Ask HN: Best way to get into blockchain development? Hi HN,
I'm a software dev with 10yrs XP. Mostly mobile and gaming. I'm interested to take the leap and go fully into blockchain/solidity. I'm looking for some bootcamps, or online learning platform that can guide me towards landing a position as a solidity developer. I'm actually interested to know any experience from other developers that took a similar leap. What helped you get into so-called web3 development? |
Blockchain Fundamentals: https://github.com/ethereumbook/ethereumbook
Practical Solidity: https://solidity-by-example.org/
Crypto Zombies is an amazing beginner step by step course to build a blockchain game: https://cryptozombies.io/
Finally, ethernaut is a series of increasingly difficult security challenges to learn about risks, exploits, info sec for blockchain dev: https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/
Oh, and any Patrick Collins tutorial video on YouTube (solidity, chainlink, hardhat, truffle, brownie, so much more)
Like I think one thing it has in there, for example, is when you push an item onto an array it returns that item, so they have you initialize a variable to that push. The very next version of Solidity changed push so it's a void return, so you can't do that outside of the Crypto Zombies tutorials.
Most of the changes are small enough to not be a big deal, just keep in mind that some things you're being taught are probably not the way things are done now.
Best practices have changed a lot since Crypto Zombies too, especially if you want to support new ideas like Omnichain or save gas using contracts like ERC-721A.
No decimals, no patches or point upgrades to deployed smart contracts (for the most part anyway), constructor event only gets called once during deploy, code implicitly has "owners" with specific execution rights, etc.
But this is what I have found to be the strangest part:
On most worldwide public blockchains, your programs are deployed to run on servers supplied by other people. They expect to be compensated for supplying this CPU power. Your programs are charged gas and mining fees when they execute. This is usually paid for by the person initiating the transaction with your program.
This produces two weird side effects:
1) Your development environment (e.g. hardhat, ganache) will "charge" you the same fees, even when you are running entirely on your own laptop. Many times when you hit the deploy button, your own laptop will puke because your dev wallet doesn't have enough coin in it to pay the compile fees. ON YOUR OWN MACHINE!
2) When optimizing your code, you no longer refactor to improve speed or code maintainability, but mainly to reduce the fees charged when executing. Solidity even has a "price sheet" of fees for operations like addition, subtraction or allocating memory. This new way of thinking can seem strange to experienced devs because of all the easy fixes you plainly see that have to be left in the code base. Counter-intuitive.
That makes me think of the game Shenzhen I/O: each component cost money, each executed line of code draw power, you have to optimize your circuit to match your assigned power and price goals.
Security is another aspect that has to be brutally evaluated, even at the OPCODE level. This is really strange.
TL;DR it's almost like writing assembly level code with a 1000% emphasis on security, despite writing code in a high level language.
Then decide wether you want to jump on the blockchain/infrastructure bandwagon (Go, Rust, etc.) or the smart contract/app bandwagon (Solidity, etc.).
Then start contributing back to the OSS projects that interest you. If you do that, you should have no issue landing a job in the field.
Source: I did hire solidity developers a few years ago and I would totally look at their open source contributions as proof of their knowledge since this was/is such a new field.
Some repos:
https://github.com/OpenZeppelin
Second was gitcoin.co. I would pick up random bounties on there, often slightly beyond my skill level so that I would learn faster. You quickly build relevant skills and just as importantly you are building working relationships with companies and peers whilst getting paid to write open source software. To start out I would take on the issues that are entirely writing tests; it's low stakes so you're not going to break the product and you learn as much as if you were writing the code that you are writing tests for.
UC Berkeley DeFi Mooc https://youtube.com/channel/UCB67PxhB5LAWEbI4etQS7aw
Smart contract security auditing https://secureum.substack.com/archive
Tim Roughgarden, Foundations of Blockchains https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEGCF-WLh2RLOHv_xUGLqRts_...
- https://buildspace.so/ - https://www.learnweb3.io/
If you need a complete introduction, then look at:
- https://github.com/ethereumbook/ethereumbook
If you want to get started quickly with Solidity:
Make sure you are paid in actual dollars or euros.
Want to work on the chain itself, on an application that communicates with different chains, Smart contracts etc.
I would approach it from; Which company or product do you find interesting and want to work for? Then I would read the Required section in the job description and start learning these skills.
Parity for example has great tutorials for their Substrate framework and this alone is probably a great starting point to venture out and learn concepts you come across you don’t know yet.
However IMO it's kinda like with JavaScript. There are so many people claiming to be solidity kings it's hard to tell who actually is. 1 little oversight can easy cost you millions. IMO you can't bootcamp skills like that. The only thing that makes you actually good is experience.
Blockchain is just a technology, one shouldn't have such strong feelings against it just because one is a contrarian and lots of idiots are shouting that it'll end world hunger or building scams using it.
You speak of machine learning and cryptography, both are tools, some use ML techniques to discover tumors in medical images before humans can spot them, and others use it to analyze your data to know which product should be advertised to you to make you spend more money on useless things.
I am definitely a cryptocurrency contrarian, so I was going to stay out of this thread - it wouldn't help OP to have people questioning his fairly straight-forward request.
But I don't think there is such a thing as "just a technology". Technology comes out of people's desires, and you can't disentangle it from the context it's created in. You can argue that blockchain is just an append-only database, but that ignores all sorts of externalities its adoption is causing.
This isn't me saying you're wrong that people are making a mistake in ignoring externalities, but more that the reason why it is a mistake isn't that they correctly articulated one component in the problem they were thinking about - its because they ignored the other stuff which interacts with it.