Hello guys, I'm back to start my series about gaining knowledge in the ethereum world. First of all I want to add a little bit to my last post for all of you who read it. I wrote about how ether was transferred from my account without my consent and how I didn't know how it went down. Well, I did my research and found out that I did a major mistake. While trying to play around a little bit with the geth commands provided on github I exposed my personal info to the rpc by using the interactive mode to give my password and unlock my account. HUGE mistake. They say:
Note: Supplying the password directly as part of the command line is not recommended, but you can always use shell trickery to get round this restriction.
I didn't pay enough attention to that aaaaand the ether is gone. The good thing with this is that it wasn't too much money that I lost and this incident is a great learning lesson for me which is exactly what I'm willing to do. Learning. So let's move on.
So what are the first steps to get involved? There is already tons of material out there to get started with developing. The main sites are the solidity documentation and the official ethereum forum. You will probbably find a lot of your questions answered and if you want to get excited about ethereum just visit the youtube channel and have a look at their videos from the various devcons that took place. This is all great but for me learning is also about having a good teacher that can guide you in the right direction. As a programmer you have to be your own teacher but also I really like to see someone else do it and then figure out by myself how I can use it and play around with the concepts. My solution to this are online courses. I think it's a great way to learn anything on your own pace. I found some good courses about blockchain technology and ethereum on udemy and subscribed to one of those for 15 bucks.
For someone like me who is not the biggest programmer geek (till now) it is not so easy to follow someone who uses a lot of technical terminology in his speech but as you can pause the video and look up the things that you don't understand it is perfect for learning. In an university class with lots of students you don't always have the opportunity to ask all the questions that you need to ask to understand the material fully and this can drag you away and you will probably miss a lot of the following because you didn't understand some of the basics. When I was doing the sections where they programmed I tried to do it own my own simultaneously so a 13 minute video sometimes took 45 minutes to an hour for me to finish. Not everything shown in the course worked good with me. Sometimes my system failed to install some of the packages needed but I could still try a lot of the things and I now know where to go to get the tools for starting the development practice.
In the course they start with some instructions and give you information on what to expect from the course. Then they discuss some of the core aspects of blockchains and the difference beetween blockchains and ethereum that everyone needs to understand, kind of like the basics. Then they introduce you to solidity which is the programming language of ethereum and show you some development environments. This is the main part. They basicly show you how to get started with ethereum studio and how to set up some helping tools and what you need to integrate all that into websites and how to connect with servers and do the testing. Sometimes they would skip a big part of writing of the code so you would definetly need a lot more time to grasp everything than just the length of the video. In the end you can see how a real dapp (decentralized application) is written and deployed. The little "uncensorable" magic dapp is born.
The course gave me a good kickstart into the ethereum world by providing a lot of the information and procedures for setting up all the stuff that you need to get working so I think it was worth all the money I paid. Now I want to learn more and maybe I will subscribe to another course on there because I also see the road that I need to go down. Yesterday I was on a little talk about blockchains here in vienna. Besides the lecturerer fainting and going down to the floor for a minute (I guess he was too deep into his thoughts about blockchain, I can understand that, he got up 30 seconds later, ate a bit drank some water and continued) it was very informative. He gave some use cases for privat blockchains that gave me a better picture on what I could start developing with the technology. For example the logistic company Maersk is setting up a privat blockchain with all their subcontractors to keep track of all their shippingcontainers. They problem with these supply chains is that every company has their own system where they update the information. Now when one of the containers is given from one company to another they have to give the information into the new system which is set up in a different way, therefore you would have to update and change the information also till now all this needed loads of paperwork. With the blockchain all this is made consent and fast and reliable. They say it will boost the GDP of the world by up to 10% which is a little bit over exaggerated but if it would increase it even by 1% it would be a huge huge deal.
