Play around

Blockchain development might feel overwhelming, and frankly very intimidating when you are starting out. To remedy this feeling, I suggest you look at programming on blockchains like an adventure game. You can explore what is possible, experiment by creating small projects with technologies that you find interesting, looking at what other people are building and interacting with their applications, debate with various people about their favorite applications, technologies and get a feel for how everything works.

As you progress through this guide, you’ll start going deeper into various different fields. There is a myriad of interesting primitives in web3 and types of applications you could build and so to pick what to specialize in from the get-go is very hard unless you have a clear goal in mind from the get-go which is quite rare. I personally think that trying everything that interests you if at least for a short while can get you a glimpse into that field and give you insight on whether you’d like to focus on that particular area. For this I suggest getting into different developer and research groups and talking about how is it like building those things, what are the types of problems you would be working on, how does one get better in that field, what is there to work on, etc. One of my favorite such groups is Newt which is Aave’s experimentation branch. Newt is completely community-driven and tries to promote open-source experimentation where the community is welcome to contribute to existing experiments or create their own. Here you can meet like-minded developers, build cool projects, explore different areas of development and different fields within web3 such as DeFi, NFTs, and more. DeveloperDAO and EthernautDAO are also good developer communities where you can search for like-minded individuals and explore the possibilities of what’s possible in web3, and potentially even getting full-time job offerings.