In January 2022, I did a 30-day project on “Why Your Business Needs to Adapt to Blockchain”. This post is a part of it. To know what I covered, learned, and executed in the project, visit this page.

This is my update on how things went after one week into the project.

Before embarking on the project, I needed a good plan for successful execution. Although I had very little knowledge about the vastness of the exercise, I gave myself some rudimentary goals as indicators of success. I transcribed the thoughts into a project outline and a week-by-week calendar.

As the days passed by, I had to modify the calendar several times. Finally, I switched to a kanban board system as predicting how much time a task would take was difficult due to unforeseen intermediate tasks.

First off, I started identifying good resources for the project. My first target was to find highly rated courses on blockchain for beginners. I looked at Udemy, Coursera, Youtube, and other MOOC platforms. After creating a list of relevant courses, I decided to start with Mohammad Nauman’s course on Udemy. I liked his reasoning behind ignoring the nitty-gritties of blockchain for creating DApps. His course was short and was a great starting point for a beginner without getting entangled in the complexities of Solidity and core blockchain principles. I coded alongside his lectures and created a Hello World Greeter DApp and a token DApp on the Hardhat local blockchain. Later, I deployed it on the Ropsten Testnet. I’ll create a video explaining how I did both in the coming weeks.

After making both the DApps, I moved on to the conceptual parts of the project. I realized that I was coming across too many words that I did not understand. I thought any beginner would face the same challenge. So, I started creating a list of words that I needed to know. Then, I turned this list into a glossary of terminologies related to blockchain.

The words were not enough. I came up with several questions related to the merits of blockchain, differences between two networks, how everything worked, etc. That thought process led me to creating a list of questions related to blockchain and I ended up creating a FAQs section. I also questioned peers and colleagues what they wanted to know about blockchain, scrapped Quora questions and other existing FAQs on the internet while curating this list. Although I have a list of questions here, I have to fill out the responses in the coming weeks.

Challenges I faced in Week 1

I had picked up a project with two key subject areas: blockchain and programming. I had almost no prior experience in either. As a result, predicting my learning curve and the size of the task at hand was the biggest challenge in the first week. I had to modify my project plan several times to accommodate my learning process. Initially, my plan was to begin with the coding elements. But, after starting with creating some DApps, I switched back to concepts and theories on blockchain for more clarity before focusing on application.