The Blockchain Developer Train
Tags: 500ngdevs4eth, Solidity, Cryptocurrency, Programmer, Blockchain

As the year fast approaches the end of its era, I sat down to reflect on how the year had unfolded and also make plans against next year with a mindset that the year had nothing left to offer. As I began to brainstorm plans for next year, I came across a twitter link about an upcoming online Ethereum Blockchain coding bootcamp tagged “500 Nigerian Devs for Ethereum” set to kick off on the 18th November 2019 which immediately caught my interest, of course, I wasted no time in enrolling 😉.

Boom!!! An email dropped in my inbox a few days before the official kick-off date, the mail congratulated me of my acceptance into the 500NigeriaDevs4ETH program, stating we will kick-off officially on 18th and link to join a Slack channel called “Bloceducare” which will be the platform used for learning. I quickly joined in familiarizing myself with the space, meeting other participants, and ensuring I don’t miss valuable information; I was received with a warm welcome message from our coordinator Ayodeji Awosika.

On the 18th, our coordinator gave a run-down of how the modules for this program will proceed; he shared a pdf file containing the curriculum of the programs and the mentors facilitating each section.

As the day progress we got introduced to our first mentor Felipe Faraggi, who has been in the crypto community since 2011 and have been working in the blockchain space for 4–5 years, he is a Developer Advocate at Pegasys (https://pegasys.tech), and protocol engineering spoke at Consensys (consensys.net).

After his introduction and the radiant welcome he received from the participants. A zoom meeting was set with the goal to educate us on the fundamentals of Blockchain with the help of a well-detailed powerpoint slide prepared by our facilitator. At the end of the meeting, we were given an assignment.

Our facilitator Felipe Faraggi tutored us for two weeks; during this time, a second zoom meeting was held, which was accompanied by a second assignment. The zoom meeting was very informative and an eye-opener, all participants were cheerful and energized to learn more. The assignments helped put what was learned during these zoom calls into better perspective and were accompanied by gifts from our facilitator, which also acted as an incentive motivation.

The third week kicked off with an introduction of our new facilitator for the week, John Padilla, a community/blockchain developer contributing to various open-source projects. John Padilla’s goal was to educate us on Blockchain Fundamental II, which involves downloading and installing the essential toolset needed by a blockchain developer such as Truffle, Ganache, Metamask, etc.

Our facilitator achieved this by giving us daily tasks to complete, accompanied by a well-detailed guide to help complete each task. The forum buzzed with activities as participants brainstorm together to achieve the outlined task, as we wait for the fifth task, it’s safe to say participants are eager to get right on it I included 😊.

So far, I would say it’s been an adventurous journey one I haven’t foreseen, thinking the year was already done with me. I can confidentially say this program has improved me in many ways, among other things, it has helped increase my research skills and my self-learning ability as our facilitators encourage us to do so.

We are at the end of the third week with nine more weeks to go and loads of exciting discovery to be made, stay tuned as I update you on our weekly progress of as we uncover the knowledge this journey holds cheers.