Nicolás Venturo: Solidity, Engineering at Balancer Labs, & the Dangers of Gas Golfing

Devs Do Something

Today's guest is Nicolás Venturo, a blockchain engineer at Balancer Labs and former engineer at Open Zeppelin - where he contributed to one of the first audits of the solidity compiler.

Nicolás is very well versed on the ins & outs of solidity, smart contract development, and best practiced for security. Prior to getting involved in crypto, he was an embedded systems engineer, and has spent most of his career thinking through low level systems.

In this episode, we discuss Nicolás' thoughts on how solidity has evolved over the years, Balancer's engineering process, Nicolás' favorite design patterns, and the dangers of gas golfing.

Shownotes:
00:00 How Nicolas got into the space
4:20 Parallels between solidity development & building embedded systems
12:21 Nicolas’ thoughts on assembly languages like Yul & Huff
19:21 Standard Libraries?
27:55 Nicolas’ favorite design patterns, and why *readability* matters!
41:33 The dangers of gas golfing
46:00 Balancer’s custom error’s library: revert strings without hitting byte code size limits
54:27 How Balancer makes use of batching in their codebase
1:00:40 How the Balancer engineering team approaches development cycles
1:08:31 If Nicolás couldn’t work on Balancer for 6 months, what would he work on?
1:15:24 What does Nicolás think the long term destiny of crypto will be

Links
Nicolás on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrnventuro
Balancer: https://balancer.fi/
Balancer's custom errors library: https://github.com/balancer-labs/balancer-v2-monorepo/blob/weighted-deployment/contracts/lib/helpers/BalancerErrors.sol
Open Zeppelin defender: https://www.openzeppelin.com/defender
Nicolás at ETHLATAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y5IDfJQGVk
Nicolás in a recent talk on smart contract security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zzr87YB6TQ