Truffle produces the “Sweetest Tools for Smart Contracts” and has been building out their new product Truffle Teams. We caught up with Mike Seese, the Technical Lead for Truffle Teams to talk about Truffle’s new product Truffle Teams.

The Chocolatier Behind Truffle Teams: Mike Seese

Mike is nothing shy of exceptional, with two bachelor’s degrees in Computer Hardware Engineering and Electrical Engineering, as well as a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Mike has previously worked as a Systems Engineer for Lockheed Martin and as a Software Engineer at multiple startups. Eventually, he became a software engineer at Truffle, the infamous smart contracts tool that has nearly 3 million downloads over it’s three main products. Now Mike is the Technical Lead for Truffle Teams, the newest blockchain development tool.

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Now, onto the interview!

Before we get into Truffle Teams, the most important question of all, what is your favorite chocolate?

Basically, anything that has milk chocolate and caramel. Milky Ways are by far my favorite.

What is Truffle Teams?

Zero Configuration Continuous Integration for Smart Contracts. Or Zero Config CI for short.

Okay but really what is it?

Explain it Like I’m Not a Developer: Truffle Teams?

Truffle Teams streamlines a team’s workflow, giving them a shared compilation and testing environment for continuous integration. Truffle Teams enables a team to monitor deployed smart contracts’ transaction, state, and events. It also enables for visual presentation of useful data and configurable notifications of errors provide critical insight for the team.

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Why Does The Enterprise World Need Truffle Teams?

Continuous integration (CI) is very common within the software development world. Many developers use Travis CI or AppVeyor CI. Developers need to setup configuration files to instruct these platforms on which dependencies to install and what commands/scripts to execute to then compile and run tests. Truffle Teams CI does all of this configuration for developers so that they can spend time doing the fun stuff.

Setting up a Travis CI can be tedious work that requires developers to ensure the config file has all the necessary packages or fixing anything that may have gone wrong. And in the software development world, things never go wrong. Continuous integration requires important, yet dare we say, boring steps that can result in bugs, headaches, and lost time. That’s why with Truffle Teams we’re trying to make sure the developer can get up and running as quickly as possible.

What does the Truffle Teams free version provide for developers?

Truffle is guided on the philosophy to create open source tools for developers. Truffle teams will always provide a free version which enables automated smart contract compilation and testing. Additionally, users get unlimited open source repositories that seamlessly integrate with Github and provide an easy view of your repository history.

What is the key benefit of Truffle Teams?

The key benefit of Truffle Teams is the ability to enable a team, no matter the size, to view where your project is going during the enter product life cycle. From the development perspective, teams can watch where things are failing and succeeding to respond accordingly. From the operations side, teams are monitoring what’s been deployed and how people are interacting with your contracts with as little configuration as possible.

What are the Truffle Teams premium features and how will they enhance enterprise blockchain development?

There are currently three premium features. Let’s go through each of them and talk about what they mean in a real-world situation.

1. Monitor deployed smart contracts’ transactions, state, and events.

Having successful builds is great, but teams need the ability to understand more information about their smart contracts.

Are people misusing the contracts or calling the wrong function? Maybe transactions are failing or there is a bug somewhere. Truffle Teams is able to monitor an organization’s contracts and display a dashboard for developers to monitor the state of their contracts, transactions, and events. Teams would have the power to easily view the balance or users of a specific contract.

Currently, developers have to get information from Etherscan or build their own interface to execute. Even worse is that this has to be conducted for each individual contract whereas Truffle Teams enables teams to evaluate multiple contracts simultaneously.

Furthermore, Truffle Teams integrates with other Truffle suite products. Therefore, Truffle would know an Enterprise’s entire truffle project and collect metrics to identify why contracts are failing.

Truffle Teams enables project level vs contract level monitoring which becomes increasingly important at the enterprise level.

2. Configurable notifications for errors and anomalies such as failed transactions or balance changes.

Everybody loves notifications. It’s not enough to know a problem exists if someone can’t respond to the issue in time. Truffle Teams dashboards can be customized to notify a developer that the balance of a contract is decreasing more rapidly than normal. Additionally, Truffle Teams can monitor exploitations and provide proper updates. Notifications will be able to be configured so that an email could be sent to the responsible party if a contract experiences 20% transactions failure. Truffle Teams will bring information to developers so that they can make timely decisions for their projects.

3. Visualize monitoring data your way using tables and graphs.

Truffle Teams will come with a developer operations dashboard that can monitor bandwidth and CPU usage. Imagine a situation where gas fees spike for a specific smart contract. Visualizing contract data, a developer could easily optimize the contract to save users’ or the firm’s network fees or increase the gas price to ensure that transactions get through quickly.

What’s in store for Truffle Teams?

Companies develop features for their users. Twitter created the retweet button after users started retweeting each other’s tweets. Facebook groups were initially created by users before becoming a major feature. While our team has many features in line for Truffle Teams, ultimately we believe in creating features that the community finds most valuable. So let us know your thoughts, we value your ideas! A few features we are planning are real-time smart contract analytics and monitoring​, Azure Pipelines integration for advanced project CI​, team-wide development and staging blockchains with a single click​, smart contract continuous delivery and build promotion​ and more! Stay tuned for more details and sign up for our email updates.

How does Truffle Teams push overall blockchain development forward?

Truffle Teams is a huge opportunity for blockchain development and applications to move into the modern world of software development. Over the last couple of decades, so many tools have been developed to bring software to the enterprise world. Blockchain is quickly catching up; however, blockchain becomes difficult with this distributed ledger where things are harder to monitor. While there’s one global place for data on something like Ethereum, ledger integration for Quorum or other enterprise ledgers is more difficult. Truffle teams gives enterprises this glimpse into the future of what product development life cycle tools will look like for the blockchain ecosystem.

What most excites you about the blockchain ecosystem?

We’ve been saying how blockchain is growing exponentially and how it’s getting closer and closer to going mainstream. Even though we’ve had this bear market, it has not hindered the developer ecosystem. Everyone is still pushing forward. The tools, infrastructure, developers are all starting to merge into this revolution.

Is there a team size limit for Truffle Teams?

Truffle Teams is built for teams of all sizes, from the single developer to the large scale enterprise teams that have various roles. Truffle Teams enables managers to have a default dashboard of contract balances and graphs as well as the ability to create more specific dashboards for individual developers.

TruffleCon is coming up in August, what do you say to people who want to go?

If you thought last year was going to be great, Microsoft is hosting this year and it’s going to be bigger and better than ever.

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