Becoming a blockchain developer can dramatically improve your career while giving you a better understanding of the rapidly evolving world of decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols.
We’ve asked top smart contracts developers worldwide for their go-to learning material when it comes to blockchain development and collected their suggestions in this complete roadmap to becoming a blockchain developer.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll find all the resources you need to kickstart your smart contract development career. It covers everything from starting as a total beginner to writing advanced, secure smart contracts, as well as outstanding UIs for your decentralized applications.
Before getting started, here's a one-stop solution that will teach you everything you need to know to kickstart your blockchain development career: Cyfrin Updraft.
Before diving into this roadmap, if you want to become a blockchain developer or level up your smart contract auditing security career, you should check out our smart contract development and smart contract auditing courses on Cyfrin Updraft.
Updraft is the world's leading web3 development and smart contracts security education platform. A full-fledged learning hub, it will help you level up your skills as a smart contracts engineer:
Completely for free.
The paths on Cyfrin Updraft are designed to give you a solid grounding in smart contract development, testing, and deployment, smart contract security auditing, and best practices. In addition to a deep understanding of the industry-standard tools and development practices used by top-notch smart contract developers worldwide, setting the stage for your journey ahead.
With that said, let's get started on our roadmap!
If you're starting without any previous development experience, the first step to becoming a blockchain developer is learning how to code.JavaScript is a highly recommended programming language for those who are starting out. It’s not only beginner-friendly but also versatile, making it particularly suitable for your first steps as a developer.
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Once you have a broad understanding of how programming works, the next step in our blockchain developer roadmap is to learn how web3, blockchains, and decentralized systems work.We’ve watched all the resources available online, literally, and there are two completely free courses (linked in the key resources below) that cover the entire journey from no programming experience to competent blockchain developer.On top of the fundamentals of blockchain, you will learn how to develop, deploy, and test Solidity smart contracts using Hardhat and Foundry. You’ll also learn advanced Solidity development tips, as well as best practices to enhance the security of your codebases.
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On top of those two courses, we suggest you go and exercise your skills, build real-world projects, or go through the challenges on platforms like the ones listed below.
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Once you understand how blockchain, Ethereum, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and smart contract development using Solidity work, it’s time to deepen your knowledge and start learning Vyper!
Vyper is a Pythonic alternative to Solidity rapidly gaining popularity among the community. It is an EVM programming language focusing on the language's security, compiler simplicity, and auditability. It’s also considered to be more human-readable.
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Once you have learned how to develop, deploy, and test smart contracts using Solidity or Vyper, you can move into lower-level concepts. You can start optimizing your Solidity smart contracts gas consumption or simply gain a deeper understanding of the workings of the EVM for fun.
And then, you should definitely learn Yul and Huff:
Since 2015, nearly $14,000,000,000 has been stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts, and users’ wallets due to low-security awareness, creative hackers, and lack of education about smart contract audits. But now, developers are starting to prioritize and adopt best practices and rigorous smart contract auditing practices.
The need for security has made it crucial for developers to spend more time learning how to write secure codebases and use best practices to protect the value of protocols and users.
In addition to this how to become a blockchain developer roadmap - we’ve put together a collection of the best resources and platforms to teach you about smart contract auditing and help you monetize your skills as a blockchain security expert through competitive and solo audits.
You should also check out the smart contract auditing course on Cyfrin Updraft - the industry-leading, go-to course for smart contract security researchers.
Once you’ve learned how to develop, test, and secure smart contracts, it’s time to learn how to create outstanding user interfaces (UIs) to interact with them!Some of the resources above will teach you most of what you need to start creating decentralized apps (dApps) front-ends. However, if you want to dig deeper into the field, you can’t miss checking the tools and resources listed below.
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This roadmap on how to become a blockchain developer gave you all the resources you'll need to kickstart your smart contract development or security career. You can go from zero to the top 1% of web3 developers completely for free.
So, if you’ve made it here! Congratulations 🎉 You only miss one thing now. Practice!
Go through the exercises in the resources listed above, create real-world projects, and keep an eye on the web3 and smart contract development courses on Cyfrin Updraft.
Also, do not miss any updates.
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