My Beginner Web3 Journey

Ps: this is my first step in a series of threads documenting my web3 journey on twitter. If you’d want to walk with me, i’d definitely love to connect @iotkelvin.

#May - August, 2021
I Went through the rite of passage of deploying my first contract sometime in May 2021. Lets just say, i wasn't making as much progress as i’d want. Built basic projects with some Dapp University tutorials, not stuff I'm really proud of. But hey! It's progress, right?

One glaring issue I noticed was that most tutorials weren’t up to date. I mean, a tutorial released in December 2020 was probably deprecated when I implemented it. I mean breaking changes, you cant even progress without fixing it. This led to lots of research trying to find the updated version of it. This slowed my progress alot BTW.

Installing Truffle on windows was a pain in the a*s. Don't know if it was a unique issue for me and my PC but somehow i got through it. Thanks to a very unique blog post. Currently, my development environment is Hardhat. And I loove it.

#September, 2021
My official college internship began sometime in september 2021, well I had already made the decision to spend the whole period breaking into the web3 space… so it was a no-brainer thinking of what i’d be doing during the period.

Wondering what I was doing from May - September? Well, it was a combination of school, web3 and a personal project I was working on. Something in the real estate industry. Obviously, you can see my attention was divided… so not exactly a rocket-speed progress i assure you.

One serious hitch I remember having was a lack of mentors or a community that i could ask for help when stuck. So I'd spend weeks on a particular problem trying to figure it out myself.

This changed in September, I got the opportunity to join the blockchainhubafrica community, this was a turning point. My progress became quite significant, I met very enlightened, motivated developers in the space already. Saying this simple act increased my progress in order of 100X magnitude won't be an understatement.

Lets just say this was the actual beginning of my journey. The next few months will be a combination of lots of things, I don't even know which to start with.

#October, 2021
I discovered buildspace. Basically they organize a kind of building session, if you’re able to go through the process, you’d have a live project on a testnet. Cool, right? Best thing is the whole building session wont take upto a week. I finished mine in three days. Lets just call it a weekend.

If you're stuck in tutorial hell or just cant seem to push a live web3 project, Like me. I'd definitely recommend buildspace. Everything happens in their discord channel. We built and deployed an NFT project on the rinkeby testnet.

Oh, also the entire web3 community seems to live on discord servers, I definitely had to create an account.

#November, 2021
Sometime in October, I was able to get an internship with xendfinance - a blockchain company in my city. This helped me alot. I got to work on a project for their xend hackathon which was ongoing. I did write tests mostly, which made me really go through the whole codebase… was quite enlightening.

The team was so helpful I must say. Even now, they are my go-to mentors for any issues I face.

Learnt about solidity design patterns like satellite pattern, data segregation patterns which aid with the problem of immutability of smart contracts; and other design issues. At this point i didn't implement them in a project, was good to know about them though…lol

This was also my intro to Hardhat. This really eased my development process. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone. I ran into some issues though, like it crashing due to a “memory allocation” issue. This seemed like a problem specific to my PC though. In issues like this: creating a new hardhat project and importing my codebase seems to fix dem issues.

I said earlier that alot happened this month.

Well, I found out about the chainlink hackathon that was ongoing. This was another milestone in my learning process. I found an active community, lots of live practical workshops and mentors, newbie web3 developers like myself. The program was awesome to say the least.

I always recommend their recorded workshops on youtube to anyone looking to learn about web3. If not for anything, it's a solution to my initial problem of outdated tutorials.

Also the hackathon is held twice a year I think, I advise participating in the next one. I got to connect with a game developer from Thailand to build a gaming platform on the blockchain. Though we didn't make much progress (yh, we began building late), the project was among the “Top Quality Winners” at the end of the Hackathon. It was quite an experience.

Pro tip: Before this month began i made a personal commitment which i titled #BlockchainNovember. Trust me, it was really a November of blockchain 😎

#December, 2021
It kinda hit me that i don't have enough portfolio project. I mean, i've written lots of smart contract, but most of them were not complete with a frontend so they cant be called a complete project.

Reminds me, isnt this a problem for engineers that prefer writing just backend code or just smart contracts. How do they show off their work? You know, without having to dabble in frontend integrations.

Well this drove my next decision. I titled my month #DecemberOfLiveProjects. This is literally pinned on a wall in front of my setup.

I'm currently working on a complete ICO project. It will have features like: crowdsale, timelock, airdrop, referrals… Ps: Some of these features have been built out already.

Updates will be posted on my twitter page. They will be daily, short and precise. Hope it helps or inspires someone.

Ps: this is my first step in a series of threads documenting my web3 journey on twitter. If you’d want to walk with me, i’d definitely love to connect @iotkelvin .

During my journey I stumbled through resources & communities like:
Cryptozombies
Eattheblocks
Dappunversity
buildspace.so
github.com/frankiefab100/Blockchain-Develop..
solidity-by-example.org
cryptodevhub.io
useweb3.xyz
Chainlink youtube

..and lots of others not mentioned.