I’m feeling pretty anxious about getting through the learning materials I’m working with now. As my confidence grows from completing the projects, I’m starting to feel impatient about getting through so I can work exclusively on those. I’m checking myself because I want to finish the courses to really be prepared to build but it hasn’t been easy when all I want to do every day is code and build the ideas I have.
I took some time in the first part of this week to also focus on myself. I’ve been so wrapped up in coding and pushing myself as far as I can go each week that I haven’t taken the time for self-care. I went to the theater and watched some TV. It’s felt like forever since I’ve done that so it felt kind of weird to not be looking at lines of code or writing an article. The later part of the week was electric with all the excitement from being at Consensus this year (more on that below).
<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>
In this week's recap:
- WAGMI Squad
- Consensus 2022
- Mastering Ethereum
- FCC Solidity & JavaScript Course
- Alchemy's Road to Web3
- Job Search Prep
- Projects
- What's Next?
WAGMI Squad
The squad is operating now and working on some of the foundational components like figuring out a website for showcasing completed projects and members, while most of us also continue working through the Solidity and Javascript course. I wrote a full article on the Squad, where we’re at, and what’s next, that you can find here.
Consensus 2022
I was at Consensus 2022 in Austin over the last few days, and the energy and excitement at this event was incredible. With 20,000 guests from 105 countries and 600 speakers, the entire convention was packed with opportunities to network, learn, engage, and have fun with other web3 people. There's nothing that quite gets me amped up and excited than conventions and this one was no different. Consensus 2022 was my first web3 convention and it delivered on all my expectations.
I met with recruiters from across the industry to learn about potential openings, networked with other developers to learn about their projects and talk about mine, and was introduced to new tools and teams that I haven't heard of before. I walked away feeling up to any challenge and even more anxious about building stuff.
Here are just a couple of the highlights:
- Privacy should be the default on the blockchain
- Filecoins FVM is coming this fall
- It's time to build, even if crypto winter is coming
- Only projects with something real to offer will survive crypto winter
- Risk education and management need to be a collective effort by the crypto industry
Tweet storm soon to come with many, many more highlights.
Mastering Ethereum
The chapters for this book can be found on a Github repo here. This book is now finished!
Chapter 9: 'Smart Contract Security'
- Best practices
- Risks and antipatterns
Chapter 10: 'Tokens'
- Token uses
- ERC token standards
- Creating an ERC20 token
Chapter 11: ‘Oracles’
- Use cases and examples
- Design patterns
- Types of Oracles
Chapter 12: ‘Decentralized Applications (DApps)’
- Defining dApps
- Walkthrough of building an auction dApp
- Swarm, Whisper, and ENS
Chapter 13: ‘The Ethereum Virtual Machine’
- Understanding what EVM is
- Compiling Solidity to Bytecode
- Deeper look into gas
Chapter 14: ‘Consensus
- Consensus algorithms
- Ethereum’s approach to PoW & PoS
FCC Solidity & Javascript Course
Steady progress with this course, I’m taking Patrick’s advice about taking my time with it to allow the material to digest and make sure I’m actually taking it and learning as much as I can from the content. Thankfully, we are still covering content that I am familiar with.
Lesson 8: HTML / Javascript Fund Me (Full Stack / Front End)
- Front end integration for interacting with a smart contract
- HTML / JavaScript
For lesson 8, we wrote a funding contract, the repo for that can be found here.
Alchemy's Road to Web3
I managed to catch up through all currently released content at this point for Road to Web3 by completing the project for weeks 5 and 6. It’s definitely a relief to be caught up on this because that frees up a few extra hours to work on the Solidity & JavaScript Course.
Week 5 focused on creating smart contracts that integrated Chainlink via use of keepers and price feed to create a dynamic NFT.
Week 6 used Scaffold ETH challenge 1 to build a staking application.
Job Search
I had a couple of informational interviews this week to talk about the industry and get some advice. I also met with a career counselor from the boot camp to talk about my progress, review some of my materials, and continue to improve my plan as I search for opportunities.
During Consensus, I met with quite a few recruiters about openings they had for jr level developers and those conversations went very well.
Projects
Solidity & JavaScript Course
Please refer to the above section or the individual repos for additional details on these projects.
Fund Me Front End | Repo | Taking the Hardhat Fund Me and building a front end
Road to Web3
Please refer to the above section or the individual repos for additional details on these projects.
dNFTs with Chainlink | Repo | Dynamic NFT using price feeds
Staking App | Repo | Built from scaffold eth, an app to stake ETH
What's Next?
This next week is going to be a blitz on the Solidity & JavaScript Course, nearly all available dev time will be on working through this material. It's a massive beast of a course but it needs to be finished quickly so I can change the focus on building new projects. Aside from this course, I'll have Week 7 of Road to Web3 and I'll touch on Learn Web3 DAO enough to make an impact on their sophomore track.
Non-technically, I'll be reading some whitepapers this week to get more familiar with those and some protocols, scheduling meetings with recruiters and engineers to learn more about some of the teams I found at Consensus, and continue efforts around WAGMI Squad's infrastructure to build a minium viable community.
I also signed up for web3athon, a hackathon with a focus on human issues like sustainability and financial health. I'll need to build a team quickly for this event as registration has already started. I'll begin by asking which WAGMI Squad members have interest in this event and find others if needed.
You can find me here:
