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Posted on May 24, 2022 • Edited on May 26, 2022

How can you become a Blockchain Developer in 2022

We all agree that ‘Blockchain’ is in trend these days.

Apart from its value add as a technology, it is now also one of the most promising and demanding areas in the software development domain.

If you are thinking to work on building your career in the Blockchain aka Web3 space, congratulations you are on the right path. If you are still considering and are also thinking on how can you build a career in the Blockchain space, specifically, as a developer, read along.

Trust us. Anyone and Everyone can become a blockchain developer, once you put your heart and mind to it. If you put in the right amount of effort, we kid you not, you should be able to start your career in the blockchain before the end of 2022!!!

Reasons why one should become a Blockchain Developer

Less competition in the Job Market

There are still not many Blockchain developers out there. Interested developers started to learn the concepts and apply their knowledge to space from 2016. Therefore, you will not have lots of competitors in the blockchain area.

Higher Salaries

There are thousands of active projects in the space but on the other hand, there are very few expert developers in the space. This means that if you are an expert blockchain developer in 2022, you will have endless opportunities.

Running Personal Blockchain Projects

As a Blockchain developer, you will be able to design, develop, test and deploy various solutions in the future as a 100% personal project.

In this article, we’re going to create the most productive roadmap to becoming a Blockchain Developer.

“Becoming a Blockchain Developer” won’t be just about smart contracts, it’s also about deployment and testing, and sometimes the front-end is included too.

So without wasting any more minutes let’s just begin with our Roadmap! ⭐

1. Web Development as a Prerequisite

First of all, in order to create attractive decentralized applications, you’ll have to learn Web Development and programming of the apps as a prerequisite.

Web Development is crucial because most organizations require blockchain developers to create apps that people with no or minimal knowledge of blockchain could use.

Thus, here are some resources for learning Web Development in 2022:

These resources will help to get a great understanding of Web Development and its functionalities.

2. Basics of Blockchain

Now you know how the back-end and the front-end work simultaneously in any application.

Next up, you will have to understand the Basics of Blockchain.

Understanding the Terminologies like:

(A) Distributed

(B) Mining

(D) Merkle Tree

and many more

To understand the Basics of Blockchain, the following are some resources that would help you out:

Before diving into various programming languages, it is important for us to understand how the Blockchain is working which will make it easier for us to understand the further steps.

3. Ethereum Blockchain

Although there are several types of Blockchain Platforms like IBM and Hyperledger Fabric. But we are going to use the Ethereum blockchain because Ethereum is one of the oldest and most established blockchain platforms.

For a general overview of how Ethereum works, you can use the following resources provided by its official website hosts:

These resources are full of lots of beginner-friendly content. So you may find them helpful.

4. What is a Smart Contract?

A Smart Contract is simply a program that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. They are a type of Ethereum account.

This means they have a balance and they can send transactions over the network.

If you're just getting started or looking for a less technical introduction, we recommend introduction to smart contracts article to you.

Ethereum has developer-friendly languages for writing smart contracts, such as:

Solidity
Vyper

Solidity is considered the most popular language for writing smart contracts.

If you’re new to the language the official Solidity documentation is a good resource to have handy.

You can also learn the language by playing Crypto Zombies.

Or learn by implementing using some of our articles:

5. Frameworks for Ethereum Blockchain

Next up, there are a few popular frameworks that are generally used by blockchain engineers.

Some of them are:

Hardhat: Hardhat is a development tool used to compile, deploy, test and debug your Ethereum software.

It helps developers manage and automate the recurring tasks that are inherent to the process of building smart contracts and dapps.

Hardhat is one of the most popular tools used by the Blockchain developer.

If you’re new to Hardhat, read their Documentation where they have explained everything about it from scratch.

Truffle: Truffle is an alternative to Hardhat. And it is not only used as a development tool but also used for built-in smart contract compilation, providing an interactive console for direct contract information.

Read Truffle’s documentation to know more about it.

Brownie: Brownie is a framework that builds applications for the EVM but is Python-based, meaning it supports the programming language Vyper, a Python smart contract language.

Brownie also supports Solidity.

It handles deployment, and testing and also supports a mainnet fork.

Read their documentation where they have explained it thoroughly.

Openzeppelin: Openzeppelin is a toolkit with plugins that help build smart contracts faster.

To use any of the smart contracts in Openzeppelin, you must import them into your own smart contract.

It is one of the most popular plugins used by blockchain developers.

6. Tools that’ll help you grow as a Blockchain Developer

Geth: Geth or Go-Ethereum has 3 interfaces that we use for blockchain development:

JSON-RPC server, an interactive console, and Command-Line.

Although it comes with built-in access to testnet Rinkeby, it also allows users to network a local cluster of nodes to create their own Ethereum network.

MetaMask: MetaMask is a browser plugin that serves as an Ethereum wallet. It allows users to store Ether and other ERC-20 tokens, enabling them to make transactions to any Ethereum address.

You can download the Metamask extension using this link.

Remix IDE: Remix IDE is an open-source web and desktop application. Remix is used for the entire journey of contract development with Solidity language as well as a playground for learning and teaching Ethereum.

Node as a Service: Node service providers run distributed node clients behind the scenes for you, so you don’t have to. These services typically provide an API key that you can use to write to and read from the blockchain.

There is a huge debate on whether we should run our own node or use a provider. To know more about it, read our article: *Web3: Should I use Infura / Alchemy or Run a Node?*

Popular Node Services are:

Out of all these node providers, Alchemy is one of the most popular node providers used by blockchain developers.

You can read more about Alchemy here

7. IPFS

Ethereum can be used in code storage in all smart contracts. But is not designed for storing a large amount of data. For this reason, we need a different methodology to store a large amount of data in a decentralized way.

Hence, IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.
To persist data on IPFS we have to work with a pinning service, which will ‘pin’ your data for you.

Moreover, there are various pinning services that exist to store data on IPFS like Pinata, Web3.storage, and Infura.