Ethereum and Solidity: The Complete Developer's Guide - My Thoughts

When it comes to building a Full Stack Web3 application, this is the course that taught me how to do it from A-Z.

I have previously taken a Udemy course about Ethereum and Solidity development but I found that it was a bit lacking in how to connect a frontend application to the "backend" which is essentially smart contracts deployed on the blockchain. After completing the previous one, I knew that I needed those skills. Writing smart contracts is good but it's kind of pointless to have a deployed smart contract unless a user can easily interact with it on a website.

This is where I feel that this course by Stephen Grider did particularly well in not only walking me through the smart contract development process but building frontends that connect to the contracts we deployed. To be fair, the previous course did get me acquainted with web3 development tools such as Truffle, Remix, the neccessary extensions in VSCode and interacting with the Ethereum testnets. Knowing those tools, the common errors, and the ways to resolve those errors to get code to work was immensely valuable while completing this course.

That's not to say this course was easy by any means. It is a bit outdated and technology moves fast. Running npm install only to find out packages are deprecated and your can't even run an application locally does cause some anxiety but in my opinion that is part of the development process. Even along the way I realized that one thing may lead to another which requires me to practice different skills to build a better portfolio.

For example, I had put together the final project of this course and went to deploy it using Vercel but for some reason it just didn't work. I will have to spend another day or two re-configuring a new project to get it to work but that's beside the point. While figuring out how to correctly deploy an application, I saw that I can deploy a personal portfolio site fairly easily and went ahead primarily as a test but now as I put more content onto that "test" deployment, that slight detour or branch is now growing into something meaningful. I think the point I'm trying to make is that the development process is not always a straight line and inspiration can be sparked by anything.

Circling back to this course, I do feel more confident in my coding abilities and have a better sense on how to work on projects going forward. Is all the code memorized in my head? Definitely not, but as I spend more time working on projects without a guide, the skills I have learned thus far will get better and better. If you read this far and want to learn about not only Ethereum and Solidity but also React and NextJS I'd highly recommend this one.

What's next for me is to deploy the frontend we built in this course,add that project to the Projects tab of this site, and then I need to re-build my e-commerce site to make it a bit more fresh. Catch ya on the next one!

Struggle, Repeat, Struggle, Repeat - Kenny Ard