I'll be honest before I started, I think I expected blockchain data to feel exotic. Like there'd be some kind of ceremony to accessing it. What I got instead was a JSON RPC endpoint. You call it, it talks back. That was the first surprise: how boring the infrastructure felt in the best possible way. It's just a database you can ask questions to. The "public ledger" framing stopped being an abstraction the moment I ran my first solana balance call and watched a real wallet's balance show in my terminal,or even request faucet and receiving it in my wallet in real time and the balance displayed on my terminal too.
What clicked fastest was the account model. Once it landed that everything on Solana is an account programs, token balances, even program state a lot of the weirdness started resolving itself. It's almost like a filesystem. Programs live at addresses. Data lives at addresses. You're mostly just reading from addresses. That felt intuitive once I stopped trying to map it onto how I thought blockchains were supposed to work.
What surprised me most about the SDK was how much the ecosystem leans on you knowing what you're looking for before you go looking. With a REST API, you usually get back something self-describing field names that hint at meaning, maybe some docs that walk you through a response shape. With Solana RPC, especially reading raw account data, you get back a base64-encoded blob and a polite shrug. You need the program's IDL to make sense of it. That's not a flaw exactly, it's just a different contract between the API and the developer one that assumes more context up front.
What's still fuzzy: the fee and priority fee model. I understand the mechanics loosely you attach a compute budget, you bid for inclusion but the intuition hasn't formed yet. One thing I did learn along the way: SOL isn't the smallest unit you're working with. That's lamports 1 SOL is made up of 1,000,000,000 lamports. So when amounts come back from the RPC, they're in lamports, and you have to divide by a billion to get back to SOL. It's a small thing but it catches you off guard the first time you see a balance and think someone is inexplicably wealthy. That's probably my next step.
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