Web 3.0 Development — Beginner’s Guide
A decentralized, distributed ledger that records the provenance of a digital asset is what we define as Blockchain. It is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network.
Blockchains are still hot and the industry has a crazy amount of demand for developers right now. Next to awesome salaries, it’s also an immensely interesting field to work in. Web 3.0 is still a very new concept to most people because it has not yet gained widespread adoption. Many web 2 developers are looking to transition to the latest internet iteration but are unsure how to get started.
As exciting as all of this may sound, getting started with Web 3.0 can seem daunting if you’re not sure where to begin. In this article, we will look in-depth at the tools and resources available to help you get started with Web 3.0 development. Now let’s get our hands dirty.
Prerequisites
You should have a great understanding of JavaScript and web development in general. If you don’t, you should take a step back at this point and learn about web development first. There are so many awesome courses and tutorials (both Paid and Free) out there. I bet, you won’t have a hard time finding good ones.
1. Learn The Basics Of Blockchain
Before getting started, you need to know what you are working with. Blockchains are an incredible piece of technology, but they also aren’t trivial to learn. You’ll have to put some time into it to understand what you will later build on. To get a good start, here is a course that explains the concept of blockchains awesomely well. Once you’ve completed the course, you can advance a little further with this course. After completing these courses, you’ll be able to recognize fundamental concepts of blockchain and its ecosystem, and apply these concepts on your blockchain systems.
2. Learn About Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. They typically are used to automate the execution of an agreement so that all participants can be immediately certain of the outcome, without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss.
Smart contracts can nearly do everything, from fungible and non-fungible tokens to the backend of your next decentralized app. They are, however, different from the code you usually write. They’ll make up a good portion of your future work, so better understand them well.
Here is a course that will help you get started with smart contracts and learn solidity at the same time.
3. Learn How To Interface With The Blockchain
Decentralized apps consist of two components: Your frontend and smart contracts executed on the blockchain. For your frontend to talk to the blockchain, you’ll need to interface with it.
This is where libraries come in and there are two popular choices to interface with blockchains that implement the Ethereum API:
- ethers.js
- Web3.js
Pick one, and learn it well. You will definitely need it. It’s one of your most important tools from now on.
4. Learn Solidity
There are many blockchains out there, and nearly equally as many of them come with their own unique way of building smart contracts.
Solidity, however, is the language of the Ethereum VM which is integrated into many other blockchains. It won’t only serve you well on Ethereum. It will also help you to build smart contracts on other chains.
The job market for Solidity developers is the largest by far. Many businesses build or want to build on Ethereum. It could take a long time until another blockchain reaches the same level of adoption that Ethereum has reached.
Although it currently has a few problems (the chain is overloaded), the community is actively working on migrating the consensus over to Proof-of-Stake. All scaling problems will be gone when this happens, and the adoption rate might sky-rocket even further. Until then, layer-2 solutions help to scale the chain, so you don’t need to worry about your job and choice.
What you especially need to understand is how gas works and how each line of code you write in Solidity affects the price of execution of your smart contract. There is no way around it. Unfortunately, some companies optimize aggressively for gas consumption.
If you want to work in this field, you’ll need to learn to optimize your code. It will be part of your job and a huge part of some interviews because thorough optimization can save millions of dollars each year for a heavily used app or contract.
Still Curious? Crypto Zombies is an awesome start to Solidity. You learn by basically playing a game. What’s better than this?
5. Build Your Portfolio
Whether you’re a UX designer, freelance writer, or photographer, an impressive online portfolio is critical for impressing potential clients, and landing future jobs. As a blockchain developer too, a portfolio of projects can help immensely in your job search. If you want to work in this field, you need to build, build and build till you can’t no more.
Just to give you a rough idea, a project should contain:
- A frontend
- A smart contract
- Some (Solidity) code optimizations with comments explaining why
- Unit tests for everything
- A local test network setup
- E2E tests that thoroughly test the contract
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Staging Deployment
- A Deployment to the official testnet
6. Apply
With all that new knowledge and a portfolio, you can begin your job search. Don’t be demotivated when it takes some time, especially if you don’t have too much industry experience yet. It might well be that some companies try to get talent with more experience.
Conclusion
The road to becoming a blockchain developer has been long and arduous thus far. In the short time I’ve been working with blockchain, I can certainly state that it has been one of the most rewarding and risky decisions I’ve ever made.
