beginner · blockchain
The blockchain bootcamp
From the vocabulary through Ethereum and Solana to writing, testing, auditing and deploying real contracts and dApps.
·
By Amit Chakraborty — Kolkata, India · Remote worldwide
What you will be able to do
Write, test, audit and deploy a smart contract, and build a dApp that talks to it.
Syllabus — 18 chapters
- 1. The vocabulary — Define block, chain, hash, nonce, consensus and finality accurately enough to read anything else.
- 2. Wallets, keys and addresses — Understand custody, signing and the mistakes that lose funds permanently.
- 3. A chain on your own machine — Run a local node and get instant, free, disposable transactions to learn on.
- 4. Ethereum: accounts, gas and the life of a transaction — Follow one transaction from signature to inclusion.
- 5. Your first smart contract — Write, compile and deploy Solidity, and read what the compiler produced.
- 6. Contract calls: the interface, encoding and reading state — Call a contract from code and know which calls cost money.
- 7. Testing contracts, including against a fork of the real chain — Write tests that exercise the cases that lose funds.
- 8. Debugging a transaction that reverted — Turn an opaque failure into a specific line.
- 9. Standards and protocols — Understand the common token and account standards and why standardisation matters here.
- 10. Solana: a different model — Learn accounts, programs, rent and parallel execution as a contrast with Ethereum.
- 11. Writing a Solana program — Build and deploy a program with the standard framework.
- 12. Building a dApp — Connect a wallet, sign from a front end, and handle the states a chain introduces.
- 13. Indexing: events and why you cannot simply query a chain — Get queryable data out of an append-only log.
- 14. Basic security practice — Apply the standard defences against the standard attacks.
- 15. Harder security practice — Reason about oracles, ordering, upgradeability and privileged access.
- 16. Auditing a contract — Read code for intent first and for failure second.
- 17. Running an audit end to end — Use the tooling, judge coverage, and write a report someone can act on.
- 18. Deploying for real — Work through a mainnet checklist, monitoring and an upgrade path.
0 of 18 published. A new chapter every Saturday evening. Free to read.
Learn it free, elsewhere too
The documentation, videos, books and practice sites worth your time on this subject. All free. None of it is mine.