Learning Solana (Day 456)

The Project Serum has proven Solana is a powerful layer 1 blockchain for building real-time trading experience--an ultra fast block time (~400ms) with extremely low gas fees are the essential pieces missing from Ethereum.

While there are layer 2 solutions, and other blockchains claim to solve the Ethereum pain points, Serum is the killer app that makes building on Solana legit.

However, building on Solana is difficult. A developer must first learn the Solana architecture, which is very different from Ethereum or Bitcoin. It is similar to a full semester long computer science course--a developer needs to learn it's architecture and how the program works, but unlike a computer science course, it has very little documentation. On top of that, if you haven't learned Rust--the language for writing Solana apps--you need to also learn a new programming language.

But it is not impossible. I remember taking the intro to computer science course, every student has to learn LISP and build on different architectures. It feels like going back to school and taking a course but with very little help and documentation--a lot of trial and error.

It's challenging and it's fun! Luckily, there is a great introductory course written by Paul, an extremely smart engineer I had the chance to talk to both on Twitter and over video. His blog is where my entire team started learning Solana, hope you find it helpful, too!

https://paulx.dev/blog/2021/01/14/programming-on-solana-an-introduction/