The last 10% always seems to take 90% of the time. I'm not the best frontend developer to say the least, but I can at least rest soundly knowing I'm only half as arrogant as the devs at Google, who frequently take what once took a single click, and turn it into eight.
My salvo at Google is not unwarranted though in this project. I discovered a Chromium CSS bug, that required a weird workaround for displaying the bottom borders of the leaderboard table. I said goodbye to two hours of my life sorting that one. Thanks Google for that PR. You borked Brave as well.
The great thing about this hackathon is that I'm doing it for the love of coding. Edvard, a 'real' CS pro had burnout from years of working for other people. The soullessness that a large company that encourages a culture of making half-baked PRs to not get culled is the antithesis to blockchain development. I know he is enjoying his time with this. The annoying problems we faced are not stress, they are akin to repetition in the weight room. You know there will be benefits to the effort you are giving now down the road, and this time for yourself.
Nadia is a fan of the KISS principle in development. She reminded me that our goal here is not to be perfect, but to show what is possible. Polished details do matter, but there will always be compromises. The main compromise here is just doing it myself in the way I know best for the frontend. Perhaps my disdain for difficult to master JS frameworks like React is misguided when it comes to the complicated state management, and quirkiness of Web3 logins.
A couple years ago I rolled my own Web3 login pattern with nodejs, JWTs, and signature nonces, but we don't need socketio with this frontend. We just need the ability for people to know the state of their Web3 wallet connection so that they can upgrade the right pig, and mint with the correct address on the right network. It sounds simple, but it's not. I feel this is where a service like Moralis can help. My only issue with Moralis is infrastructure centralization.
The arrogant part of me thinks my way is actually great for blockchain because my smooth brained development style ports perfectly to decentralized file services. I think every page should be static when it comes to managing NFT assets. Web3 is the glue to the read-only database that is the blockchain. Why do you need CDNs, nodejs backends, and Nginx to deploy a site?
Polygon is a bit of a chore for newcomers to wrap their head around. Simplifying it for those people is important, but it isn't easy. Web3 currently doesn't think like that for us, the developer. We need tools to easily manage wallet state, chain IDs, and network switching. Why on Earth does Web3 use both an integer and hexadecimal representation of the chain ID?
I think being a little bit thick is helpful sometimes to understand when things don't make sense. However, I hope I am not being like those homophobes who used to say, "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" when I was a kid. Those guys, and it was always guys...hmmm...were pretty thick too. Maybe we are all degenerates and nobody has any idea what is going on. We could all just be vomiting dogma based on the current state of something. Remember when Jakob Nielsen was cool? I do.
I guess now I'm just being nostalgic for a simpler time. One where a friend's sister hijacking the phone all night prevented your ICQ conversation. I have a feeling that this is the ICQ era of crypto. We will soon long for these days too I believe.
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