Today is a momentous day for the Radix community as the Alexandria Preview Event happens this afternoon in New York and across the virtual world. In this event the Radix team will, for the first time, reveal the actual syntax and key mechanisms of the Scrypto programming language. In addition a few hundred developers will get early access to an initial set of developer tools for building "blueprints" that are used to deploy the equivalent of "smart contracts" on Radix. By all accounts this will become key technology for moving Decentralized Finance (aka DeFi) into the mainstream. We will explore exactly why that may be in future blog posts.

First let me back up and explain who I am and what this Blog is all about. I am Rock Howard, the founder and operator of the Radix Programmer's Guild. I am best known in the Radix world for starting a discord server for those interested in learning about functional programming for cryptocurrency. Over 100 people signed up mostly including Radix enthusiasts like myself. When it was first announced last spring that Scrypto would be largely based on the Rust programming language, my discord added a strong focus on Rust as well as cryptocurrency programming platforms and protocols that used Rust such as Solana and Substrate.

I have always been a programming language freak having learned and used over 50 different languages during my career and so I have strong opinions about what works and doesn't work when implementing complex ideas in code. With that background, and also with my work to help aspiring Radix programmers prepare for Scrypto, I have been approached many times to get more involved with various projects in the Radix community. The first notable contact was by the Radix team who allowed me a brief sneak peek at Scrypto last April in order to collect my impressions about where they were going with it. Hopefully my feedback was useful to them. Personally, based on what I learned, I decided to drop all of my other crypto endeavors and job searches and focus my full-time attention on Radix. Yes it was that exciting!

My discord continued to grow and subsequently I was approached by Ed Chow and Gary Leuis of Sovren Ventures who wanted to amplify my work by conducting a West Coast and then an East Coast live training event for potential Scrypto developers. I had gathered notes from my sneak peek and so confirmed that I could conduct such an event on their behalf but that they would have to get permission from the Radix team because I had verbally agreed with Radix not to reveal anything specific about what I had learned about Scrypto from them which is a promise that I have kept. So Sovren followed up with Radix and got their blessing but then, as I was recruiting potential class members and starting to prepare my training materials, Radix had a change of heart. They decided that it would be best if they conducted the training sessions themselves since Scrypto had evolved considerably from when it was shown to me last April. That was fine by me!

Radix ran the first session during October and demoed a stripped down version of Scrypto to a very small group including myself. We got to try out the tools and, while they were somewhat primitive, they were more than sufficient to allow us to create some nice example blueprints and test them out on the provided Radix Engine simulator. I was still sworn to secrecy but was told that the planned second session would be more public. That second session was rebranded as the Alexandria Preview Event (APE) and that is what is happening today.

APE will kick off with a couple of presentations that will be live streamed on YouTube starting at noon Eastern time and so these are completely open to the public. The rest of the APE proceedings include hands-on access to the language and tools and, as far as I know, is limited to a few hundred developers who signed up for it. The full public access to the Scrypto language and Radix development tools begins with the Alexandria release which is scheduled for December 14th, 2021.

So I thought about what I wanted to do in the Radix space and I have decided on these things:

1) I reorganized and rebranded my discord as the "Rust & Scrypto Forum". It remains a free service. My friend Neal Singer, who has been answering questions about Rust in the forum for several months, has signed on as a full partner in the operation. Neal is developing a video series that teaches you to program in Rust from scratch. We plan to follow that project up by developing a similar video series about Scrypto. The Rust & Scrypto Forum has grown to over 240 members. You can join us using this discord invitation.

2) I started the Radix Programmer's Guild. The RadGuild soft-launched yesterday for a small group of my friends in the Radix community. I will have much more to say about RadGuild in future blog posts, but suffice it to say that we are trying to find useful work for developers who want to try their hand at programming for Radix without having to give up their current day job just yet. Besides being an incubator of sorts, RadGuild also plans to evolve into a DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) using Scrypto blueprints that we will write and test ourselves. The design of the blueprints is being developed in conjunction with the team at the AdeptDAO project. (If you want early access to RadGuild, you should go ahead and join the Rust and Scrypto Forum since the people their will be the next ones invited to take a look at the Guild. Otherwise check this space in the future for the official launch announcement.)

3) I am writing a book tentatively entitled "My Road to Scrypto" which goes into a lot more about my personal journey as a programmer and why I find Scrypto compelling.

4) I will publish posts for this blog on an almost daily schedule. Not all of them will be written by me as I intend to invite other Guild members to here as well and so it won't be solely my point of view. In addition I will invite leaders from Radix-based projects around the world to contribute articles that I can publish here as well on their behalf.

That is a lot to do and a lot to cover in the months and years ahead so please subscribe to this blog and join me in this journey into the future of DeFi with Radix.

("Scrypto Is Coming" meme by Miso Shiru)