Week 7 has ended with successful non-technical growth from outside of the boot camp experience. If you're more interested in the technical side of things, check out the week 7 technical recap here. This week was somewhat limited in available time due to some personal matters but I was able to get squeeze in enough hours to keep up. I've got the usual round of articles, an informational interview, and an update on the Chainlink Spring Hackathon below. As always, let me know if you have any recommendations for what I should be trying to learn next.

<usual_enterance> If you're new here I'm creating this blog series as I go from coding newbie to working in web3. I'm creating this to reflect on the technical and non-technical growth and to leave it behind for others who might be interested in how they can follow a similar path. </usual_enterance>

Articles

I tweet every day about at least one web3 article, here are the biggest takeaways from those articles this week;

• Smart contracts allow any deal or transaction to be securely automated and decentralized. 
• Smart contracts should be used because they are accurate, efficient, transparent, secure, save money, and guarantee outcomes
• The limitations of these are a lack of ability to change, there are few remedies for breach, limit negotiations, security concerns, and outside data constraints
• Logical for large enterprises to seek private, permissioned blockchain options but small and medium companies are better off using public blockchains because they can utilize greater resources 
• Smart legal contracts are the applications of the code that make a smart contract
• Generally speaking, smart contracts are enforceable but just because a contract exists, that does not mean it is legally enforceable
• The top 5 smart contract languages: Solidity, Rust, JavaScript, Vyper, Yul
• Solidity is an OOP language with JS-like syntax and can be deployed using an IDE or real coding environment 
• Solidity and Rust devs are in high-demand and short-supply

And you can find my sources here;

• What is a smart contract?
• BENEFITS OF SMART CONTRACTS
• Smart contracts can redefine business — But this doesn’t imply wide openness
• Smart Legal Contracts: Explanation & Enforceability
• Top 5 smart contract programming languages for blockchain
• Writing smart contracts with Solidity
• Desperation for Rust, Solidity as crypto coding languages rise

Informational Interviews

Web3 Dev

I had the chance to meet with a web3 developer this week who was working with a web3 protocol as a full stack developer. I asked how they stay up-to-date with web3 stuff, and they recommended that the best way was to be active in Discord and Twitter communities around web3 and to be an active user of platforms and protocols, this would also be vital to break into the space as a new developer myself. Some final parting advice was given and part of that was about the hackathon and their recommendation to find ideas was to dive into Chainlinks integrations and find something that interests the team and try to build off that.

Chainlink Spring Hackathon

Only a brief update to this, as mentioned above a web3 developer helped with understanding where to find some ideas for what to build. The team should be meeting by the end of the week to share ideas and try to start working out what additional technology we need to become familiar with before the hackathon begins on April 22nd.

What's Next?

What comes next this week is a strong focus on technical projects and the new course Flask + MySQL, as well as the daily articles and developing hackathon ideas for the team. I'm excited to have another week of smart contract-focused learning with the articles, this continues to prove to be an area of high career interest to work towards, and learning more about the different languages they are written in will surely help me understand how I might pursue that following the boot camp experience closing in May.

If you'd like to join the learning community I'm building on Discord for web3, you can find the link for that here. It's a space that I am trying to build for myself and others to share their growing knowledge of all things web3. 

You can also find me here:

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