Welcome back to Day 1 of my blockchain series. In this video, I walk you through what it actually looks like to build a decentralized application (a dApp): you write code, then you deploy it to a consensus network that uses blockchain tech. The big pain point is that different blockchains often want different languages, which makes portability hard. That’s why I’m using Reach in this series—Reach lets me write the app in JavaScript-style syntax, automatically verify safety/correctness, and then launch on almost any blockchain protocol. I also explain why I think of Reach as “high-level blockchain dev”: it helps you focus on app logic instead of low-level blockchain details. Then we get practical and set up your development environment so you can build along with me. I install Docker Desktop (because Reach is dockerized), verify tools like make, docker, and docker compose in the terminal, and create a project folder. After that, I download Reach with curl, make it executable with chmod, pull the Docker images with reach update, and confirm everything works with reach compile --help. Finally, I set up VS Code, install the Reach IDE extension, configure the Reach executable path, and compile a starter index.rsh file so you can see the generated output. By the end, your machine is ready to start building and compiling Reach dApps.