I have been a part of the India Guild for a while now and I am thoroughly enjoying the process of brainstorming ideas with my guild members and coming up with innovations that can help increase Blockchain adoption among Indian communities.
I recently came across the NCD program - the Near Certified Developer program which was conducted in a boot camp-like fashion spread across 5 days. The aim of this program is quite simple: teach developers about NEAR and how to build using the NEAR Protocol. I obtained my Verified NCD tag just recently and I am excited to share my journey with you folks hoping it would help you and encourage you to take advantage of the program. Did I mention that the program is completely FREE?!
I would like to start by saying that this entire experience would be helpful to both junior developers as well as senior developers in case they are interested to explore a cutting-edge blockchain framework and learn to build solutions on top of the framework. As I describe my experience, I'm sure you will be able to judge what you can gain from this particular certification program.
Once you apply for the program and you are accepted into it, which would be indicated by an acceptance email - you would be required to perform certain steps before the program begins. As you share your availability to meet during the week of the program and join the discord server - the endorphin rush is starting to kick in by now.
Before the program begins, it is suggested to definitely read the pre-reading material which would be available to you once you are accepted to the program. The pre-reading material consists of a set of resources that not just introduces you to the NEAR blockchain but also talks about why and how of the blockchain and in general about the evolution of web3 and our journey up until here in the technology world.
It is important to know beforehand that this program is meant to be hectic and full of experiences where you are constantly challenging yourself and sometimes perhaps even doubting yourself. And i you are, then you are definitely on the right path. Day1 starts with a kickoff call where you are introduced to the facilitator who would be running this program and of course to your other cohort mates with whom you would be working closely throughout the duration of the program. Depending on your location, this kickoff call could happen in the morning hours, in the evening hours or perhaps a little later in the late night, so for those who are sure that the kick-off call would be in the late evening, I would suggest going through the reading material of Day1 before the kick-off call.
Day1 is really all about reading the smart contracts . As suggested by the facilitator, it is best to choose AssemblyScript as the smart contract language if you are not familiar with the Rust programming language. If you are a junior developer and are skeptical about not knowing too much about programming languages, do not worry! You will be able to catch up with Assembly script quite fast. My suggestion would be to open and explore as many smart contracts as possible in the language of your choice. Try to quickly walk through each of the smart contracts without delving too much into what each line represents or the action that has been performed at each statement level. This will only lead you going into a spiral ending up wasting a lot of time of and missing out on an opportunity to explore the various use cases that you could think of in the space of blockchain. The same applies to senior devs as well - even if you are experienced, it is highly recommended to go through at least 10 smart contracts. Just read them very quickly and understand or rather try to understand what the smart contract is meant to achieve.
Day2 : The hours leading up to today would involve you to write and run a couple of smart contracts. My strongest suggestion would be to clone as many smart contract repos and run them on your local. Observe how they work and what is the repo structure. Most of the smart contracts have a few scripts associated with them which you can view in order to see how the contract can be deployed and the functions can be called. Once you have done this with a couple of smart contracts and got in the hang of it, edit a few of them - the easy ones like the counter example, the guest book example or the sending messages example. Once you start playing around with the code, this strengthens your confidence that now you are slowly moving towards the ability to formulate your own logic and codify it in the form of smart contracts. This exercise is also meant to give you an understanding of how smart contracts are different from the usual programs that we write on a day-to-day basis for enterprise applications.
Deep 3 and Day 4 are meant for you to deploy the smart contract onto the testnet of and test them by writing unit test cases and simulation test cases if you can. The later part of day2 following day3 and day4 are good times to brainstorm as to what would be the demo project that you will be building. The demo that takes place on Day 5. By the first half of day3 if you have not decided what you're going to build for your demo, you're already lagging behind and can choose to do a demo in the next cohort instead. Do not worry if you are not displaying a demo during this cohort, you can always do it in any of the upcoming cohorts. The idea is for you to implement or create a small project from your learnings from the past couple of days.
Even if you do not give a demo on Day5, it would be good to attend the demo to see what your other cohort mates have built during the cohort. This would not only help get more ideas but would also help you expand your thought process and figure out what are the different use cases that one can work on.
Some tips and tricks for those who are planning to demo:
- Ensure that your smart contract is not too complicated and is compiling as well as getting deployed successfully on the localnet at least.
- Write as many unit test cases as possible for your contract so that you can run the unit test cases during the demo.
- Each demo might be ranging from 5 to 10 minutes to ensure that you are able to explain the use case as well as show the technical skills that you have learnt during the week.
- Do not get absorbed with the idea of building a fully functioning front end because the focus is to learn about the near blockchain ecosystem where smart contracts play an important role in understanding how logic can be programmed on the blockchain.
If you are successfully able to demo a working project, you would be eligible for the NEAR Certified Developer(NCD) Certification which in itself is a great laurel to have as you have learned to work with one of the most cutting-edge blockchain frameworks. Post the NCD boot-camp, you can also apply for a one-on-one interview with the facilitator and if you clear the interview, you will be eligible to become a verified l1 (level one) near certified developer.
If you are looking to connect with folks who have already done this program, you can reach out to me or you can also join the NEAR Discord Server and speak to folks from NEAR to understand more about the programme.