Show HN: Illustrated Transaction on Solana (illustx.github.io)

Lately I've been working on a library to interact with multiple blockchains [1] and naturally I learned a lot of internals and nitty gritty details about each chain.

I wanted to share some of the learnings in a way that's not the usual blog post "get started with blockchain x".

I was inspired by "The Illustrated TLS Connection" [2]. I recall that when I first saw it a few months ago I was really engaged and took some time to go back and forth between TLS 1.2 & 1.3 to explore the differences. Granted I knew enough about TLS already, I still found that going through a connection byte by byte was an excellent exercise.

So I thought: why not trying it out with blockchain transactions? and Illustrated Tx was born.

The site is built in svelte 3 + bootstrap 5, published on github pages. (It's just my second project in svelte, this time around I learned about routing and adapters to publish, pretty good stuff.)

Of course I started with grandiose ideas to make the ultimate solana parser and explain every possible tx. Then I realized it's pretty difficult :) not necessarily for the parsing of the binary data, but for deciding where and how to add comments that more or less guide the user through a progressive learning experience.

LMK if you learn something new! :)

[1] https://github.com/JumpCrypto/crosschain

[2] https://tls13.xargs.org