Solana Developer Education with Jacob Creech
Jacob Creech discusses Solana developer education, network reliability, learning resources, NFTs, hacker houses, and upcoming protocol features in 2022.
Episode Description
Jacob Creech discusses Solana developer education, network reliability, learning resources, NFTs, hacker houses, and upcoming protocol features in 2022.
Episode Summary
In this July 2022 QuickNode Twitter Space, Anthony Campolo interviews Jacob Creech, Solana Foundation’s developer relations lead, about helping engineers build on Solana. Creech describes his path from software engineering and early Bitcoin and Ethereum experimentation into Solana, then explains why the network is sometimes characterized as an operating system rather than simply a blockchain. He acknowledges past outages while emphasizing rapid protocol improvements, and outlines education efforts including better SDKs, rewritten documentation, courses, short videos, the community-maintained Solana Cookbook, translations, program examples, and a planned progression from simple applications to complex integrations. The conversation also covers NFT use cases, upcoming standards and compression, Solana Hacker Houses, and resources for finding them. Creech closes by discussing Token-2022, fee markets, and address lookup tables, while preserving the discussion’s 2022 expectations and release context.
Speakers
- Anthony Campolo
- Jacob Creech
Chapters
00:00:03 - Introductions and Jacob’s Path to Solana
Anthony Campolo opens the QuickNode conversation by introducing Jacob Creech and asking about his role. Creech explains that he is the developer relations lead at the Solana Foundation, working across tooling, education, and developer updates with support from a broader team. He describes a software engineering background that included six years at a large bank before moving into the ecosystem.
Creech traces his interest in blockchain to mining Bitcoin in his college dorm around 2012, experimenting with Ethereum and smart contracts, and doing contract work through Gitcoin. After Solana emerged, he built with its SDKs and worked to make development easier, eventually being noticed and offered a Foundation position. He also describes why some Solana contributors compare the network to an operating system.
00:03:38 - Solana’s Network Reliability and Rapid Development
Campolo asks why Solana appeared to experience more visible network volatility, including periods when the network went down. Creech says the protocol and its core contributors were developing quickly, and argues that incidents had led to fixes that prevented similar failures from recurring. He gives the example of an early-June out-of-memory incident caused by roughly 100 gigabits per second of traffic and validator memory exhaustion.
Creech contrasts that event with a later NFT drop producing about 20 gigabits per second without the same failure, because the underlying issue had been addressed. He stresses that outages should not be considered normal, mentioning fee markets and quality-assurance work as part of continued efforts to prevent them.
00:07:37 - A Broader Plan for Solana Developer Education
The discussion turns to how Solana approaches education. Creech says experienced developers still encounter friction because the SDKs were not yet best in class, so improving their usability was as important as producing tutorials. He also describes a restructuring of the core documentation, especially material explaining concepts such as Solana’s account model.
Additional plans included a Solana course, short videos explaining accounts and transactions, and a goal of helping someone build a basic counter or Hello World application within ten minutes. Creech’s longer-term ambition was for a learner to progress toward a substantially more complex application, such as a lending or banking project, within a week.
00:10:15 - The Solana Cookbook and Community Contributions
Creech confirms that the Solana Cookbook was an initiative he started to provide practical, copy-and-paste code snippets for common tasks. He says it helps developers avoid getting stuck on details such as domain lookups and gives them a faster route to working examples. The project began with starter material and an invitation for the community to contribute.
He reports that the Cookbook was associated with an approximately 15 percent increase in developer retention, while emphasizing that the community now maintains much of it. Contributors were also translating the resource, with Vietnamese completed around the recording and Mandarin, Spanish, and Korean work at varying stages. Campolo notes that multilingual documentation creates ongoing synchronization challenges.
00:14:35 - Missing Examples, Integrations, and Front-End Support
Asked what the Cookbook still needs, Creech identifies cross-program invocation, or CPI, as a major missing core concept. He also describes an integrations section intended to show how developers can work with protocols such as Mango Markets, Switchboard, and the Jupiter aggregator, including account handling and CPI patterns.
Creech explains that Cookbook material is generally reusable snippets rather than complete React applications. Separate program examples cover basic development in Anchor and native Solana approaches, with fuller decentralized applications planned. Because the Foundation team cannot maintain examples for every front-end framework, community contributions are important, but Campolo points out that contributed examples also create versioning and maintenance obligations.
00:18:36 - A Learning Progression and NFT Possibilities
Creech describes an upcoming 30-day challenge designed to guide learners from Hello World to a counter using program-derived addresses, then to cross-program calls and integrations with systems such as token lending. He presents this sequence as a way to build progressively stronger Solana and Rust skills through practical projects.
The conversation then moves to NFTs. Creech highlights event tickets and attendance badges as promising applications, along with community projects that use NFT royalties to fund public goods. He mentions Metaplex’s planned metadata standard improvements and NFT compression as developments that could make large-scale NFT creation more accessible in the 2022 context.
00:23:32 - Hacker Houses and Building Community
Creech characterizes Solana Hacker Houses as co-working and networking environments focused on connecting developers, forming teams, and building products. Drawing on his experience at the Austin event, he says participants were working on a range of projects and meeting potential collaborators. He also recalls the Lisbon event during Breakpoint, where ecosystem teams offered bounties that developers could pursue for prizes.
Campolo notes that QuickNode was partnering with Solana for the events and expected to attend a future Canadian gathering. Creech directs listeners to the Solana events page for information, while the discussion frames Hacker Houses as both educational spaces and practical routes into the ecosystem.
00:26:26 - Token-2022, Fee Markets, and Address Lookup Tables
Creech closes the technical portion by previewing several Solana developments. He describes Token-2022 as a new version of the token program with extensions such as transfer fees, default freezing, and confidential transfers. He also discusses fee markets, which were live but not yet broadly adopted at the time, and says they were helping preserve low fees.
Address lookup tables are presented as a response to Solana’s small transaction-size limit, noted as approximately 1,232 bytes. By representing public keys with smaller references, they were expected to enable more complex transactions. Creech specifically mentions Mango Markets’ interest in the feature and expresses anticipation about how these changes would shape development.
00:28:33 - Domains, Closing Reflections, and Sign-Off
Campolo asks whether Creech owns a .sol domain. Creech says he registered one early but had not connected it to a particular address, while Campolo mentions his own domain and broader interest in blockchain-based domain functionality. The exchange provides a brief, informal conclusion after the technical discussion.
Campolo thanks Creech, recommends following his Solana work, and identifies the conversation as part of QuickNode’s recurring Twitter Space. Creech reciprocates before the recording ends. Their final thanks close a discussion that moves from the network’s challenges to the resources, community efforts, and protocol work supporting developers.
Episode Links
Transcript
This automatic transcript retains the original timestamps and wording apart from clear name corrections. It may contain transcription errors or turns that combine speakers.
00:00:03 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you for being here. We are getting set up.
00:00:12 - Jacob Creech
Can you hear me on it?
00:00:13 - Anthony Campolo
Yes.
00:00:15 - Jacob Creech
It sounds great.
00:00:16 - Anthony Campolo
What's up? Jacob, how's it going?
00:00:18 - Jacob Creech
Let's go. How are you doing?
00:00:20 - Anthony Campolo
Very good. Happy to meet you. This was a setup, I believe, by Noah. But I am really excited to chat with you because it sounds like you are in charge of developer education, which is something that I'm very passionate about. And why don't you just give kind of a quick introduction of who you are and what you do?
00:00:41 - Jacob Creech
Sure. So my name is Jacob Creech. I'm currently the Devereaux lead at Solana Foundation. I do many different things, including like handling tooling. I do some of education. I do a lot of things with keeping developers updated with the latest changes on Solana. yeah. Everything that goes under devel. I do a little bit of, as well as I have a great team that does most of the work, to be honest. Yeah, that's about me.
00:01:13 - Anthony Campolo
That's great. Were you doing devel before you worked here, or is this kind of your first go at it? Like, what's your kind of background before you got into the salon world?
00:01:23 - Jacob Creech
Okay, sure. so previously to working at Solana Foundation. I worked at a big bank. and I was a I was a software engineer, so I was so my background is in software engineering. I was an engineer for six years before making the jump into the ecosystem with solid foundation.
00:01:47 - Anthony Campolo
Gotcha. And were you just, you know, really passionate about, like, Web3 and blockchain stuff? And is that what kind of drew you to it?
00:01:55 - Jacob Creech
Yeah. So personally, I've been actually doing a lot of stuff in and out of blockchain since about 2012. I mined bitcoin in my college dorm.
00:02:06 - Anthony Campolo
Is extremely OG.
00:02:07 - Jacob Creech
Yeah, it was fun back then, but back then it was like you're just playing around for a lot of things. There's something to learn. it was mentioned in my college at when I was a freshman.
00:02:18 - Jacob Creech
So I mined it in my freshman dorm. I played around with Ethereum when it came out. Did a lot of smart contracts. Did a lot of contract work on Get Coin? and then Solana came out. I started building on the SDKs of Solana, got keyed into a lot of great folks. just try to make Solana easier to build with. And that's ended up. That's how I ended up at Solana Foundation. I was noticed and was basically offered a job, and I was like, yeah, this is great because it's basically what I do in all my free time. So now it's my job. So it's really a dream to be here.
00:02:58 - Anthony Campolo
That's super exciting. Yeah. So I want to hit you with the tough question right here at the top, because I have a coworker who. One of his favorite sayings is Solana is not a blockchain. So is Solana a blockchain?
00:03:12 - Jacob Creech
I mean, technically, yes. a lot of people, totally, Anatoly included, like to call Solana like an operating system, because in that, in a way, it kind of is, it's just like a distributed system that allows you to, it's a permissionless distributed system which some people call a blockchain.
00:03:33 - Jacob Creech
It can be an operating system. It's up to you how you define it.
00:03:38 - Anthony Campolo
Okay, cool. Yeah. And I'd be curious, as someone who, you know, wants to get involved with Solana, it seems like it has, like, more kind of volatility in terms of, like the network state Itself. Could you kind of explain like why that is? And like what developers kind of expect like when they're actually interacting with it.
00:04:01 - Jacob Creech
When you say volatility on networks, they could you define like.
00:04:05 - Anthony Campolo
Sometimes it goes down like I think.
00:04:09 - Jacob Creech
So a lot of the things with Solana, they're really building very quickly. Like the all the core contributors that are building on the protocol itself. Are building incredibly quickly. And one thing to note is that every time that Solana has had any type of issues, like we've had an event soon afterwards, that if if the same event happened like previously, it would have had issues. So like they're making really cool progress and really awesome development on the protocol that constantly improves it.
00:04:46 - Jacob Creech
Like give you a great example. I think there was a little bit of downtime. think it was the beginning of June. that was due to an out of memory error because there was so much traffic. I think it was like 100 gigabits per second of traffic. that some of the validators could not keep up, and they ended up just running out of memory and like, constantly forking and running out of memory. Well, recently I think actually this week I think it was Monday, there was a really popular NFT drop that got 20 gigabits per second of traffic around there. that would have caused that same out of memory error, but it's been fixed since then. So every single time that we have or that any anything has happened on salon, it's been fixed pretty shortly afterwards.
00:05:38 - Anthony Campolo
Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think with any of this kind of tech, like it's it's so new and it's like we're still kind of figuring it out. So I think that developers should kind of expect this kind of stuff, but is something that like someone who works like an infrastructure company, I just kind of like noticed.
00:05:54 - Anthony Campolo
And I've always kind of like wondered why that seems to happen more on like salon than other chains. But I think it's like, as you said, it's because like, they're really pushing the boundaries of like, what? What we can do with this technology. So there's kind of like a little more like wiggle room that I think we can give people when they're like really pushing the boundaries of stuff. And it's like they they're always really good about like, you know, giving updates and like fast updates and things like that. So I think that that's that's all totally fine. It's just some that probably good for like developers to know. Just so like they kind of like know what to expect and know, like when something's not working because of their code or when something's not working just because of the network. And that, I think, is where some of the challenges comes in. It's it's like if you're really, really new at this stuff, like sometimes things are broken, like you have no idea why and you don't know if it's because, like, you need to fix something in your code and you just have to, like, wait five minutes for the network to settle.
00:06:51 - Jacob Creech
Yeah, I think in general, like any type of outage. And that's not something you should expect. Like, it's not it's not something that should be normal. And it definitely is not something that should be normalized on it. And so there is a lot of work involved to keep any of these outages ever happening again. And they're constantly happening through either quick or fee markets. or the, the quality assurance overrated stuff. It's like there are a lot of things that prevent them and ultimately like it shouldn't be something you expect. Yeah. Like it shouldn't happen. So I don't want to normalize that. And it's something that we definitely are constantly trying to improve on the core contributor side.
00:07:37 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you answering that. let's get into like, how do you and how do Solana, as an organization think about developer for education. So like, are there certain pieces of content that you're like producing? Are there certain like example apps that you're building is like what what do you think of as kind of like the the grand vision of like how to educate developers about Solana.
00:08:02 - Jacob Creech
So we're doing a lot of stuff on the education side. And like ultimately, first off, like there's a lot of developers that are more senior and they still have trouble because our SDKs aren't the greatest. They're not like best in class. So fixing those to the like you can it's beautiful code you don't need to read documentation to use. It is great on the other side, like we're currently doing a documentation kind of restructure rewrite on the core docs. So docs docs so that it's easier to find the information about Solana if you decide to look for it, like for example, if you need to understand how the account model works, which is different, and you might have to read something, you might just not come through code. that will be a lot easier to obtain through the core docs. other initiatives that we have on education is that we have a course that's being built. So there's a at Soledad Sole dev app course. There is a course that's built by a great guy named James that we've been working with for quite some time.
00:09:18 - Jacob Creech
we are also about to start just producing tons of video content, about, like bite sized videos of, like, different things on Solana. So like explaining accounts, model how transaction works, etc., so that you don't have to spend so much time learning. Ultimately, like the goal that I have on education for salon is that someone can like start building like the first app within the first ten minutes of. I want to like deciding, I want to build something. So they build a very basic like counter or Hello world within the first ten minutes, and then maybe they can build something that is pretty complex within the first week, or something like a full lending banking app or something, which is a lot higher in complexity than what you probably could build now. so yeah, that's the goal. And there's a lot of things that are being built around it in order to achieve it long term.
00:10:15 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think there's a, there's like a Solana book, I think that's on online somewhere that I saw it because like the I know like rust has like documentation tools kind of built in.
00:10:26 - Anthony Campolo
So is that something that's like from the the official Solana team. And if you, if you know what I'm referring to the salon cookbook, I think.
00:10:35 - Jacob Creech
Yes, the Solana cookbook was an initiative that I started like the second week that I read. it was a great initiative because what happened is that, like, we have a cookbook. It's a lot of copy paste role code snippets on how to do different things on Solana so that you can quickly, like, get up to speed. And you don't have to be like banging your head against the wall trying to figure out, okay, how do I do domain lookups, sort of like the dot soul domains or something. It's just right there. and was great about that initiative in itself was that we put out a call to action, was like, hey, we're building this. And I, I jump started with a bunch of beginning examples and we told the community, like, hey, if you want to contribute and help developers in the future, Build On Solana Cookbook is a great place to build.
00:11:26 - Jacob Creech
so we had a ton of contributions on that on the cookbook that I helped review, and now it has definitely made Solana so much better to build on. We so internally we attract like developer retention rate and the cookbook. When it came out, it immediately increased our developer retention rate by about 15%, which is insane that a single resource can do that. so yeah. Cookbooks. Awesome. And it is being built by it's really being built by the Solana community because it's not mostly by me anymore. and it's being maintained by a lot of the community as well. I haven't done a PR in a while, but plenty of people come in like, hey, this would be cool. I let them, I say, cool, go ahead and add it. And then they make a PR and it gets merged. and ultimately right now we're doing a lot of like making cookbook more accessible to other countries in the world. Just yesterday, I believe the Vietnamese translation went through. we have partial Mandarin, partial, Spanish and, upcoming Korean.
00:12:33 - Jacob Creech
And so it's been great. And once again, all these translations completely. Community contributed. I didn't even ask them. So it's fantastic to see.
00:12:42 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that's that's super cool. I actually worked a little bit on translations for RedwoodJS. There's an open source project that I've worked on for a while, and like people underestimate how complicated that can be, like just getting like a docs site set up to be like, multilingual in the first place and then like, how do you like so do you, do you use any system to manage this and other things like crowd in and stuff like that? Because the the real challenge tends to be if you want to like change content, like you need to change content like the base language and then update all the translated languages. Also kind of like keep those in sync. So is that something that you just like are kind of building iteratively. So like you're always kind of keeping things in sync. Or do you use some kind of specific tool to manage that.
00:13:28 - Anthony Campolo
Like is there like how does the translation work specifically?
00:13:32 - Jacob Creech
So the cookbook specifically is basically just community contributed. I'm definitely not qualified to do all the translation work. so I think in the future for when we do change, like the base of the English version of the cookbook, we'll probably use some tools. We're just getting the translations now. So it's it's not fully thought out at this time, but definitely something we'll be looking into. Coming soon.
00:14:04 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome. Yeah, we were using donkey sauce. They had a pretty good kind of built in internationalization support already. So if you're kind of looking for a tool that can do that, that's one to to check out. I would be curious if you said that, you know, people are contributing this and, you know, they're contributing translations and examples are there like current things that you feel like are missing that you would like, want to put out, like a call to action? Like if someone could build this for us, that would be like super duper sweet.
00:14:29 - Anthony Campolo
Is there anything kind of like on your mind that you you think could be added? That would be really cool.
00:14:35 - Jacob Creech
We have in the cookbook, we have a core concept section, and the one part that's missing is the cross program in a vacation part. So CPI that is an issue. So all of the different things that I'm looking for for cookbook and also the community has been looking for we create issues and they're on like a project board on the cookbook. And so that is like the big one is that core concept. And it takes a little bit more work, but it's there. there's also so there's a new initiative on the cookbook that's not really well publicized right now because it's still being built out, but they're under cookbook Solana cookbook.com/integrations. The idea is that there is going to be a lot of different protocols, like Mango Markets and Switchboard and Jupyter aggregator, so that you can learn how to get the accounts and how to do CPI with the with those different protocols. So it's a lot easier to get started with like, hey, I want to build on top of mango or something like that.
00:15:40 - Jacob Creech
that is something that's being built at right now. And ultimately, like if anybody wants to keep true to that, I'd love to see it because it would be huge.
00:15:49 - Anthony Campolo
Cool. And for these types of examples that we've been talking about, are you providing like just the smart contracts or do you also build kind of like front ends and like JavaScript frameworks to connect to them to or does that like even make sense for Solana? Kind of curious. Like, are you building full on DApps or more of just kind of like the the back end smart contract kind of stuff?
00:16:13 - Jacob Creech
So the cookbook is both, clean throughout, but it's not like fully fledged like a react front or something. It's like a snippet of code, and you can use this interchangeably in any front end that you have. we also have different initiatives that if you go to github.com developers, there's a bunch of repos there, and one of them is called program examples. So that one has a bunch of program examples of like how to do very basic stuff, but both in anchor and the native.
00:16:44 - Jacob Creech
and then there's also going to be front end like full DApps there as well at some point. so we have that being built. It's not fully built out yet, but it is definitely planned. I think the the difficulty there, the challenge there is that we, as the Devereaux team, don't have expertise in every single, framework. So we rely a lot on community contribution to get those done. Like, I don't think anybody in our team knows React Native, for example. It's just like we kind of rely on somebody else for that.
00:17:21 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, that's that's always the challenge, especially when it comes to the, the JavaScript world, because things are like so fractured off into all these different libraries and frameworks and and stuff, and it can be a lot to manage for sure. And then even if people are like contributing examples, then it's like, well, that's nice. That means you need someone to maintain that example. It's like, what happens when you know the version of react is out of date.
00:17:44 - Anthony Campolo
And so it's a it can be a real burden to have to, to take care of all these example apps. So it's it's great that they really have someone who's like just looking at this and really taking that on. if anyone out there in the audience wants to kind of hop up and ask some questions of Jacob as well, or speak to their own experience with Solana, you are welcome to join us. We'll be going for a little bit longer here. And you already spoke to this a little bit with kind of like what to build when you get started. You're saying, can I start with like a simple to do app and then maybe work your way up to like a larger, more complex kind of financial app? But could you speak a little bit more about like, what you would really recommend people to, to build if they're like getting started. And what kind of like is a good progression of projects? Like help them level up?
00:18:36 - Jacob Creech
Sure. and actually, on that note, we have coming up like a 30 day kind of challenge thing that will go through this progression.
00:18:45 - Jacob Creech
So that really anybody that goes through the whole thing, if they're able to do it end to end because it ends up being a pretty experienced, solid developer. the beginning would just be like, hello world. Like everybody does. then I would recommend doing something like a counter app. just counting with using specifically PDAs. so that you get to understand of, like how a PDA works in a program. and using that to handle the counting. then probably move on to more of a CPI calls with maybe Sam or something on Solana so that you can understand like, okay, this is how getting accounts for another program works and this is how I interact with it with my own program. And then you can really just branch out from there to, hey, I'm going to use this program library. So looking at like token lending, how to integrate that into your smart contract and things like that so that you can learn a lot more and progress a lot more into like the very difficult parts of program development.
00:19:55 - Anthony Campolo
Nice. Yeah, that that sounds super, super useful. I'll have to check out that kind of, challenge sequence, because I am someone who have not really dove in super deep into Solana yet, probably because I don't really know rust that well, but I've always wanted to learn rust, so I think it'll be a good excuse to actually kick my butt into gear, make me actually learn rust. So I like to have a, you know, some sort of use case for learning, you know, cool new technology. So Solana is going to be a good excuse to kind of dig in to that. let's talk a little bit about, NFTs. I'd be curious, you know, how plugged into, like, the Solana NFT space. Are you are there some projects that you think are, like, interesting or or worth checking out? Just kind of the, you know, broad NFT question for you?
00:20:44 - Jacob Creech
I think NFTs are very like unique and interesting. And I think there are definitely some, very cool applications of them.
00:20:53 - Jacob Creech
I feel like a lot of the applications that are really cool to build with NFTs have yet to be like, like have mass adoption. Like, I really think that using NFTs as tickets would be really awesome one day. I, I'm starting to see this pop up, but like so Ethereum has NFTs with like their calling apps, for badges whenever you go to different events.
00:21:18 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I got one when I spoke at Ethereum Amsterdam. I have a Poe app for that.
00:21:23 - Jacob Creech
Yeah. So like those are really cool. And I'm starting to see them pop up on Solana right now. And it's like, I think that's awesome. I, I wish they can't worry. Earlier when I went to a different hacker, but now they're starting to pop up at the different hacker office and it's great. so like a badge that like, hey, I went to this event. so ticketing a badge, I think also using NFTs to create a community and then use royalties off those NFTs to fund a project that you then like, have open as a public good is really, really cool.
00:21:56 - Jacob Creech
some projects that did this successfully, like Genesis, go and had like an RPC to some extent open to the public, which was really, really cool at the beginning. yeah, those types of projects are cool. I'll be honest, I don't I there's so much stuff happening in NFTs, I'm not able to keep up all the time. But I do know that metroplex themselves, like they have their new, their new NFT standard coming out, things like the metadata standard V2. That's going to bring a lot of really cool advancements in NFTs and allow it to be a lot easier to build on NFTs. Some cool things than that are like the NFT compression. so you can make something like a million NFTs for like less than one soul or something like that. So it's a lot easier to build with NFTs on Solana. So looking forward to that when it comes out.
00:22:55 - Anthony Campolo
Cool. Yeah, and I'm the same way. Like I have a hard time keeping up with NFTs as well, which is why I like to ask people about them, because, you know, trying to it's like that, you know, the poor blind men trying to feel that, that elephant type thing, they all feel a different piece.
00:23:09 - Anthony Campolo
So that's kind of how I feel about NFTs is just like such a huge world. It's really hard to kind of keep a keep a hold on it. But thank you for recommending those, a projects. I'll definitely make sure to check those out. You also mentioned, hacker houses you want to talk a little bit about, like what are the Solana hacker houses? If someone wanted to go to one, what they could kind of expect to get out of it.
00:23:32 - Jacob Creech
Sure. so Solana hacker houses are really cool. I've only been to one, but, like, it was awesome. I went to the Austin Hacker house, and what what they are is kind of like a, it's kind of like a co-working space that is really geared on, like networking and introducing you to other Solana developers within the ecosystem and helping you find and build teams to then build really cool products on Solana. So like the Austin Hacker House, there were a lot of cool devs there. I talked to as many as I possibly could, and they're all building great products, and some of them are finding their new team members at these hacker houses.
00:24:11 - Jacob Creech
And it's really cool to see, I know that the original hacker house in Lisbon during break point last year. They had a bunch of, like, ecosystem bounties that just random projects on the ecosystem put up. So a lot of pride. A lot of developers tried building for those specific bounties and won some great prizes in that in the same run. I'm hoping that that comes, actually, I expect that will probably come back whenever we do the hacker house in Lisbon during breakpoint again. and looking forward to seeing all the builders there.
00:24:47 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. And Quick Node is a partner with Solana for these hacker houses, so I'm actually going to be at some of them in the future. I'm very much looking forward to it. I'll be at one in Canada in September. if someone wanted to see kind of like the lineup and where hacker houses are going to be, like, where should they go to get that information?
00:25:07 - Jacob Creech
It says. Com slash events. And I actually met the a lot of the quick note team in at the Austin Hacker House.
00:25:16 - Jacob Creech
It was really cool to meet some of the people that I've been working with for quite a while, like Noah.
00:25:21 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. Yeah, yeah, we have a decent chunk of us over in Austin, and Noah is like our resident Solana guy. Anytime people have a lot of questions, Noah is the one they go to. I know that he's like really embedded himself in the in the community and then learn a lot and create a lot of really great content. So that's kind of partly why I have like held off on really like learning it because like we have like a really solid Solana dev real person already. So we're kind of managing some of the other chains. But like I said, like I'm really excited to to dig into salon and learn more. I've heard rumors that Solana devs get quite hefty paychecks, so I think that's a good sign of the the health of the ecosystem and the fact that there's a lot of people building stuff. There seems to be a lot of demand for more people to build more stuff.
00:26:07 - Anthony Campolo
So having someone who's just in charge of like teaching people salons so they can go out and they can like get these jobs and they can build these applications. It's like so, so important and such valuable work. So is there any kind of final call to actions or exciting things that are coming up soon that you all let people know about that we haven't talked about yet?
00:26:26 - Jacob Creech
I mean, so there's a ton of really cool stuff happening on. So that could be quite a while. So like token 2022, which is like the it's like a new version of the token program coming out that allows you to do extensions on the token program itself. So you can like have fees on transfer. You could freeze tokens by default, all sorts of really cool stuff. You can do confidential transfers on it so that they're like, you can't figure out where they're going and who they're going to unless you're the sender or receiver. Like lots of really cool stuff happening in the token 2022. there are so the fee markets coming up on Solana, which actually are live but not really adopted yet, which is really interesting to me.
00:27:16 - Jacob Creech
that like, hey, they're there, but not everybody has a fully adopted yet and you can see people using it slowly but surely. but those are, those are live and keep personal keeping fees pretty low, which is great. and then let's see there is address lookup tables which allows you. So transaction size limits are really small. They're like I think they're 1232 bytes. So it's very tiny. so that's a often a problem that developers have when building transactions. And what it comes up is that, hey, public keys are 32 bytes each, so they take up a lot of your transaction. The address lookup tables that are coming up and coming out soon will compress the public keys down to four bytes each, which is fantastic. And now you can build a lot of more cooler stuff with address lookup tables. I know Mango Markets is waiting for those for their version for which is really I'm really excited about. yeah, there's like quite a laundry list of things to be excited about in Solana, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the ecosystem shapes to all the different changes that come out.
00:28:33 - Anthony Campolo
Very cool. All right. Last question. Do you have a dot soul domain?
00:28:38 - Jacob Creech
I do, well I do. I never looked them up. I think I bought them the the first day that they came out. Well, I think the what you had to do is you had to, like, register and then wait a week to get them or something. and I did that the first day they came out, but I never hooked them up with a specific address. I think it's more of, like, privacy on those addresses first. So I'll get them hooked up eventually. but I do not have one hooked up to any specific address today.
00:29:10 - Anthony Campolo
Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I've got an AJC web dev dot, so it is out there. I bought it and I think I hooked up a wallet to it, but I haven't really checked it out since I since I did that. But I've always interested in kind of like the more domain like functionality that comes along with these things. All right.
00:29:28 - Anthony Campolo
Well, thank you so much for being here. This was a really great conversation. I learned a bunch about Solana and recommend all of our listeners give you a follow to keep up on all the cool Solana stuff that's coming out. And yeah, this is our weekly Twitter space here at Quick Node. We'll be doing these every week at this time. So if you enjoy this conversation we love to see you again. And yeah, thank you so much Jacob for being here.
00:29:56 - Jacob Creech
Thank you. This has been great.
00:29:58 - Anthony Campolo
All right. Have a good one, everyone.
00:30:01 - Jacob Creech
Thank you. Bye.