I have to admit that you have shown a great insperation in this wonderful site. I understood that we should teach a tactical approach in every learning opportunity that we received              even in our own ways of              learning before teaching technical skills and showing the result to others to come up for successful and contented result and through this i was able to  modify each poject that i have specialy this one:

mcdvoice.org

I'd dive right into the Rainbow Wallet codebase, it's the best React Native web3 codebase out there right now.

Hey, I'd recommend doing some basic defi stuff, like maybe token swaps or maybe even staking contracts. I'd also try to build out an NFT marketplace, where people can list their NFTs and program in a commission of some sort.

Finally, I'd check out maybe doing an e-commerce platform that accepts crypto payments (will probably require a centralized server / back end for now), as well as sign in with ethereum / decentralized identity.

The biggest productivity hack that has worked for me is to have at least 1 moderately large deliverable per week, and ship it! This deliverable could be a blog post, reference architecture, workshop material, conference talk, or really anything.

Over the course of a year, if you ship something every week, you will have a large body of work. What you can then do is remix and repurposing some of that material - a blog post becomes a video, a video becomes a conference talk, a conference talk becomes a tweet thread, and so on and so on.

The DevRel opportunity at AWS came from someone on that team reaching out to me with the job offer, after having worked in Seattle with one of the teams at AWS teaching a React Native workshop. I had not really thought of moving into DevRel until then, though the idea of DevRel always was cool to me, and I was essentially doing it for my own company at the time (React Native Training).

I actually picked up React Native before picking up React, which made picking up React fairly easy since I already knew how to do web development and had experience with both jQuery and Angular.

I also had a decent amount of experience in teaching / training, having started both a meetup and a coding school in Mississippi and given dozens of talks and workshops leading up to that point.

I first heard about the idea of technical training from The Freelancer's Podcast, and learned that some technical trainers were charging up to $20K per day. This caught my attention and I intentionally pivoted into training at that point to see if I could land some of those opportunities.

Content marketing and having a well designed (even basic) website to funnel leads into is probably the right approach. Also positioning yourself as a specialist in some area is probably a good idea. I wrote a post about getting into consulting here.

Re: Public speaking

I got into public speaking by starting my own meetup because I could not land any speaking opportunities. At my meetup I would give talks, and some of them were recorded. I was then able to use those recordings to start landing speaking gigs at various meetups and conferences. At first I would even pay my own way to travel to speak, though as time goes by you start having opportunities where the conferences pay for your travel expenses.

I think the best approach to speaking is to "just do it", but go prepared. Practice your talk as many times as possible. Also consider starting small, at meetups, before going into larger events!

The DeFi applications are really interesting to me because they are some of the largest and well known dapps in existence, but I really love seeing teams like Audius and LivePeer building on The Graph because they are some of the most innovative web3 projects out there.

I think the two most transferrable "web2" skills are front end development and devops. If you can do either of those moderately well, you will not have a problem being hired in web3.

Also, give Sam a raise!!

Nader Dabit hahahaa cc Sandeep Panda Syed Fazle Rahman

Thank you for the kind words, definitely, Sam's spaces are the ones to wait for every time.

I put together this post outlining some of these things a while back:

dev.to/dabit3/how-to-get-into-ethereum-crypto-web…

In addition to that, I'd check out BuildSpace, UseWeb3, and follow Developer DAO on Twitter.

Thank you Nader Dabit

No

Hey, I'd check out this post and then check out useWeb3 and Buildspace.

Also this tweet is pretty accurate. If you learn a JS framework like React, Ethers.js, Solidity, and The Graph, then you will probably get hired.

Thanks Nader Dabit for helping me out.

I'd say learning in public is one of the biggest growth hacks I've seen for developers looking to land their first role.

Also, just building and documenting what you're building in GitHub goes a long way.

If you don't have an idea of what to build, I'd just say rebuild something we see every day, like a furniture store or clothing store website, a restaurant site, a blog with a CMS, a bug tracker or a real estate website.

Building is the best way to learn.

I'd say none. Instead, I'd learn JavaScript and React in parallel. While learning React, you'll run into situations where you have to learn / understand parts of the JavaScript language, from there you can go back and forth learning as you need to.

Being able to build something of substance is important while learning, and using a framework like React (or I'd recommend Next.js), you can kill two birds with one stone!

Nader Dabit

Thank you for advice, Nader.

I owe you one. 🙏

I definitely chose to pivot my career to web3 because I believe in it, but that being said, it's definitely overhyped right now.

There are a ton of opportunities right now, but the space is still so new and volatile it's hard to know the level of real adoption we're going to see over the next couple of years, or to predict the volatility of the market.

I don't think anyone needs to add it to their skill set, instead my recommendation is to experiment with it as well as a handful of other in demand tech and see what is most interesting to you.

There is so much opportunity right now, if you're in tech then you're already already on a great path, from here it's just figuring out what you'd like to work on.

For me, I've never had so much fun as I'm having in web3, but it's going to be different for everyone!

Nader Dabit Thanks, that makes sense! Definitely clears up all the doubts I had!

Hi Usma, really great questions!

To me, the things that excite me the most are back end composability and open nature of smart contract platforms. Also the fact that all of this data remains completely open and free, forever, is very interesting.

Smart contract platforms also simplify authorization and authentication on the back end, making it so that there is universal consistency across all front and back ends, underscoring the composability of smart contract platforms.

To get started in web3, I'd just start building and experimenting with things, and sharing the things you learn in public. From there, I'd identity a few communities that you'd like to be involved, and start meeting those people and consider applying for small grants. Landing a grant is a great way to get paid to learn, while also building relationships with a team.

Thanks Nader Dabit

Writing is hard. I'd say my suggestion would be to start keeping a running tab of blog ideas, and then after you've gathered a few, set aside dedicated time to just write.

You don't have to start with anything substantial, but if you can just write down a general outline of the top points you want to make and go from there, it's usually a great tactic because you have something accomplished and you can start filling in the details.

I usually look at a blog post as something that takes around 5 to 10 passes before it's ready to be shared. Each pass could be looked at like a paint brush, at first it's not anything to look at, but after a few passes it starts to turn into something great.

I don't think you should be in too much a hurry, try to learn web development in general along with some web3 fundamentals (like Solidity, Hardhat, and Ethers.js).

From there, just start trying to build out different things and experiment.

I will say that you don't have to be an expert to start landing possible opportunities. It's better to start looking earlier than later. I'd find a few protocols that you find interesting, start getting involved with the communities, and making connections as early as possible. From there you might even find opportunities to do some light work / freelancing that could turn into something more.

Thank you so much for your response Nader Dabit

I am still working on my public speaking skills / technique. I have had some really great talks this year but also some that I'm not so proud of.

If I had to pinpoint an 80/20 rule here, it would be around these two things: practice and experience, in that order.

To prepare, I usually like to have either a really strong idea for a talk, or a really well received blog post, OSS project, or video to build upon.

The more experience I have, the more I'm loving the blog post to conference pipeline. Finding an idea, then deep diving / exploring it as you write a blog post about it allows you to really learn something beyond the surface.

From there, writing a talk becomes really easy as you've already solidified and crystalized your thoughts around the topic, and even have talking points to work with.

I still get nervous sometimes, but only in rare situations (like a big keynote or something), but the anxiety has subsided quite a bit from where I was 5 years ago (but not completely gone 😅).

Yeap, I'd agree that building a talk from a blog post is much easier.

Thank you Nader Dabit for the tips and for taking the time to answer everyone's questions!

1. For me it's all about time management, and something that you get better at over time. I spend a tremendous amount of time researching things, so that I understand the ecosystem well enough that, once I decide to do something, I am certain enough that I am focusing on something that makes sense at the time.

From there, it's all about dedicated focused time. If you set 1 goal per week around learning and building, then over time that adds up to a lot!

1. I'd say that the general computer science and logic will transition over very well, but instead of dealing with traditional back end code, you'll just need to focus on Solidity (or some other back end language & environment like Rust + Solana).

To get into the space, I'd just find the focus area (I'd recommend Ethereum Virtual Machine + Hardhat) and start building stuff, learning in public when possible and sharing your code. Once you have a decent understanding I'd start applying for roles.

1. There are a decent amount of these services already like rally.io/, but I think that a year from now we'll see an exponentially larger number of them.

I'd still say learning how to launch your own token, and the mechanisms around a DAO like Token Gating, are worth knowing how to do as well.

The Graph Network was officially launched in July, and there has been a lot of action between the various roles and we've been gathering a lot of feedback around improvements.

Right now we are working on a handful of really great updates that you'll probably start seeing rolled out towards the end of this year and beginning of next year.

I'm really excited to see Real Estate and Social Media get flipped on it's head in the next few years!