change it. You can import those functions into your React app and then do an onClick. On the onClick, you'll run the set hello thing.
You can input it into an input field on a React app and then interact with the blockchain through the React app. That's really cool, and that's where it starts to click for a lot of people.
00:38:47 - Anthony Campolo
I think once they see that you can actually interact with these blockchains through what we would normally think of as making API calls, it starts to make sense. Usually you make an API call, you hit an endpoint, and there's a certain contract there of what it expects and what you're going to get out. You know what to send it, and you know what you're going to get back and how to format that in your JavaScript.
That's what all this tooling is meant to enable for JavaScript developers to be able to interact with the blockchain and know what they need to send it and what they're going to get back so that they can have a front end that's attached to that blockchain. You don't have to worry about creating a whole blockchain from scratch or even worry about that at all. It's infrastructure that's already created and exists and is very stable and reliable. Now we're at the point where we're building dev tools to make it easier to build these applications.
00:40:05 - Amy Dutton
Very cool. Let me give you my, again, noob description. You can tell me if I'm right or not. It almost sounds like when you're interacting with it, it's kind of like state that you're grabbing, the state kind of as a getter and setter, and it's still tracking everything, almost like Redux. With Redux, you can go back and track and see everything that was ever done within that application. This just seems like that on a much grander, more secure scale.
00:40:32 - Anthony Campolo
Totally. So when I'm doing that, I'm using a useState and passing the state through React, and then there'll be a final point where you actually set it to the blockchain. That's the point where it's not just being passed around React state, it's actually changing the blockchain. When you click it, literally your MetaMask wallet will pop up and say, hey, you need to connect to this site. Hey, you need to sign this transaction. So that is the point where you're right. It's in the state and it's being passed around your front end, and then there'll be a point where it ends up back on the blockchain.
00:41:05 - Amy Dutton
Again, just trying to tie this to terms that I'm familiar with, like with GitHub you have an entire history of your project. I know that's not a complete one-to-one example because I can delete my repository, but I can go back at any point in history and you can do the same thing with the blockchain. You can go back to any point in history and see who had that data or what the value was.
00:41:28 - Anthony Campolo
So yeah, this is really interesting because a blockchain is append-only. So in that sense it's kind of versioned, but it doesn't actually have version control the way we think about it. But there's something called IPFS. The Interplanetary File System is a terrible name. It's not actually interplanetary. It's only on one planet.
Going back to the BitTorrent and the peer-to-peer stuff, it's a peer-to-peer distributed Git, essentially. So you have a repo and then you put that repo onto IPFS. That gives you an endpoint, and you can actually host a static front end on that. Usually when I build my examples, I'm deploying the front end to Netlify or Vercel, which to Web3 purists doesn't count because that's a centralized service. It's not actually decentralized anymore. I think you're always going to make trade-offs. If you're using QuickNode at all, you're already using a centralized service. I think there are points where it makes sense to use centralized services along with decentralized tech to help you go faster, farther because you can always leave QuickNode and connect with a different provider. You're not really being locked in, you're just being given a better, nicer experience.
00:42:41 - Anthony Campolo
But with IPFS, your actual front end is not on Netlify, it's on this distributed IPFS thing. If Netlify decided they want to take my site down, they could do that. Not that they ever would because they love me. But if IPFS decided to take it down, there's no way to do that.
00:42:59 - Amy Dutton
That's great. Is there anything else that you want to wrap up in terms of closing thoughts?
00:43:04 - Anthony Campolo
A lot of people are very skeptical of this technology, and I think that they should be. I welcome the skepticism. I think some people feel that it's a very strong net negative for the world. I don't agree with that. I think there are negative aspects of it and there are bad actors, and those are the same things with the internet. Lots of people got scammed on the internet before blockchain. People talk about scams in the blockchain, and that's true. It does happen.
The reason people are getting scammed is because they have all their money in their wallet and they have something worth scamming for, so they have something of value that people are able to steal from them. But the people who are scamming people and the people who are building blockchain are two separate groups of people. We're here trying to build tech, and then there are other people who are preying on the community, and that all gets mixed together into a single thing in the media.
00:43:55 - Anthony Campolo
So I think actually understanding who the bad actors are and where they are at play matters. Are they actually able to do something they couldn't do before blockchain, or is this just the new way to do it? You really have to hear both sides and hear both sides make their case many times over a long period of time to fully wrap your mind around the topic. So don't drink the Kool-Aid, but also try and be open minded. I have some people who, as I've been going out to podcasts, used to be like this one, where you're like, cool, I would like to learn about Web3. I don't know anything about it. Other people are like, no, I want to talk about Web3. Why would you come and talk about Web3 on my podcast?
Again, I think that's fair. I don't take it personally, but I think there's a lot of stuff happening that's very hard to wrap your mind around, some of which is good, some of which is bad. You need to keep a good head on to suss out what is what.
00:44:49 - Amy Dutton
I love how you described that with the bad actors and the scams and things like that, because I think that's where a lot of people get mixed up or confused or they want to avoid it. They don't understand it and they see the scamming. But to create a metaphor to help my brain wrap around it, it's like there are people that make phone calls and scam people over the phone, but that doesn't mean I'm never going to answer the phone again. You have to know that those are bad people and it's not everybody.
00:45:18 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, and it's about education. You have to educate people to not give away information on the phone or not click random things in emails or not connect their wallet to some website that they don't know about. Part of the problem is people get very enthusiastic about blockchain. They're like, yeah, everyone should get into this. Everyone should have cryptocurrency. Then a lot of people get cryptocurrency and then they lose it and then they forget their password and then they're like, ah, this sucks.
I remember talking to my dad about this. He thought that was so crazy that you could just lose your money. I'm like, no, that's actually how you know it works. Because if you could just go in and reset your password, that's a security vulnerability. Someone else could come in, reset that password. So the fact that you can actually lose your money is the proof of why it actually works the way it does. But that means you have to have responsibility for what you do and be responsible for your actions.
00:46:07 - Anthony Campolo
This is also why, if you actually want to buy cryptocurrency, this is not financial advice, but if you actually want to buy cryptocurrency, you should use something like an actual exchange like Coinbase. With Coinbase they actually hold your keys for you. Going back to the Web3 purists, they'll say, not your keys, not your funds, because they're saying Coinbase could take all my money and do whatever. That's true, but that'd be a huge reputation hit for them. Coinbase has a vested interest in keeping your funds safe just like a bank does.
If you're first going to get into this stuff and you actually are interested in cryptocurrency, you want to start with a very well-known, reputable, well-established exchange that is going to ensure that you don't lose your crypto. Then you can start branching out to, like, okay, well, if I want a hardware wallet. A hardware wallet is when you actually take your crypto off of the internet.
00:46:59 - Anthony Campolo
If it's on your computer, just in your browser, anytime you're on any website, you're leaving yourself open to doing something you're not supposed to and having them get into your wallet and steal your stuff. You do have to click a thing to sign a thing to make it happen, but people can get tricked. If you have it on a USB stick that's not even attached to the internet, no one can steal that. But that also means if you lose that USB stick, you lose all the money.
So what people really do, if they really want to keep their funds secure, is they get a paper wallet, which is just the keys written down on a piece of paper. Then they put it in a security deposit box in a bank. If they actually need it, they have to go to the bank, take out the wallet, look at the numbers on it, type it into a computer, and then they can get their money. That is actually the most secure thing you can do, but no one wants to do that. That's ridiculous. That's not going to be the future of money.
There's just, like with any tech, trade-offs all the way down. It's the same thing with blockchain.
00:48:02 - Amy Dutton
Very neat. I appreciate you taking the time to explain it to me. I feel like I have a lot more clarity around it. I'm still there. I'm sure there's still a lot of holes.
00:48:10 - Anthony Campolo
Happy to hear that.
00:48:11 - Amy Dutton
Yeah, it makes a lot more sense. I appreciate that. Is there anything that you want to plug or where can people find you?
00:48:17 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So QuickNode.com for QuickNode, RedwoodJS.com for Redwood, remember the J, and then AJCWebDev.com. Remember, you and James were going back on who would remember which parts.
00:48:34 - Amy Dutton
Remember the J?
00:48:35 - Anthony Campolo
That's my...
00:48:35 - Amy Dutton
Job.
00:48:36 - Anthony Campolo
The J stands for Joseph. Yeah. So AJCWebDev is my Twitter handle, my GitHub handle, and also my blog is AJCWebDev.com. I do a lot of writing. If you go through my back catalog, you'll find a lot of non-crypto stuff because I've only been doing this for a couple of months, but now I'm writing about a little bit of everything. There'll be blockchain tutorials. There'll be front-end framework tutorials. There'll be deployment platform tutorials.
I really love creating content because it's how I learn things, and I just enjoy the process. I've got a pretty decent backlog. I actually think you said you had found one of my things and you're like, oh yeah, it was super helpful. I'm very happy to hear stuff like that because I want to help other people get up and running faster and easier than I had, trying to learn all this stuff myself, and it took many, many years.
00:49:22 - Amy Dutton
Well, mission accomplished.
00:49:24 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome.
00:49:25 - Amy Dutton
We appreciate you coming on the show, and I'm sure we'll catch you around on the stream in the chat.
00:49:32 - Anthony Campolo
For sure.
00:49:32 - Amy Dutton
And on Discord. Thank you so much. I'm not sure what our next episode is, but in the meantime, that's all we got.