As the mastermind behind Livetoken and the engineering backbone of Pieland, 2022 was a busy year for Bonfire. He built the Boss Battle mechanic, created and upgraded MyPies, and made it possible for Pieland to put on Compietitions, just to name a few of his incredible Pieland accomplishments in 2022. We caught up with Bonfire during a rare occasion of free time and chatted about Boss Battles, the community, and the code and technology upon which Pieland is built.
What has been the most challenging Pieland feature to code?
At first I was going to say the Ethereum smart contract because that technology was new to me when I coded it, but in the end it wasn’t really that much code. So instead, I would say MyPies because there’s actually a lot of code involved with that feature, both from a front-end, user-interface perspective to make it look nice and feel good, but also from the back-end, which requires interacting with both blockchain and traditional databases and making it fast.
What is your favorite recent Pieland feature that you’ve worked on? Why?
I had a lot of fun working on the boss battles because I knew the community would get a kick out of guessing the mechanics of the scoring system, but also because the code to implement the system was a bit of a coding puzzle.
The first Boss Battle was a community favorite, how difficult was it to build the mechanics for it?
Luckily not that hard because it really was an extension of the compietition system that I had already built. The most difficult part is coding some of the scoring mechanics, as those are all hand-coded, and not part of a generalized framework. I didn’t design the scoring system, but of course I turned it into code.
How enjoyable was it to see how much fun the community had with the Boss Battle?
I had a blast seeing folks not only compete with each other for high scores, but also with themselves as they tweaked their own submissions to try to reverse engineer the scoring system. When I first coded the boss battle feature in MyPies, I gave feedback to the user on how the scoring works, but I think it was more fun to hide that feedback as it was cool to see folks share their insights and guesses.
What technologies does Pieland use?
The tech stack consists of the ethereum blockchain, MongoDB and Redis on the backend, Express/Node in the middle, and VueJS and Bootstrap on the very frontend. We use Typescript as the main coding language, along with Solidity for the smart contracts. We also use many different external APIs such as those from Discord, Opensea, Alchemy, Infura and Moralis.
To learn more about the technology behind Pieland, check out this Linktree for a host of resources and further information.
That’s all we have for now from Bonfire. Let us know your thoughts about this Bonfireside Chat in the Pieland Discord, and please message any other questions or follow-ups you may have to his answers! And maybe we’ll get a glimpse into what Bonfire has been cooking up for 2023 soon…
