Become a Web 3 & Blockchain Developer. Practical Step by Step guide

Web 3.0 can potentially change the Internet as we know it forever. However, you’re still early in catching the trend and building your first blockchain application, acquiring the skills to get a high-paying job, or creating your own Web 3.0 Projects That Can Make You Money.

The future of the web isn’t just coming, it’s here, and it’s growing fast.

Since the world of Web 3.0 is entirely new, I believe it will be helpful to provide a complete guide on how we can learn it step by step.

This Web 3.0 roadmap will guide you from bare beginnings to complete mastery. It covers everything from the essential building blocks of blockchain to the most modern Web 3.0 technologies.

You’ll know precisely what you need to do to become an outstanding blockchain developer. 

You can easily use this guide as a roadmap that will lead you to become a blockchain developer.

Before we dive in, we need to understand what exactly Web 3.0 is, and for that, we need to understand the differences between Web 1.0, Web2.0, and finally Web 3.0.

From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 refers to the first stage of the World Wide Web. Between 1991 and 2004, we saw the first generation of the Internet, mostly a bunch of static sites. After that, it was mostly just one big website, including hyperlinks to different sites. Whenever you loaded up a site, they just showed some stuff, and that’s it.

We can say that it was a read-only web. There were zero interactions. There were no things such as authentication, comments, and analytics. It was just a one-way communication tool. During this time, Internet users were just consumers. They went to the Internet to consume information.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 started forming around 2004, and it is still improving. During this time, the web evolved a lot. The boring read-only pages were replaced by interactivity, social connectivity, and user-generated content.

Interactivity was the main change in the web. The users not only consume the information from the web page but can also interact and send information through the website. Therefore, the names like Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 don’t necessarily correlate with specific web technologies. Instead, they explain how the web is being used.

For example, Web 2.0 is all about interaction and collaboration in a social media dialogue.

As you know, today, we watch many YouTube videos like posts on Facebook or Instagram and perform Google searches. All of these are owned by centralized companies.

For example, Meta (Facebook) and Google are collecting data about us so they can serve us better content, which in return would make us stay longer on their websites. They do that because they can make more money if we stay on their websites longer.

That brings us to the biggest problem with web 2.0. And that is the lack of privacy and the fact that total control is in the hands of middlemen, the big corporations.

Web 3.0 – Decentralized Internet

To discard that whole centralized system, Web 3.0 comes into play. Web 3.0 is also known as the decentralized web, and it is the third and the latest phase of the Internet. Web 3.0 is built on peer-to-peer networks of computers that talk to each other without middlemen.

All of the data in Web 2.0 is controlled by big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Meta, or Microsoft.

In the decentralized web, no single person or a company owns any data or information about anyone or anything.

Everything is completely visible and connected to the public. The whole point of Web 3.0 is that data is shared rather than owned.

Why exactly is Web 3.0 better?

The centralized Internet relies on servers that can go down at any time or be hacked. At the same time, a decentralized Internet relies on a peer-to-peer network built by a community of users. Their interconnected devices host the Internet rather than depending on a group of centralized high-powered users.

In short, if we had to summarize this and dump this down. Then, we could say that Web 1.0 was all about reading the content.

It was just about consuming. Web 2.0 was about reading and writing, or rather about interaction, social media networks, etc. But the data was owned by companies.

In Web 3.0, We can read and write data, but we also own the data. That’s the whole point.

Now that we understand these differences let’s jump straight to the roadmap. 

Get a developer background

The first step of our journey is that you should have Web 2.0. Most people make one mistake of diving straight into smart contracts without having a technical background in web development. Blockchain technologies are built on top of web technologies, so you can’t learn Web 3.0 if you don’t have a solid understanding of what Web 2.0

So before digging deeper into Web 3.0, better understand the fundamentals of the web in general. If you’re building blockchain applications, you’ll need to create web apps that will talk to these smart contracts.

So all of this is interconnected. Your Web 2.0, like React, Next, JS, or just basic JavaScript, will be hugely beneficial because you’ll have to connect your decentralized applications to your regular web apps.

Blockchain technology basics

Once you have the basics down, we can move to our second step, which is to learn the fundamentals of blockchain.

As a Web 3.0, you need to understand blockchain, how it works, and why we even use it. You need to understand the main point of why blockchain even exists, and you need to learn the core fundamentals.

So a blockchain is a network of computers connected somehow, and they collectively run what is called a blockchain client. So, a blockchain is a chain of blocks.

These blocks are linked together using cryptography. The chain of blocks can be considered a distributed digital ledger.

Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Blockchain technology is not only related to crypto coins. To learn and master blockchain technology basics, we first need to understand the fundamentals.

We need to learn the foundations of the blockchain and how blockchain technology works.

We need to learn how to interact with the blockchain. We also need to understand the tools we can use on the Ethereum Blockchain.

We need to learn how to connect a web application to the blockchain, how to create Smart Contracts and decentralized applications, and finally, how to deploy and test Ethereum networks. 

Now, there are many different blockchains. There isn’t just one. For example, the Ethereum blockchain is the recommended blockchain to start with.

One of the best reasons to start on the Ethereum Blockchain is that there is a lot of technical support for it.

Its developer team offers excellent community support. So if you’re deciding which blockchain client to start with, Ethereum Blockchain is the answer.

Learn Smart Contracts

The third step in our journey is to learn about Smart Contracts. A Smart Contract is software stored on a blockchain-based platform that automatically executes an agreement.

Smart Contracts are how you can program the blockchain to perform a specific set of instructions like you’re telling the blockchain precisely what to do.

Smart Contracts enable you to exchange anything of value while also eliminating the middleman. The self-executing feature of a Smart Contract is what makes it very important.

You might think that this can also be done in Web 2.0. It’s just a self-executing piece of code. Why do we even need Smart Contracts?

The answer is that the code in Web 2.0 can easily be manipulated. Smart Contracts are self-verifying, self-executing, and tamper-resistant. Furthermore, the Smart Contract code cannot be changed, which is immutable in technical terms.

Use cases of smart contracts

Smart Contracts could be used for banking, insurance, Copyright, and many other sectors. Smart Contracts are robust.

They can do everything from creating your own NFT’s cryptocurrencies and handling the back end of decentralized applications.

Smart Contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that runs when predetermined conditions are met. They are typically used to automate an agreement’s execution so that all participants can be immediately sure of the outcome without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss.

IBM

They are incredibly efficient and fair to all sides of the agreement.

If you want to dive deeper into learning about Smart Contracts, I suggest learning about the basics, the lifecycle of the Smart Contract, and how we can interact with Smart Contracts using Web 3.0.

Learn Solidity

The fourth step in our Web 3.0 journeys is learning Solidity because knowing how to write smart contracts is essential in every blockchain application. So which programming language can be used to write Smart Contracts?

It’s Solidity. Of course, there are some other programming languages, but don’t worry because learning Solidity doesn’t mean that you are restricted to the Ethereum blockchain.

It will serve you well on other blockchains. Solidity is the primary programming language for writing Smart Contracts for the Ethereum Blockchain, so understanding Solidity is crucial.

Solidity is also a relatively new programming language, and it’s a combination of a few languages. The creators of Solidity got inspired by JavaScript, Java, C, Rust, and many other languages, therefore making Solidity amazingly versatile and intuitive.

As you start to write code in Solidity, you’ll notice it is similar to JavaScript. However, it will make sense almost as if it is written in pure English, so don’t think you must learn a whole new language from scratch. Hopefully, it’s going to make sense immediately.

Testing and deploying Smart Contracts

The fifth step in our journey is compiling, testing, and deploying smart contracts. That is an essential part because, as we know, once the smart contracts are deployed, they are immutable, so it is crucial to test them out before deploying. For testing, there are three different testing libraries.

Recommended testing libraries

Mocha, Chai, and Ganache. Once you test these out, you’re ready to deploy them. And for deployment purposes,

Recommended deploying environment

I would recommend Hardhat, Infura, or Truffle. Once your smart contracts are deployed, you are ready to move to the 6th step to learn more about decentralized applications.

Decentralized Applications

Once you build and deploy your smart contracts, you’ll need to create a friendly user interface at the front end so that any user can use it.

Previously, I said you should have web two skills before starting with blockchain development? That is why.

what is a decentralized application?

In simple words, dApps or decentralized applications are just applications that run on a blockchain. They are decentralized.

They are free from the control and interference of a single authority.

They keep users’ data out of the hands of these organizations. So, just like cryptocurrency is decentralized money, dApps are decentralized applications.

A decentralized application can be a mobile or a web app. However, in the current state of Web 3.0, it’s mostly a web app. dApps can cover various use cases such as social media apps, where no big company is taking the user’s data, such as eCommerce for payments or even banking.

For example, a person can post an image on the blockchain in a decentralized social media application. When the image is published, no one can delete that image, not even the owner or the creator of the social media application.

That’s the power of the decentralized web. The web app is usually just like your regular web application with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But when building a decentralized application, there are two additional tasks, the integration with the blockchain and the integration with the wallet.

You can use a JavaScript library called Web3.js, which is helpful and easy to use.

The alternative to using web3.js would be to connect your smart contracts manually, which is a bit more work but is also doable.

Now that you know what the apps are, we can move to the 7th step, learning about MetaMask or any other crypto wallet.

Crypto wallets

Blockchain wallets help people exchange funds quickly. Transactions are incredibly secure as they are cryptographically signed. A wallet is used to interact with the blockchain.

Using a wallet is similar to sending or receiving money through PayPal or any other payment gateway, but you use cryptocurrency instead.

There are a lot of crypto wallets out there, but the best idea for a start would be to learn how to integrate your Smart Contracts with the MetaMask wallet and then later learn about all the other ones.

Metamask

Metamask allows users to access their Ethereum wallet through a browser extension or a mobile app, which can be used to interact with decentralized applications.

Now that you’ve learned about blockchain Smart contracts and Wallets, you are ready to learn Web 3.0 JS and web3.js. To connect your decentralized application. You’ll need to connect your front-end application and your blockchain smart contract.

The two popular choices for implementing the Ethereum API are web3.js and Etherium.JS.

Web 3.js is a collection of libraries that allow you to connect with a local or remote Ethereum node using HTTP, WebSockets, and other communication protocols.

Ether.js is a lightweight JavaScript library that connects your JavaScript front end with Smart Contracts and essentially is an alternative to web3js. Both of these libraries are excellent choices.

The next step is to practice your skills by building a blockchain application.

Building a blockchain application

To keep learning effectively, you have to challenge your capabilities, take up a project well beyond your capabilities and stick to that project until you complete it.

By the end of just four to five such assignments, you’ll be more proficient than most other developers in the field. 

Build a blockchain portfolio

The last step is to build your portfolio. When you’re comfortable working with blockchain and decentralized applications, you should consider building your portfolio because a portfolio website shows evidence and expertise in your field.

It can also help build trust with clients because they have direct evidence of the quality of your work. A portfolio is crucial if you’re looking for a blockchain-related job.

 This was just a short introduction to everything that web 3.0 offers.

There you’ll be able to find many courses, lectures, and videos about web 3.0. 

Good luck