About
I got my start working at a crypto startup in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. In my almost four years there, I’ve built full stack web apps, built and managed an end-to-end datastack, configured AWS, and built a bunch of microservices. Until I left, I had yet to experience building Solana programs or contributing to Solana dev tooling.
I moved on trying to build my own Solana application in public. It was a naive implementation of a vault program used for commitment contracts - promises you would make to yourself or to others that would use $SOL as the bond if you didn’t keep your promise. There were a couple things I learned - firstly, that Solana dev tooling is janky, but easier than one might think, and secondly, that Rust is not a hard language if you make an effort to know what you’re doing.
I’ve gone in and out of several startups. Realizing I had a lot more to learn, I wanted to understand the terrain of Solana dev. I was looking for a place where I could see what everyone was working on and what engineering problems were being solved. All the work was being done in different places, and no reference existed collecting their updates and progress at the time. So I decided to create a newsletter in December 2025 and have been publishing that content weekly since.
Solana Technical Weekly - W1 on X
Eventually, I saw an old post and video series called Solana Changelog, that covers material similar to mine, but was discontinued. I reached out to Jacob Creech to see if we can ressurect it. He agreed. And my newsletter got incorporated into Solana Changelog. Since then, the newsletter has become a weekly podcast on @solana_devs on X and @readylayerone on YouTube.
Solana Changelog: May 21 on X