A few people have asked how I am shipping so many apps. HivePredict, HiveHand, HiveDice, Hivesweeper, HiveWord, HiveHeist, WordHive, Hivett. All built and deployed in a short window of time. The assumption is that I am either not sleeping, cutting corners, or that the apps are throwaway prototypes. None of those things are true. So here is how I actually do it.
I have been a professional developer for over 15 years. PHP, Python, C++, .NET, C#, JavaScript, and more recently in the last 3 years Go and Rust. I have worked across the full stack at agencies, startups, and enterprise companies. I have written code that has been used by millions of people. This is not a hobby. This is what I do.
I got into blockchain in 2016. I was writing Ethereum Solidity smart contracts before Hardhat existed, before OpenZeppelin was a standard dependency, before Foundry, before any of the tooling that makes it approachable today. It was raw. You had to understand the EVM at a level that most Solidity developers today never need to touch. I was also getting involved with EOS during that era, cutting my teeth on as much blockchain technology as I could get my hands on.
I worked at blockchain startups during the 2016-2018 cycle. The good old days when everyone thought they were going to change the world with a token and a whitepaper. Then the brutal bear market came and most of those companies disappeared. What survived that period was the experience. Understanding how blockchains work at a fundamental level, how consensus mechanisms differ, how to build applications that interact with on-chain data, and how to architect systems that handle the specific constraints of decentralised infrastructure.
I have been in the Hive ecosystem since 2018, back when it was still Steem. I was drawn in immediately by how amazing the developer experience was. It felt like the jQuery of blockchains.
The single biggest force multiplier in my Hive development workflow is a library I wrote called Hive Stream. It is an open source TypeScript library that handles the heavy lifting of interacting with the Hive blockchain. Streaming blocks, parsing operations, broadcasting transactions, handling authentication. All of the repetitive boilerplate that you would otherwise write from scratch for every app.
Fun fact I originally released this 8 years ago for Steem (before the Justin Sun fork).
Every app I build on Hive starts with Hive Stream. It gives me a consistent, tested foundation for blockchain interaction so I can focus entirely on the application logic and user experience instead of reinventing RPC calls and operation parsing every time.
This is something a lot of developers underestimate. Having a battle-tested library that abstracts away the infrastructure layer means your time to prototype drops dramatically. I am not spending the first two days of every project setting up blockchain connectivity. That part is done before I write a single line of application code.
I use Aurelia 2 for my frontends. I am on the Aurelia core team, so I know the framework inside and out. Aurelia's convention-based approach means less boilerplate, less configuration, and more time building features. Components are just classes and templates. Dependency injection is built in. The binding system is powerful without being complicated.
I know React. I know Vue. I have used them professionally. Aurelia is faster for me because I helped build it. I know every shortcut, every pattern, every optimisation. When you know your tools at that depth, you stop thinking about the framework and start thinking purely about the product.
It turns out AI is also really good at Aurelia.
I use AI tools and I am not quiet about it. Claude Code, and other AI coding tools are part of my daily workflow. But I want to be clear about how I use them because there is a big difference between what I do and vibecoding.
Vibecoding is dangerous. It is the practice of prompting an AI to generate code you do not understand, shipping it, and hoping it works. That is how you end up with security vulnerabilities, performance problems, unmaintainable codebases, and apps that break in ways you cannot diagnose because you never understood what they were doing in the first place. I think shipping code you do not understand is irresponsible, especially on a blockchain where real money is involved.
What I do is different. I leverage 15 years of experience across multiple languages and paradigms to use AI as an accelerator. I know what the code should do before the AI writes it. I review everything. I understand every line. I refactor, restructure, and rewrite when the AI gets it wrong. The AI does not make architectural decisions. I do. The AI does not choose patterns. I do. The AI handles the mechanical output of writing code faster than my fingers can type. My experience handles everything else.
Sometimes I'll use AI to scaffold the initial code and then go making surgical edits and fixing obvious things. It means spending maybe an hour or two versus spending days/weeks/months writing from scratch.
The result is a 10 to 20x efficiency gain. Tasks that would have taken me a week now take a day. Features that would have taken a day now take an hour. And this is specifically because I have the experience to direct the AI effectively. Someone without that background would get 10 to 20x more bugs, not 10 to 20x more productivity.
This is why I can ship the volume of apps that I do. It is not magic. It is the combination of deep domain knowledge, a battle-tested library, a framework I know intimately, and AI tools that eliminate the mechanical bottleneck of writing code.
The old timeline for building an app looked like this: two weeks for scaffolding and setup, a week for blockchain integration, two weeks for core features, a week for testing and polish, another week for deployment and bug fixes. Six to eight weeks for something reasonably functional.
The new timeline looks like this: blockchain integration is instant because Hive Stream handles it. Scaffolding is fast because Aurelia 2 is convention-based and I have built dozens of apps with it. Core features ship in hours because AI handles the mechanical code generation while I focus on logic and architecture. Testing and deployment are streamlined because the patterns are repeatable.
What used to take six weeks takes days. And the output quality is not lower. It is arguably higher because I am spending more of my time on the things that matter, like architecture, user experience, and edge cases, instead of typing out boilerplate.
This efficiency gap is only going to widen. AI tools are getting better every month. The developers who learn to use them as skill multipliers while maintaining deep technical understanding are going to operate at a level that was previously impossible for a single person. The developers who refuse to use them are going to wonder why they are being outpaced. And the developers who use them without understanding what they are shipping are going to build things that eventually break in spectacular ways.
With all of this capability, I could build on any chain. Solana, Base, Arbitrum, whatever is trending this cycle. I build on Hive because the development experience is genuinely good. Free transactions mean I do not have to think about gas. Fast blocks mean the UX is snappy. Custom JSON operations mean I can store application state on chain without writing smart contracts. The identity system means users already have accounts and profiles.
And Hive Stream means I have a direct line into all of it without friction.
Hive's problem has never been the technology. The technology is excellent for application development. The problem is that not enough developers know about it, and the ones who do are not always made to feel like their contributions matter. But that is a community problem, not a technical one. And community problems can be fixed.
In the meantime, I am going to keep shipping.
