Day 1: Blockchain & SmartContracts
Previous: The Whys …
The best way is to start from the basics of everything. That would mean learning the C language from scratch. But that would be an overkill. I needed a mixture of the latest and the basics at the same time. This would help me fight boredom that I am never going to get in line with the other engineers out there.
Blockchain was just starting out and getting popular among peers as I write this. I had heard you need to be good at JS if you want to learn Solidity and write smart contracts. So I went to Udemy and purchased my first course on Blockchain — Ethereum and Solidity: The Complete Developer’s Guide by Stephen Grider. I completed the first module of 32 lectures today.
In a gist, it helped me understand what is blockchain and how it is similar to our current client-server architecture. I also wrote a post on it given how excited I was. How Ethereum has a lot of networks and how to deploy a smart contract on a test network and test it. Metamask is our wallet and web3.js is the way to code in it. Solidity is the language used to write smart contracts which are basically nothing but functions that run on a network. The smallest unit is a transaction and updating data on a blockchain takes money and time however getting/reading data is free and fast. Mining is the process of changing data on the blockchain and how difficult it is to mutate data illegally on a blockchain. I used Remix IDE to write smart contracts and will be shifting to a local network soon. For every transaction, you need ethers — since it’s Ethereum and most of the faucets that give free ethers don’t work. Lol. Finally, I learned how gas is the unit of running a smart contract and it’s an equivalent form of Ether/Wei.
The rewards
I ended the day feeling pretty full of information that I needed to sink in. The best way to do that was to trouble someone with all that knowledge. So I spent the rest of the day troubling people and asking doubts.
