Boost Your Web3 Dev Efficiency with Cookbook.dev

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell, folks. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, where we welcome founders, hackers, and anyone in between who's built an awesome project that they want to share with the Web3 community. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Michael, who's Head of DevRel at Cookbook.dev. So if you didn't know, Cookbook is the home for Web3 devs, with a searchable library of thousands of smart contracts, ChefGPT to answer any Web3 questions you may have, and an easy onboarding process to any protocol. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll see Michael take us through the complete Cookbook.dev product suite to show you how they can improve your work efficiency in Web3. Alright, let's get into it.

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GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Michael. Happy to have you on here today.

GM, Narb. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure, my pleasure. I guess, before we get into all the great content you have planned for us with Cookbook, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself if folks aren't familiar?

Absolutely, thanks for the opportunity. As Narb mentioned, I'm Michael, I'm the Head of DevRel at Cookbook.dev, a developer tooling company. But before that, I've kind of worked as a Solidity developer for most of my career, mostly in the NFT space. After I graduated my undergrad, I studied Econ. Me and a bunch of buddies from school started flipping NFTs, and everything got really exciting in the NFT space and we ended up kind of contributing to different projects as Solidity developers and really fell in love with building in the Web3 space. Which is, you know, a big part of the reason I work at Cookbook now is empowering other developers and builders to just have a really high quality of life while they build in Web3.

Fantastic. And I guess, have you always been in the Web3 space with your tech background, or did you ever dabble in Web2?

You know, I was pretty aware of Bitcoin and Ethereum for many, many years. I wasn't necessarily like a builder in the Web3 space at all during college. I was kind of... I went through things like startup accelerators, but they all had like a Web2 focus. It wasn't until after I had graduated my undergrad a couple of years ago that I really got into building with Solidity and in Web3.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. I mean, you landed in a great spot. I guess, what was your journey from starting to play around with Solidity with your buddies to landing as Head of DevRel at Cookbook? Like, how did you land at Cookbook, basically?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of projects in between. So, back in 2021, my friends and I, we started what we called the world's first NFT music festival. So we sold an NFT collection that acted as a ticket to a music festival we hosted in Las Vegas over two days. And that at the time kind of had a lot of buzz, so we were getting a lot of calls from other projects who wanted to launch NFTs or do concerts on-chain, things like that. So we pretty much had a dev shop, I guess like a Web3 Solidity dev shop where we would write smart contracts on behalf of clients. And I found Cookbook as a user, actually. I was working on a completely different startup as one of the kind of co-partners on that one, it was a music financialization startup where we were issuing tokens on-chain so you can invest in artists and kind of own part of their catalog. Anyway, I was using Cookbook as a user and I kind of ran into the team in San Francisco. I liked the product a lot coming from a Web3 dev shop. Once I start talking through Cookbook, you'll kind of see maybe the connection of why it could be useful for someone in that position. But yeah, just met the team here in San Francisco where the company is based and really vibed with them and the product, and joined maybe a year and some change ago and it's been a blast.

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, interesting in Web3, a lot of the hiring processes basically if there's a vibes match, so to speak, between both parties, and then it ends up being a fit. And sounds like that's what it was here, which is amazing to hear. And I guess, without further ado, I think this is a good segue to see exactly what excited you to join Cookbook with your content you have prepared today.

Totally. So I'm really going to just jump into a product demo. I did have some slides, but I think the demo says a lot more. So I'm going to just go ahead and share my screen and jump right into it.

And folks, while Michael is going through his demonstration, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat and we will bring them up. Alright. Yeah, you're good to go.

Awesome. So can you see my screen share? Perfect. So, you know, after you watch this or as you watch, check out Cookbook.dev is the website to find all of this cool stuff. In a nutshell, we've gone and hand-curated a ton of different builder resources for Web3 developers, from smart contract templates to entire protocols templatized to popular libraries in the Web3 development space, all laid out for you, as well as resources and out-links for dozens of different chains.

So I'll go down the list of all of those things, starting with contracts. If you go to Cookbook.dev/search, the first thing you'll see is this contracts tab. And you can see that we have over 1,800 different smart contracts that we've gone and templatized for developers to search for, discover, and use for research, hacking, or using as the base of your next project. So rather than starting from scratch, you can go over to Cookbook.dev and find either a complete version of what you're looking to build or a really good starting point.

So we can go into the search tab and just search for any contract that we may be familiar with, or we can go down here and filter. So if we want to find a token for our next token launch, we can just press this token button and we have dozens of pages of different token contracts with different mechanisms that some you can see are audited, some have different mechanics, for instance a buyback token versus a burnable token versus a mintable token. So you can think of it as a big library of every smart contract that you might find relevant. Once you open up one of these templates, you get a few really handy things as a developer.

For one, this docs page over here breaks down the functions within the smart contract and gives a little description of each of them. So at a glance as a developer, you can see what functionality the contract that you're grabbing is going to have on-chain over here. You do get the source code, you get a couple of options down here for actually building.

So Cookbook does support no-code deploy for, I would say, simpler contracts, things like ERC-20 tokens, ERC-721 NFTs, things like that are great to deploy through the Cookbook.dev website. You'll just pass your args here, if you do something like test, test, and a supply, and then we'll select token. And you get access to all of these different mainnets and testnets that you can then go ahead and deploy through your own wallet. So, for instance, if I wanted to deploy this simple ERC-20 token with those test names given, I can just go pay a small testnet gas fee and do that through the website. But there's a few more interesting ways to do that.

So we have open in Web IDE, supporting Remix and ChainIDE, and then you can download boilerplates for different toolchains, specifically Foundry, Hardhat, and Scaffold-Eth. So I think that Remix is a really, really popular venue for Web3 developers who may be ideating, hacking, or just kind of working on an early concept before really jumping into a project. So we can see over here that Cookbook is one of the featured plugins on the Remix IDE. We can just click on that and we get this chef hat in our sidebar. This gives you access to all of the contract templates and protocol templates that we have here on the Cookbook website within the Remix IDE.

So you can do things like one-click open, you know, an ERC-20 token for instance, into the Remix IDE where then you can go in and... well, I'll actually do this right here. Simply compile it, go into this deploy and run transactions tab, select Injected Provider - MetaMask so that we can pay our gas fee and select our network. In this case, I'll go over to Sepolia. Oops. And I do have a little bit of tokens here so I can pass... let's see, just some arbitrary... so here I named our token test, I made our symbol test, and I made the supply one with a bunch of zeros. And then we will select our correct smart contract. Let's see. ERC-20. Simple token. It's not uncommon for us to have quirks during live demos. Yeah, the joy of live demos is that, you know, you get to have the pressure of being live while like problem-solving.

But to remain graceful, I'll skip over this. Essentially you'll pass your args, you'll pay your gas fee. In the Cookbook plugin, you can go ahead and select not only something like a simple token but over 1,800 templates here. And then we do have this tab called Copilot up here. It's our ChefGPT AI assistant, and you can go ahead and ask questions about the contract that you opened up as a template over here. So that's, you know, one way that's very popular for developers to be able to take advantage of Cookbook's smart contract template library is just open different things up in Remix, compile them, deploy them, see how they look in a block explorer, which is great for hacking and learning and ideating.

But if you do want to maybe... maybe you have something in mind for a project that you're working on as a developer but you want to save a little bit of time. What I would point out on Cookbook is this import contract tab over here. So if we go into a block explorer, let's say... let's go to Etherscan. And we select a project, let's say we want to fork Pepe, one of the most popular meme coins here. What we can do is actually grab this contract address by copying it from Etherscan or block explorer, going into Cookbook, and then pasting it over and selecting import. What this will do, once my computer finishes loading, is give us access to all of the same features that we have for the hand-curated contracts on Cookbook but for our own contracts.

So at this point users are not able to submit contracts to the Cookbook library. We do everything kind of as a team to make sure that the contracts that are available on Cookbook, you know, are the ones that are on-chain that are kind of battle-tested and vetted. And it looks like again, the joys of live demos, I think my internet connection at home might be a little bit rough which is giving this some trouble. So I'll kind of talk through it rather than show it. But let's see. Alright, there we go. Import Pepe token from Ethereum mainnet. So we can select import here.

So we just took the contract address from a project that we want to work on ourselves, in this case the Pepe ERC-20 token, and imported it into Cookbook. So now we have all of the source code for the PepeToken.sol contract that is actually on-chain. So when we go over here to Etherscan and check out the code, we now have a version of that that we can easily work with on Cookbook. So we can do a few things with this. We can no-code deploy it ourselves if we'd like to. So we can set a name for our contract, set a supply, make sure that our decimal count is set correctly, and then deploy it directly from the Cookbook website.

So we can do that or we can open it, you know, once again in Remix in one click over here. So we see that PepeToken.sol is now up here. So we can go into Remix, compile once again, select our Injected Provider to be MetaMask, which sets our blockchain network in our case to Sepolia, the Ethereum testnet. We'll select our correct contract, the PepeToken.sol, and then you know, we'll make our supply 10,000 or something. And thanks for bearing with me, it's been a minute since I've actually worked in Remix. So we'll do this no-code deploy through Cookbook to demonstrate that anybody can cook contracts without having to be familiar with any tooling in Web3.

So we'll name our contract PepeClone, pass a supply of one with a bunch of zeros, and then also select Sepolia over here. So we are now connected to Sepolia, we'll select deploy. We can see that we have to pay a small gas fee. And now we can go back into MetaMask, jump into activity, and then actually view our PepeClone deployment in the Sepolia block explorer. So we can see that this contract has been created over here, and the token tracker shows Pepe token. So this is a really simple example of something that you can use Cookbook for to fork projects. Pepe obviously being a very simple one, but you can also do this for more complex projects.

So whether it's a hackathon or you're looking for a base for your next dApp or startup, Cookbook is probably a good thing to check out. So we can see that we have this great success message that our contract was successfully baked. Within the Cookbook website, you can go in here and actually read and write to your contract without it being verified. So for instance, if we are checking out our new Pepe deployment in the Sepolia block explorer, we can... you know, if we want to go to the contract tab we'd have to verify it to call or read and write to it through the block explorer, whereas on the Cookbook page we can actually do that right here in our dashboard. So anything that you deploy through Cookbook, you can actually find it in the dashboard over here.

So I definitely encourage everyone watching, grab a template, try to no-code deploy it, try to open it in Remix and deploy it. And if you're, you know, familiar with Foundry, Hardhat, or Scaffold-Eth and that's your preferred developer environment, definitely give a crack at using any of the templates in there. You'll just download, for instance for Foundry, you'll get a zip file, just open that up, unzip it, and then drop the folder for simple token into your IDE. You'll run Foundry up like normal and then follow the readme in there to kind of complete the deployment. Same with Hardhat, like the Hardhat boilerplates work like a pretty standard Hardhat project. You just have the .sol contracts included in there, so you set your Hardhat config, run your deployment scripts, and you're off to the races like your regular Hardhat projects and the same for Scaffold-Eth.

The only other I'll point out on the Cookbook website are these chain resources pages. We've pretty much added a collection of out-links to anything that you may find relevant as a builder. So you can do things like one-click add dozens of networks to your wallet directly from the Cookbook site. For instance, if I want to add Holesky, just click the button... well... click the button, it'll get added to the network. You can go hit a faucet to get some testnet tokens, find an RPC provider, and then have links to explorers, bridges, grant programs, anything you may need.

And then we do show off a couple of protocols that are deployed on different networks that we have on Cookbook along with resources and our ChefGPT AI assistant. So for all of the contracts, the protocols... and protocols are essentially, you know, expanded kind of contract pages that just have a collection of contracts that make up entire protocols, in this case OpenSea Seaport. But we have everything templatized from OpenSea to Uniswap to Aave, Gnosis, PancakeSwap. So dozens of protocols that you might use every day available here for you as templates to fork, learn about, ask questions to via the AI.

So you can jump into any of these pages, ask how does this protocol work, and then get a kind of hyper-specific answer for the contract that you're working on right here on the website. So one thing that Cookbook has been doing kind of more recently, and you may see us around more, is adding our ChefGPT AI assistant to developer documentation for our network partners. So as a for instance, if I go into the Avalanche docs, I can ask AvaGPT, which is Avalanche's version of ChefGPT, different questions about the Avax network, as well as access this chain info page kind of what I showed you on the Cookbook website for Ethereum but for Avax here.

So you can one-click add the network to your wallet, access a faucet, and then have all of these handy out-links right there for you anytime while you can ask questions over here. So in a sense, we've been taking Cookbook and adding mini versions of it to different developer docs. This is an example where we have an entire code playground with Cookbook's contract template library within a docs page, in this case the Berachain docs, where you can actually go in, compile, and no-code/low-code deploy all of our contract templates to different networks directly from the docs. So in this case, it would be Berachain and it's just the same as the Cookbook no-code deploy on the website. You pass your name, token symbol, and supply, and then you can go ahead and deploy directly to different networks.

So I believe Cookbook supports around 40... 40 out of 86 of the chains that we have on the website so far with a tool like this. So if you're looking for different venues to deploy your project or dApp on, and you're going through different docs pages, you may see an Ask AI button and there's a good chance now that Cookbook is actually powering that. So you can access that again through the Cookbook.dev website through any of the either contracts under this ChefGPT tab over here or any of the chains pages, as well as actually directly in some documentation pages for our network partners that we support with this ChefGPT widget.

So I'll kind of recap, I guess. Cookbook.dev, a really, really handy place for you to go research different protocols, different smart contracts, learn about how they work through kind of these enhanced documentation pages or the ChefGPT AI assistant, or actually get cooking or get building with via no-code deploy or your favorite Web IDE or toolchain. And then, you know, this great Remix plugin for you to find contract templates, protocol templates, while having access to the AI to ask questions to. And then these playgrounds with contract templates, chain info pages, and ChefGPT AI assistants that you'll kind of might see out in the wild there in different technical doc pages these days. So really looking forward to seeing if the audience has any questions or anything like that. I do encourage anybody who's at a hackathon or looking for their next project to just check out what's on Cookbook. You might be surprised to find that you can save, you know, dozens or hundreds of developer hours by starting with a battle-tested smart contract template for your next project instead of starting from scratch.

Yeah, that is amazing. Yeah, that was quite the comprehensive overview of the product. Yeah, crowd, if you have any questions for Michael, please type them now. But in the meantime, I have some questions. So, ChefGPT specifically. You answered a couple of the questions that popped up as you were demoing. One, the portability of it. Obviously showed it off on Berachain and Avalanche and I'm sure other protocols have it too. Is there a IDE version? So can I download a IDE extension into like VS Code or something and have ChefGPT there?

So there is a VS Code plugin, and Narb I'm so sorry, I think somehow my computer got muted while I was going through the demo. So if I was talking to me or anyone was asking questions, I may have kind of gone over them. So I'm so sorry about that. No, no. You're good. You're good. Yeah. OK. So there was a VS Code plugin. I think that we may still have it supported but we haven't been like pushing new updates to it much. It essentially was kind of like the Remix plugin where it had the contract templates that you can then import into VS Code, but it never kind of really took off with users as much as the Remix plugin or some of the kind of the playground things. So right now, the best way if you're using like a VS Code to interact with the contract templates would be to download a boilerplate for Foundry, Hardhat, or Scaffold depending on where you prefer to build with and just opening that up in your preferred IDE.

Fair enough, fair enough. And have you guys considered expanding ChefGPT's capabilities beyond just the protocol level? So say, there is a company that's offering a SaaS with an API. Have you thought about enabling ChefGPT to basically have the same experience but have like a comprehensive overview of like how to get started quickly with an API? Because we all know not every API is created equal, some have better documentation than others. But is this something you've thought about? You guys have thought about?

We have. We do support some other kind of more API-based or SDK-based tooling providers like Web3.js as a for instance. If you go into their technical docs they have an Ask Web3.js button powered by Cookbook ChefGPT AI. So I guess as a protocol, too, I'll kind of give a shout out to maybe not exactly the developers but the protocols who may be coming across this video or watching. By listing your protocol or contracts on Cookbook, you kind of have a great opportunity to improve composability and discoverability for developers to integrate with your protocol by having all of the kind of functions well-documented and all of the code available and easy to discover and learn about. Other builders may come across that and build cool integrations on top of your protocol. So obviously everybody would love... you know, usually loves developers building on their protocol or network. It's a really great way to kind of promote that. And ChefGPT is very at this point flexible. So while traditionally Cookbook is a smart contract template library in the Ethereum space, we are beginning to support networks like Sui, like Movement Labs, with tools like this we're also in their docs, and are planning on expanding our smart contract templates outside of just the Solidity space. So if you're a builder who prefers to work with other languages, we're here for you, we're just working on it. We try to kind of remain neutral in the sense that we think that bringing builders to Web3 regardless of where they want to build is really important and, you know, as a developer to have a lot of options that are kind of well-documented and well-tooled is really the goal for us here.

Excellent, excellent. And I guess you touched on it a little bit about the roadmap, but is there anything... anything that you can kind of spill the beans on, Alpha-wise, in terms of like what people can expect from Cookbook the rest of this year and perhaps a little tease of what they can expect next year?

Totally. I think from a user and developer standpoint, I think you're going to end up seeing the Cookbook AI assistant and playground in a lot more places. We're really trying to kind of shift how developer onboarding works in the Web3 space. Our team, you know, pretty much everybody on our team has a background working as a Solidity developer and we, you know, have all gone through different levels of learning curves to learn Solidity and be, you know, a Web3 developer. But we think that in the future it should be a lot easier and faster. Right, people shouldn't have to spend like weeks figuring out if they even want to build with a certain stack. We want to bring that time up to like a few minutes or hours to really do like a serious deep dive. So one for users and developers, I would expect to see Cookbook in more technical docs, at more hackathons, things like that.

For protocols and DevRel engineers, the enterprise side of Cookbook is a suite of DevRel focused tooling where we have these AI assistants and playgrounds that can help developer relations teams, with things like analytics and journey tracking for developers. So expect to see kind of some playground V2s coming. Right now, it's a pop-up modal that sort of covers the docs page. We're experimenting a lot with different placements for playgrounds within technical documentation pages to make it like a really cool experience for developers going through the docs, being able to run code snippets or smart contracts within little code blocks in the docs or kind of a more dedicated page. So like, you know, a lot of playgrounds might just give you a Hello World or a counter or something like that, but we want to take that experience where maybe in a playground you can deploy a whole... you know, a whole Uni V3 and really get a sense for what it takes to get to a like very robust production-level protocol but without killing yourself doing that.

Amazing. Yeah, love it. Yeah, this looks like an amazing tool for developers of all different skill levels, whether you're just starting out and you want to get just like a bird's-eye view of what's going on and an easy couple click action to deploy your first smart contract, or just a great reference point for somebody who's a little bit more experienced and needs to look something up really quick. So this is amazing work and really looking forward to continuing to see you guys grow and the developer community here watching today to continue to use it, use it as their companion in their next hackathon as you mentioned. But in the event people want to reach out or ask questions or need help with something, or maybe there is a protocol watching today and they want to onboard with Cookbook, what's the best way to get in contact?

Yeah, we're super active in our Discord server. If you go to our Twitter, which is, you know, x.com/cookbook_dev, we have a link to our Discord server right there. You can come in and ask questions about Solidity, about smart contract templates, about your next project, and myself or our engineering team would be happy to answer anything. So please do give us a follow on Twitter, we post cool updates about the product all the time, so you may find something that's helpful for your next project if you follow along there and join the Discord and you can get in touch with us very, very quickly there.

Excellent, excellent. Great answer. And unfortunately, we had so much fun we reached time. But thank you so much Michael for coming on the show. Really appreciate you taking the time to give us that wonderful overview of Cookbook and like I said, looking forward to seeing devs continue or start using it if they haven't already. Cookbook.dev, you heard it here folks. Alright, I guess with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and that will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Right-o, cheers.

Thanks.