Career story
Owning a blockchain explorer
How a small hobby blockchain explorer became a crash course in backend systems, Svelte frontends, DevOps, Linux servers, CI/CD, eUTXO smart contracts, DeFi apps, merch infrastructure, and community bots.
Highlights
- Built and maintained a blockchain explorer as a small hobby project that became a serious learning ground.
- Used Elixir on the backend and Svelte on the frontend, then learned Linux server administration to host it.
- Built the full CI/CD pipeline and maintained the deployment flow myself.
- Used that foundation to learn eUTXO smart contracts, DeFi applications, a multi-chain merch shop, and Telegram community bots.
Related links
The backend language that made long-running sync and service work feel natural.
SvelteThe frontend framework used for fast, direct explorer interfaces.
Extended UTXO modelA useful reference for the transaction model behind eUTXO smart-contract thinking.
Telegram Bot APIThe API surface behind the community bots and automation helpers.
The hobby project that got too useful
After years of game and AR work, I took a break from game development and started a small hobby project: a blockchain explorer. At first it was just curiosity. I wanted to understand how a chain looked from the inside when you stopped treating it like a wallet balance and started treating it like data moving through a system.
An explorer is a good teacher because it has nowhere to hide. Blocks, transactions, addresses, tokens, timestamps, confirmations, indexes, search, pagination, syncing, errors, missing data, weird edge cases: if the chain does it, the explorer eventually has to explain it.
Elixir on the backend, Svelte on the front
I built the backend in Elixir and the frontend in Svelte. That combination changed how I thought about web software. Elixir gave me a functional, process-oriented way to build long-running backend work, and Svelte let the frontend stay small, fast, and direct.
The backend had to ingest and organize blockchain data reliably. The frontend had to make that data readable: blocks, transactions, addresses, token movement, explorer pages, and the small UX details that help people answer the question they actually came with.
Learning DevOps because the server was mine
Hosting it myself forced me into the part of web development that tutorials often skip. I had to set up and maintain a Linux server, configure services, manage deployments, understand logs, deal with restarts, and keep the thing alive after I closed my laptop.
I also built and maintained the full CI/CD pipeline. That was a big turning point. Code stopped being just "it works locally" and became a path: commit, build, test enough, deploy, monitor, fix, repeat. Owning that path makes you a better product engineer because production becomes part of the design.
The eUTXO rabbit hole
The explorer became a jumping-off point into DeFi applications and eUTXO-style smart contracts. That model asks you to think differently from account-based systems. Instead of one global mutable balance per account, value moves through unspent outputs, and smart contract state is often represented through data attached to those outputs.
That mental model is annoying until it clicks, and then it becomes fascinating. You start thinking in transaction graphs, constraints, validators, datums, redeemers, and state transitions that have to be explicit. It made me better at modeling systems because it forces you to care about how state moves, not only where it currently sits.
From explorer to apps and bots
Once the explorer foundation was there, it opened the door to other decentralized applications. I worked on DeFi-related tooling and also built a multi-blockchain merch shop, again using Elixir and Svelte. That meant payments, chain-specific assumptions, order flows, backend state, and a frontend that made crypto mechanics feel less hostile to normal users.
I also created and maintained numerous Telegram bots for different blockchain communities. Bots are funny little products: simple on the surface, but they become critical infrastructure when a community depends on them for commands, alerts, moderation helpers, status checks, or little rituals that make the group feel alive.
What it gave me
That period gave me backend confidence, frontend confidence, and DevOps confidence at the same time. I was not only building features. I was running the server, handling deployments, understanding protocol data, building interfaces, and supporting the community tools around it.
Looking back, the explorer was less a single project and more a bridge. It moved me from interactive/game development into full-stack product engineering, where the interesting work is often the whole system: product shape, data model, infrastructure, user interface, and the operational habits that keep it alive.