What do blockchain developers do exactly?
We’ve heard this question many times from potential participants in LimeAcademy and decided to shed some light on what’s what.
There are two main tracks that define the development opportunities for blockchain engineers:
- Smart Contract Developer
- Web3 Developer
Smart Contract Developer
As the name implies, this is a person who writes smart contracts (self-executing lines of code with the terms of an agreement/contract automatically verified and executed via a computer network). The tech stack here is fairly simple: the language used is primarily Solidity and the frameworks used for development and testing look similar to others in the JavaScript / TypeScript ecosystem.
Smart contract development is pretty specific, as it requires good knowledge of how blockchain and the Ethereum Virtual Machine work. The code has to be very clean, performant, and bug-free.
Such a career path is very suitable and most frequently taken by engineers with primarily back-end-oriented experience. They are used to writing high-performant code and feel comfortable with the complexities of smart contracts. There is no user interface or any front-end required for such a career track – in most cases, only SDKs (software development kits) or libraries are produced.
Typical tech stacks of people working as smart contract developers can be but are not limited to:
- NodeJS (TypeScript, JavaScript, NPM)
- Go Lang
- Rust
- C/C++
- C#
- Java
Web3 Developer
A Web3 developer is fairly similar in a position to the typical “Web developer”. The main difference here is that such people build so-called dApps (decentralized applications) that do not have a dedicated back-end (in most cases) but instead rely on the blockchain itself.
In such cases, the smart contracts are already written by other people and have to be integrated with the application, which is handled by Web3 devs.
Such positions involve dealing with front-end development and frameworks:
- Typescript / JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS3
- React
- Angular
- Vue
It’s very desirable that such engineers possess at least a minimum understanding of how the blockchain works, what are smart contracts, and how to interact and integrate with them (there is no need to be able to write them, although it helps in some cases).
Such a career track is mainly suitable for people who have more front-end experience, although it’s not uncommon to see back-end or full-stack people take this road, as well. By definition, the term Web3 developer incorporates in itself “full-stack”, as it’s not only a front-end skill that is required to produce a good dApp.
What do you get at LimeAcademy?
The LimeAcademy blockchain training program combines the best of both worlds. If you are a front-end developer, you will have a substantial learning curve with Solidity and smart contract development. You will use your front-end skills to build the communication between your dApp and the smart contracts. And to make your project look and feel nice.
If you are a back-end dev, you will add another language (Solidity) to your skillset and understand in-depth the differences between traditional programming languages and writing smart contracts. You will get support from your mentor with front-end elements, including a boilerplate, in order to help you focus only on what is essential, instead of starting with FE from scratch.
Are you a full-stack developer? Then you are the perfect match for the program.
In short, at LimeAcademy we train well-rounded Web3/smart contract devs who will be ready to face the challenges of working on blockchain projects. Curious to learn more? Check out the program details here.
