Currently, there are many factors that make the smart contract development profession attractive for a career at a smart contract development company, from the opportunity to work with technology that has a transformative impact on the world, to the high demand for smart contract developers in the talent market.
In addition, smart contract development skills are becoming more and more relevant. In the 1990s, engineers moved from the closed world of mainframes to open Internet databases, and a similar transition is happening now with the introduction of smart contracts. Just as developers then were moving to a more future-relevant technology stack, so now developers are moving to the Web 3.0 stack.
Beginning smart contract developers have a lot of questions about how to make this transition: what is the Web 3.0 developer stack? What coding languages should be learned? What technical skills will be required and how to acquire them? Below, you will find answers to these and other questions that will help you make the leap into the world of smart contract development.
Technical Skills
Compiled, relatively low-level backend languages such as C/C++ are a good starting point for beginning programming in Solidity. Those with a background in web development or experience with languages such as JavaScript and Python will have to adjust to the lower-level thinking of Solidity, where you may find yourself directly operating on variable bits. Nevertheless, a full-scale blockchain programmer should have both skills, since it is through the web3.js, ethers. js and web3.py are used to perform most of the interactions with Solidity smart contracts. A good developer can work with both the Solidity contract backend and the JS/Python front end, but an excellent developer can work with the whole stack. The OpenZeppelin contract library is also a great source to use because it eliminates the need for developers to write some generic contracts, such as the tokenization contract.
Perhaps the most important skill to develop is security. Your smart contract may one day be handling billions of dollars, so it’s imperative that it’s not flawed. Vulnerabilities such as recurrence are important to consider in smart contracts. Because smart contracts often trigger other smart contract functions, there is a possibility that another function could interrupt the execution of your smart contract. This was the cause of the famous $70 million DAO ETH hack. Security thinking is essential for smart contract developers.
So what does the process of developing these contracts look like? Are there tools and IDEs that can help us? Of course, there are! A popular IDE is Remix, which is a web-based tool that can handle both compiling the contract and deploying it to the network of your choice. In addition, Truffle and Brownie are two development frameworks that are also designed to help you.
Aleph1 advises on some languages, libraries, and tools you should be familiar with to become a smart contract developer:
- Solidity
- JavaScript
- Python
- web3.js/web3.py
- ethers. js
- Truffle
- Brownie
- Remix
Now let’s go to the text editor and take a look at the project files. You will notice that truffle has already created some basic contracts during initialization. Let’s delete all those files, except for the migration files. We’ll remove the extra contract, library, tests, and some code from the migrations.
Solidity is a fairly young and dynamic programming language. This imposes certain inconveniences, one of which is frequent changes, some of which can break backward compatibility, which in turn can cause problems with already published contracts. To prevent this, we need to specify the version of the Solidity language compiler.
Blockchain Developer Community
A community is extremely important in the smart contracts industry. With so much innovation happening so fast, it’s hard to keep up with it alone. That’s why the best developers actively communicate on Twitter, participate in hackathons to meet other developers and potential investors or employers, receive rewards in Gitcoin to help develop open source code, participate in thoughtful forums such as the Smart Contract Research Forum, and chat on Discord to learn and help others learn.
Hackathons are a particularly good place to develop smart contract skills. At hackathons, you learn by doing and hone your talents in real time as you build, and industry influencers help you – maybe even become co-authors on your project! Aleph1 is a great place to start building. With prizes, the presence of leading experts and venture capitalists, and thousands of developers to meet, it can be a powerful boost to a career as a smart contract developer. Aleph1 is also a place where developer advocates and active community members are ready to help you get started.
Take the first step toward smart contracts
There are many ways to become a smart contract developer. We’ve described several options, but it’s up to you to choose what works best for you. The most important thing is to get started, create something for your interest, start researching and asking questions, and the rest will follow. Whether you’re a backend developer, a web developer, or a developer new to development in general, there’s a path to success for you and plenty of people who are happy to help.
Aleph1’s help
Aleph1 is for those who are preparing to go public or want to test developers. We will test the functionality, check for critical errors in 5 indicators, conduct unit tests, point out vulnerabilities and ways to fix them and provide a report in text format (suitable for exchanges) and video. If you want to ensure that your money is not stolen by hackers – you should conduct an audit.
Aleph1 will help to implement what cannot be done by a smart contract. Accept not only ETH, but also any other cryptocurrencies and fiat money, make airdrop, affiliate programs, give investors unique wallets, display the number of investments and tokens, automate Whitelist/KYC, and much more.
What our smart contracts can do
- Several stages (Private-sale, Pre-sale, Sale), with the ability to manually change dates and pause the contract
- Discounts and bonuses for early investors
- Ability to accept payments in USD and BTC
- Sending tokens manually to any wallet (bounty campaign, advisors, marketing, etc.)
- Blocking tokens on investors’ wallets until you decide to unblock them
- Ability to change the token price if necessary
- Multi-signature contract (hackers won’t get your money)
- Ability to make an airdrop (negotiable)
- Limitations on the minimum and maximum contributions for each stage
- Instant transfer of funds to your wallet (if needed)
- Burning of unsold tokens
- Refunds for investors (if soft cap is not collected)
- Maximum token issuance limit
- Listing on GitHub and etherscan.io
