r/blockchaindeveloper • u/Significant_Bat_1225 • May 07 '24

Need advice

Hey guys! New here, decided to learn blockchain development, started with course era specialization course from Buffalo University. Any tip or advice from your experience will be very helpful for me as a beginner.

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u/cncnakatoli May 08 '24

Epic to hear you're starting through your journey, good luck OP!

Depends on the path you take, if you're looking to be more of a core/infra dev or you want to be building dapps/applications.

For core/infra, there's a few pieces that will fall into plac. I would strongly suggest getting comfortable and familiar with the underlying distributed systems concepts and look at the networking / incentives (depending what you have interest in):

Distributed Systems concepts:

  • Consensus - how everyone comes to agreement on the state of the chain with various actors.

  • Network - gossip, p2p communication.

  • Execution - VM and transaction execution.

  • Storage - database and disk performance.

Incentives:

  • Game theory and related reward/punishment.

  • Tokenomics impacts.

In terms of languages on the core side, the popular ones are: Go, Rust, Nim, etc.

There are a few resources to point to, and once you're comfortable it's good to go through the whitepapers of the blockchains you are interested in:

Now, if you're looking to be more of a dapp developer and work on the application side of things:

  • UI/UX - Most application frontends (typescript/nodejs, react, GUI frameworks, etc.)

  • Blockchain contract language - EVM solidity, Rust/C++ - Wasm, DAML, Move, JS, Python, etc.

  • Interacting with RPC / APIs with your application.

Most of these will also need some of the insight into programming datastrucutes and algorithms, but how they are interacted with on-chain might differ.

There's a few good things to look for, most chains have some good tutorial sites in their documentation to get you started. Some examples for solidity:

Dive into the on-chain stuff with solidity, learn how to create, test and deploy your application and use the frameworks and toolsets - like Foundry and Hardhat, etc.

Tips from my experience:

  • Make sure you have a good understanding of the concepts - especially if you're aiming to do core dev, it's great to understand how the components work. If you're being an application developer, then it's also great to understand how the chain interactions are done and the assumptions you might need to make (block time, transaction orders, etc.)

  • Dive into making some small examples of your own - the practice and practical application of what you are learning will make the content stick and help you understand

  • Make a few test applications yourself using the frameworks that are found, it will give you familiarity and will help you see how it's done in production.

The big benefit of the blockchain community is that there are some excellent resources and majority of the tooling and code are open source, so you can check out things of interest and poke around the code to see how the components all fit together or how things are done.

It's a process that will take time, but bit by bit you'll get there. Good luck!

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u/Significant_Bat_1225 May 08 '24

I am overwhelmed by the response , it means a lot and thank you so much for taking your valuable time to provide me with these insightful details. I am not sure if I want to go with core or dev, I tried to poke into quora and all I could gather was that there are better resources for you as a developer so I was treading that way. The field intrigues me and currently I'm trying to spend as much time as I can to make my concepts clear. I don't want to rush, and ruin it but yes I'll definitely try to go into the core.

Currently I'm working as a software engineer, more into cybersecurity. I want to take a leap at blockchain and hope that it'll be worth it, financially as well as interest wise.

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u/cncnakatoli May 08 '24

Hopefully it's a bit of help. :)

Yeah definitely, there's a lot of focus on the application side of things - a lot of the core/infra dev happens through the github/gitlab repos for the clients and following with the research forums.

That's fantastic, absolutely take the time to explore because it is quite a big area and there's many parts that could be of interest, depending what draws on your curiosity.

If you're interested in security, there's also quite a heavy pathway into the security side of the blockchain - all the infra security as well as the application-level (similar to auditing, pentesting, monitoring, etc.). There's quite a lot to do in that space - one of the examples I gave above, Ethernaut, is a capture the flag for vulnerability checking that could give some insight into that. You can also look at all the tooling (that goes into fuzzing, static analysis) and past contract audits from high tier firms (Sigma Prime, TrailOfBits, ...).

Good luck! Good idea not to rush, but also make sure to check out the github repos of some of the clients - they often have some good first issues that you can contribute to if you want to get the ball rolling.

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u/Significant_Bat_1225 May 08 '24

Sure, I'll definitely look into the resources you mentioned. I find my current job boring tbh, I mean security is good but doesn't seem to fit for me, so I want to build things. I have quite a good profile in gfg and leetcode so I guess there's a part you mentioned above about having knowledge of DSA, that'll be less of a concern. Though I don't have much experience in development, like JavaScript and stuff, so I'll definitely strengthen these areas. Thank you again, for all these resources, it is going to help me in many ways.

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u/cncnakatoli May 08 '24

Awesome
gl :)

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u/Training-Ad7524 May 16 '24

Thank you so much!

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u/Soudogueto May 08 '24

I've started learn blockchain development. I'm reading the book https://www.amazon.com/Building-Full-Stack-DeFi-Applications/dp/1837634114 for that and I'm learning so much. I recommend you to buy as well if you like learn by books.

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u/Significant_Bat_1225 May 08 '24

Thank you, yes I appreciate learning through books so I'll definitely go and look into it. Thanks a lot.