4 Reasons why you Should Learn Blockchain Development as a Web Developer ⚛
Ok, let’s set the scene.
🫵 YOU: Are a developer, mostly doing web stuff in your professional work but you occasionally dabble in data / mobile / infra / whatever type stuff
✋ I: Am you from the future. A dev who was initially very put off by the ‘empty’ public speculative retail-side of crypto, but who tumbled into the technical rabbithole of decentralised computing and added a very powerful new skillset to their arsenal for fun & (massive) profit
Now there’s lots of good stuff out there on why the notions of blockchains & decentralised assets as technologies are awesome for the world (good place to start)
However here we’re gonna scale it down a bit
We’re gonna scale it allllllll the way down to a single life: your life. And why learning blockchain dev as your next objective might be very good for you specifically as a human being
But first, let’s clear the air
Let’s start by dispelling some some damaging myths
The name ‘web3’ makes a lot of sense as in the context of the historical progression of the internet. Chris Dixon summarises it in this fantastic piece
The issue is on a human level it sounds too much like a straight upgrade. It immediately labels the current crop of the internet (including us ‘web2 developers’) as ‘last gen’
The PS3 was much better than the PS2. Nobody wants to be called a PS2
Ultimately our goal as developers is to make digital products that make people’s lives better. web3 technologies will have only ‘made it’ when they are working away under the hood of products that our users love and nobody is making a big deal out of the tech stack itself.
So what’s important for us here is to keep in mind that web3 is not a ‘version update’ for us developers. It’s not about getting left behind, your tech stack is not getting like-for-like replaced. web3 is a high-level ‘third era’ of the internet that we are right at the start of
So why should I learn web3 dev?
#1 Oh. My. God. it’s fun as hell
If you’re anything like me you started programming due to some varying combination of: building stuff that people (including yourself) can use is satisfying, it pays well and your parents can show your career title off at dinner parties, and finally, the craft of writing good code is fun in of itself. Writing test suites, making them go green, solving micro-problems throughout your day… work feels like a pleasant stream of minigames & dopamine
Well coding up web3 stuff is like these minigames on roids
You are genuinely working on unsolved problems, with novel constraints that force you to think about familiar old problems in exciting new ways. You are closer to the metal of your stack in ways that I’ve found provide more engineering satisfaction than plumbing together endless REST API’s
To think of blockchain engineering as simply learning the Solidity (or Rust) programming language is smoothbrain. The real fun begins when you take a deep dive down the EVM execution rabbit-hole and realise that while on-chain you & your programs are operating in a wild, untamed adverse environment filled with shadowy human & machine actors of varying degrees of benevolence at every turn
Working on smart contracts is the closest thing to playing an MMO that still qualifies as a job. Just read the famous Ethereum is a Dark Forest post for god’s sake, this stuff is coooooool
#2 You wield massive leverage as an engineer
You as an engineer, as a human being, are extremely empowered in web3. While in smart contract land:
Need hosting, right? Nope, no needing to add a credit card to an AWS account, your contracts are hosted permanently for free on the chain you target. Just pay one-time gas fee for the contract deploy transaction
And more awesomely:
Wanna accept payments? Well no more running to Daddy Stripe and jumping through hoops for permission to let your users pay you for something. Payments are a built-in primitive of the blockchain
Imagine you spend the weekend hacking on a fun little web3 side project with fee-taking baked in, deploy your contract and throw a quick free frontend up on Vercel/Fleek/Github Pages/Heroku. This thing basically now lives forever and any usage at any point in the future by anyone is gonna automatically accrue cash in your crypto wallet. Throw out a few of these side projects and you could be generating beer money, then rent money, then who knows maybe even yacht money 😉
The point is the power is placed in your hands. The systems you work with are permissionless and you are a first class citizen on-chain whether you have $100 or $100m
#3 Your web2 experience will translate super well and make you a web3 god
I see so many people asking for a roadmap to become a web3 dev as a new developer and the responses are always the same
learn a language like Python or JS (don’t start with Solidity)
Then learn Solidity (it should seem quite familiar at this point)
Now make some projects and get an internship!
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this per se, believe me I’m the last person trying to gatekeep the industry, and it reads ok at first glance- but wait a sec hol’ up! That Step 1 is not actually a Step 1, it’s a multi-year career pursuit.
You can’t just do some Python syntax tutorials and assume you are web3-ready. To be a successful web3 developer, you have to be a successful developer. You, as an existing web2 dev, have so much more than just knowledge of a language’s syntax.
You have a honed instinct for debugging, you ‘feel’ where error messages are guiding you like a wise old weather-beaten tracker stooping to smell the dirt beneath their boots. You have familiarity up and down a software stack, from screen to datastore & beyond. You know how to phrase Google searches perfectly to get that niche StackOverflow answer from 3 years ago with 7 upvotes and a green tick that you need so badly
In a sea of people caught up in the hype and 6-figure salaries, you are the best placed person to hit the ground running, build meaningful things and drive the industry forward
#4 The jobs… but also a world of unique non-job opportunities
The water’s warm over in web3. In general, the closer you work to money the more money you make. And in crypto you are damn close to the money, even if it takes many different forms. The demand for web3 talent is high, although often overstated & it’s not yet crystallised into a fantastic job market (as I’ll discuss in a future post). Salaries are usually six figures, but that’s not even the most interesting part 😯
But what’s much more exciting is the limitless world of non-job opportunities it opens up. We’re working with permissionless stuff here! As we mentioned before, you, the engineer, have so much individual power to build!
Just one small example: it’s kinda like every NFT & crypto token on a blockchain are open API’s that you can leverage without needing to apply for a private key that could be rate-limited or revoked on a whim. Do you think Bored Apes are cool? Build a product, tool or derivation specifically for Ape-holders that uses their NFT as a login - you need absolutely zero permission from the original Bored Ape creators to do this
And a potentially very life-changing side effect of learning this blockchain stuff inside-out is that it will also make you a god at using DeFi and chains in general. You’ll be absolutely miles (note: that’s `absolutely kilometers*1.6` to our EU friends 🙌) ahead of the masses of retail investors when it comes to new investment opportunities and making money on-chain (early adopting new protocols, yield farming, MEV, arbs, etc etc)
Being an active dev in the space means you’ll be drenched in alpha, and just one of the opportunities that lands in your lap due to this edge could realistically give you life-changing money (I’ve seen people score 1000x’s on new projects before my eyes)
Soooooo if the idea of:
✅ hitting the ground running
✅ building & learning in a fun new computing paradigm with unsolved problems
✅ getting personally empowered to create your own ideas or build on top of existing products/layers freely
✅ and potentially setting yourself up financially for life
sounds good to you, then you might be interested to know I’m building a specialist advanced web3 course to fast-track existing developers into the driving seat of a life-changing new career ⚡️
Drop your email below if you’d like to be kept in the loop
Cheers guys, till next time!
Thomas