Chris Maddern - Cloutie Reverse engineering story on BitClout

Front end code and the nodes and all these things are really, I mean, even before that I think you were working on the Cloudy app. Even before that, right before the release, you were using API, the reverse engineering, if you will, of the app. Right. Reverse engineering is the exact right word. And I think one of the most delightful surprises in building Cloudy is at the very beginning, myself and then later Wes Smith who joined me, we kind of assumed that it was going to be an uphill battle against an ever moving target without any friendlies on the inside. We kind of assumed that we'd be building almost to the chagrin of the original developers. It turned out to be pretty different than that.

In the first few weeks, the platform's moving really, really quickly and so we sort of interpreted some of the early breaking changes as oh God, they're trying to break our app. Obviously they were just trying to move really. But when we did finally start to engage and see them working on things like BitCloud's identity and then started working with maybe through some problems, the team's actually been incredibly supportive and helpful and is clearly proactively trying to create a more stable development interface so that people like us can build applications on top of it. And where I think six weeks ago now, when we started building Clouty, we were basically one of maybe five people who were maybe, I don't know, a very small number of people who were building anything prominent on top of the platform. And so when they broke something, they really only like broke us and a couple of other people and no one had to care. Today, now that they've federated that and they've open sourced the nodes and other people are running the front end code, there's a lot more stability in that interface and so they've created a much more friendly environment to build in. And candidly, I've never seen a platform evolve as quickly as BitCloud is today. I don't know how many people they secretly have working on it. Behind Blue Party Hat, Red Party Hat. Maybe it's.

The pace and the quality and the kind of single minded direction in which they're building is really impressive. And where that came certainly at the cost for us of having to rewrite things. I don't think I've ever rewritten code as much in my whole career as I have on this project. In the last six weeks, I think we've written image uploading and image posting maybe three times as kind of that's evolved over the past few weeks. Login Identity, I think has had three full rewrites as the underlying things have found their final state, but it's been totally worth it. And now that they've open sourced a lot of the identity code, it's no longer reverse engineering. You can go and actually kind of look at how it works and build a sensible protocol on your side. So it's been a really fun evolution to watch. Oh, yeah, it is, it is. And I actually went and downloaded the node set up and everything and set up a VM and started the node and all that.