Tutorial on writing and deploying your first Soroban smart contract in Rust, from Hello World to a practical hit counter example with web integration and three key developer tips.
This comprehensive tutorial covers building Soroban smart contracts in Rust using the soropg online IDE. The speaker demonstrates deploying a Hello World contract to testnet, then builds a more practical hit counter contract with persistent storage. Key topics include what blockchains are good for (permissionless immutable code, transparent transactions, financial data) and what they're not (large file storage, private data). The tutorial shows how to integrate a smart contract with a web frontend using the Stellar SDK, covering both read operations (simulated transactions) and write operations (signed transactions). Three tips for developers: keep contracts simple, focus on security through testing and audits, and leverage open source code like OpenZeppelin contracts.