It was time again for Etherheads to convene, with DevCon 5 being in the land of the rising sun. In particular, where the red ball on Japan’s flag represents the tacoyaki of the nation’s best food destination: Osaka! (And if you’ve ever eaten fresh tacoyaki, it should be colored red since it always has the inside temperature of magma. Sweet, delicious magma.) After learning to navigate the city’s metro (which was much easier with the use of an IC card), we found our way to the ATC Hall along Osaka’s west coast. Though I’m still confused why it’s not APTC instead of ATC, but I digress…

Since the ATC is part of a larger complex that includes eateries and shops, it took a bit of navigation to find it, especially as different parts of the conference center were in different parts of the complex. It was an interesting venue, to be sure. Nestled between an active port for cruises and some industrial warehouses, it had the simultaneous feeling of being both welcoming and gritty. Which is, in some ways, how you could describe Osaka.

And we even had our own little outdoor park, which we was a nice change of pace.

But enough about that…on to the conference itself! Well, after getting the new wristband (that seemed to take the place of the lanyard), we snacked on some local favorites inside the main hall as we planned our first day:

First stop was a session on getting the Ethereum community to create a more open dialogue about creating standards for Ethereum usage, ones that could be embraced by the world at large. Granted, the focus of the conference was aimed at the talk about Ethereum 2.0, since the technical hurdles are the most important priority. However, this kind of discussion was also important, since we do need to think about what comes after the successful implementation of the platform’s next iteration. After all, getting Ethereum into the marketplace will require a lot of negotiating with the outside world, and it’s better to start that conversation now.

Next stop was a must for me, since it was a presentation about building rules engines within Ethereum. And I thought that my baby Wonka was the only game in town! So, with rapt attention, I listened to Michael Yuan and his team at Second State present their rules engine for Ethereum. Since it’s a subject dear to me, I was glad for their talk, and I felt more validated for even putting all the time and work into my own project.

But, in the end, I didn’t see their implementation as the viable one, especially with its variation of the Drools spec. In that scenario, you would use a Drools-like pidgin within a rules contract, which would then transpile your effective rules before eventually compiling the contract into EVM code. But in that case, why wouldn’t the writer of the contract just write Solidity/Vyper code instead? Plus, most Drools implementations use clever versions of the RETE algorithm, which could execute in an Ethereum environment unpredictably (depending on context) and could have immensely unforeseen gas costs with multiple iterations of rules. I still believe that rules engines should be for non technical people, and this way would alienate a lot of that crowd. In the end, though I’m probably incredibly biased, I still thought of my Wonka project as the better path. However, it was still cool to see someone thinking along the same lines, since even most developers have never heard of a rules engine.

And, even though I had already seen them in Brooklyn a few months ago, it was good to see Microsoft again, since it reconfirmed their dedication to the space. Cale Teeter and crew talked about the Azure Blockchain Workbench becoming more dynamic, with the ability to add nodes outside of Azure to their management console. Which is good, since I had been complaining about that for a while now. Plus, they showed off some new abilities with the Visual Studio Code IDE, and they even gave a shout-out to my Ethereum mentor Juan Blanco and the Nethereum team, since their Workbench tools rely on Nethereum for quite a bit.

After a busy day, why not enjoy some quality time with Kabo-chan, the seminal dog that’s the muse of memes and crypto around the globe! That should fun, right?

…

I love dogs, especially mine…but I’m not hanging around to meet a damn dog. He was too much of a celebrity for me, having to wait in a line to meet him. I instead decided to embrace the mediocrity of my existence and to skip my chance at rubbing elbows with fame. There was too much tacoyaki waiting for me back in the center of town.