Ramblings about the Ethereum merge from a Solidity developer's perspective

I find the best way to understand what is going on in a given technology is to actually get my hands dirty and install, configure, and run the underlying software.

Last weekend I configured an Ethereum testnet node - the Göerli testnet to be precise - to examine what is involved in running all the client software and staking some ether (göETH in this case - I don't have $64000 dollars spare to try the mainnet). 

In this episode, I talk about the various components required, and a bit about how they work and what they do:  - the execution node, - the beacon chain node, and - the validator