Who am I

Hi! My name is Yossi, I’m leading the engineering for the Developer Experience squad at Kin.

I joined Kin almost a year and was tasked to establish a new team, the Developer Experience squad (AKA DevX), together with Ayelet Laub, DevX squad lead.

In the past 11 months, we grew the DevX squad from 2 people to 14. This includes client, backend and support engineers, product and business people as well as design. We hope to hit the 16 people mark within a month or two.

What do we do at DevX

DevX is responsible for building the Kin platform. DevX engineering mission is to build the best tools possible for integrating with the Kin blockchain and allow any developer to join the Kin Ecosystem quickly and easily. Our challenge is to build the most generic and decentralized tools possible. Under the hood, all Kin squads use DevX tools and SDKs.

Here are some highlights of what we did in the past 11 months…

KDP #1 (Kin Developer Program)

As the DevX squad began working on KDP1, DevX engineering was preparing the KDP SDKs and the necessary backend infrastructure.

KDP1 is successful for two main reasons:

1. We’ve on-board 30 (!) new applications into the Kin ecosystem.

2. By interacting with so many developers we’ve learned a lot about our tools — what’s working and what we need to improve.

Launching a new Kin SDK

The most important learning from KDP #1 was that we need to allow our developers to interact with the blockchain directly, without added abstractions on top of the basic blockchain functionality. Developers asked for more freedom and we heard them loud and clear.

The KDP SDKs were running on top of an internal component — we called it Kin-Core. Kin-Core was responsible for interacting with the Kin blockchain.

We took Kin-Core, painted over the ugly parts, created more robust documentation, then released it as our go-to SDK for Android, iOS (client SDKs), and Python (backend SDK). The KinSDK was born.

Enabling the ecosystem migration to the new Kin blockchain

As the blockchain squad finalized their work on the “new” Kin blockchain, DevX was tasked with building the tools that will enable the Kin ecosystem partners to migrate to the new blockchain. We also decided that our KDP1 partners would be the first to migrate.

Migrating accounts between blockchains is not an easy task and require A LOT of planning. After a few months of planning, architecting and coding the Kin Migration Module and the Kin Migration Server were ready, as well as the “migration-ready” KDP SDKs. At the time of this writing, some of the biggest applications in the Kin ecosystem were already migrated successfully using DevX tools.

Launching the Kin Unity plugins

The Kin-Unity partnership has a special place in DevX’s heart. We LOVE gaming and we believe the gaming world, games & gamers alike, would benefit greatly from Kin. This is why we’re actively working on Kin Unity plugins for Android and iOS. The Android plugin Unity certification process is at its final stages and the iOS plugin is not far behind. We hope to finalize the iOS plugin internal tests in the next few days.

As always, working with developers (game devs in that case) allowed us to gain valuable knowledge about our tools and we were able to identify the Kin backend SDK as a friction point for developers. And so we’ve built the Python bootstrap module.

Building the Python Bootstrap module

We wanted to make developers lives easier when implementing Kin. The need for a functioning backend to run the Kin backend SDK (Python) was taking its toll and we weren’t happy with the Unity developers time-to-market. After considering serval options we’ve decided to build a Kin bootstrap module that will cover most Kin use-cases out of the box, a generic abstraction above the Kin backend SDK that remains true to our decentralized approach.

We’ve released the bootstrap module just 2 weeks ago and the developers reactions were very positive.

Launching the Kin NodeJS SDK

Maybe you love Node, maybe you hate it, maybe you’re apathetic to its existence — the fact is that Node is super popular among developers and we want to be where our developers are. And so, these days, we’re finalizing our work on the Kin Node SDK and we hope to release its first version within a few weeks and allow developers with Node backend capabilities to join the Kin ecosystem with ease.

Looking into the future

Building the Kin platform, of course, is an ongoing process.

New features and improvements are “in the oven” for most of our tool offerings and new ideas are being discussed and designed on a daily basis.

Working closely with Kin developers is extremely important to us. We will continue the conversation with our developers to better understand what are their pain points and what do they need us to build to make their lives easier as part of the ecosystem.

This is actually a good place to stop and give a huge shoutout to all Kin developers — Thank you!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, dreams, and concerns with us.

We are listening and taking action. Always.

Closing words

Well, this write-up proved to be longer than I expected. Looking back at all the things we’ve accomplished in the past 11 months — I cannot be more confident that we’re on the right track.

As the DevX squad continues to introduce great opportunities for new developers to join the Kin ecosystem. KDP #2 developers and the Kin Gaming Challenge are about to dramatically grow the Kin Ecosystem yet again and introduce wonderful new ways to use Kin into our lives — There’s a lot of work to be done.

This is a marathon — not a sprint, and we’re winning.