My journey on development with Tezos

This was the first time I was building something on Tezos Blockchain. There were a lot of questions on how to proceed and what challenges I will be facing during my development. In the end, it went smooth and this article can be helpful for those who want to proceed with the same.

So, I had my project and it’s requirements in my mind. The first challenge was understanding how tezos blockchain works. I started reading tezos whitepaper and simultaneously googled confusing terms. There were online sessions by Cryptonomic which helped me resolve my doubts. The videos for the same can be found on youtube and the tezos’ whitepaper can be found here.

After I was done understanding how tezos works, the next challenge was writing the smart contract. Tezos smart contracts are written in Michelson, which is a domain-specific language and was written for tezos. Do you know the best thing about tezos? It supports multiple languages. So you don’t need to learn Michelson for writing the smart contract. But at the end of the day, all the languages that tezos supports, are compiled to Michelson for execution.

Coming back to writing the smart contract. I came across this amazing platform called SmartPy. It lets you write the smart contract in python. Amazing right? What else can be better than you being able to write the smart contract in one of the most preferred languages? SmartPy had its contract development syllabus which I had to go through for being able to write the smart contract. The syllabus can be found here.

Now, I was done writing the smart contract and it was time for deployment. The complete deployment procedure was explained in the smart contract writing syllabus. And tezos faucet was the right place to get free Tez(token for tezos) for the test network.

Now, my smart contract was deployed, I used React-js for building my UI, it was time for a wallet which can help me interact with my deployed smart contract. There are several wallets out there but the one I used was TezBridge. It was easy to integrate and easier to interact with the smart contract. And here, my development was complete.

There’s a common error faced by the beginners while calling the deployed smart contract which looks like this-

Reason? All the tezos accounts are required to be revealed before they can be used. When we get an account from Tezos Faucet, often the account is not revealed to the network, meaning the test network or whatever network you are using, doesn’t know that such an account exists. And when we try to use that account, we get the error. All the accounts, before being used can be revealed manually in Faucet Importer and the error resolves.

This was my first time experience while building on tezos and it was really fun. Hope it helped.