Solidity Smart Contract Development
A practical guide to writing production Solidity — security patterns, gas optimization, upgradeability, and the tooling that actually ships.
Solidity Development Workflow
The Solidity stack that ships
Hardhat or Foundry for compilation, testing, and deployment. OpenZeppelin for battle-tested contract libraries. Ethers.js or Viem for frontend integration. The Graph for indexing on-chain events. This is the stack we use on every engagement. It is boring, proven, and works.
Security patterns that prevent exploits
Reentrancy guards, checks-effects-interactions pattern, pull over push for payments, access control via Ownable and AccessControl, integer overflow protection (Solidity ^0.8.0 handles this natively), and timelock controllers for admin functions. These are not optional. Every audit starts with these. Every exploit that makes the news skipped one of them.
Gas optimization that matters
Storage is expensive. Memory is cheap. Pack related variables into single storage slots. Use mappings over arrays where possible. Batch operations. Avoid writes in loops. Use immutable and constant for values set at compile or deploy time. The difference between an unoptimized contract and a gas-efficient one can be 5-10x in deployment and transaction costs.
Upgradeable contracts — patterns and pitfalls
UUPS and Transparent proxies are the two upgrade patterns. UUPS is cheaper and simpler but requires the implementation to include upgrade logic. Transparent proxies separate admin from user functions but cost more gas. The real risk is storage collisions between implementation versions — use a storage gap pattern and never remove or reorder state variables.
Testing and deployment workflow
Unit tests with Hardhat. Fuzz tests with Foundry. Integration tests on a forked mainnet. Deployment via hardhat-deploy or a custom script. Verify on Etherscan automatically. Use a multisig (Safe) for production deployer. Tag every deploy with a git commit hash. If you cannot reproduce a production deploy from source, you are not ready to ship.
Building smart contracts?
We write, audit, and deploy production Solidity. 30 minutes. Real conversation.
