I’ve been a developer in the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) space for a while now. Something that has consistently bothered me is the significant barrier to entry and the steep learning curve of most SSI code. Many SSI concepts are slippery enough for newcomers to grasp. Once a developer has mastered them, however, my experience is that it is remarkably tough to find exemplary reference implementations. Those that exist are often shrouded in tribal knowledge that isn’t easily accessible. And when it’s time to build something serious, simple-to-use, stable production libraries are scarce. Admittedly, some great work has been done in this area, but I don’t think it’s enough. If we want SSI to take off, we must make it dirt simple for developers to implement.
To this end, I’ve begun an effort I call “Simple SSI.” My goal for Simple SSI is to champion SSI code that favors these principles:
- Uses spec terminology faithfully
- Favors a declarative approach
- Includes self-documenting tests
- Has clear, short, and up-to-date documentation
- Produces easy-to-install, reliable artifacts that are readily available
- Produces broadly compatible artifacts
To kickstart this initiative, I’ve taken the first step by creating simple-cesr, a straightforward, limited, true-to-spec implementation of Composable Event Streaming Representation (CESR). I chose CESR as the starting point because, as the current primary developer for cesr-ts, the concepts are fresh in my mind. But this is just the beginning. There’s a world of possibilities ahead for us to consider.
As a development community, I’m not suggesting we’ll perfectly achieve the ideals I’ve listed above. It’s just that we need to pay more attention to them more consistently. Developers are the boots on the ground for SSI. It is they who will develop the revolutionary products we all hope to see. It is critical that we write more attractive, intuitive, and easier-to-use code for them.
