The Ethereum Bootcamp: 7 days of Blockchain

It was a late night in August, I was browsing through my emails and then I found this…

I was probably confused as to how did I convinced my anxious head to apply for it.

Let’s backtrack a bit. 6 months ago I started watching a few videos of Caleb Curry explaining blockchain and bitcoin. Well, I dumped the idea after 3 days. Cut to, a month ago I came across a podcast/interview of Preethi Kasireddy with Superpumped and I was sold.

I was more sold to the idea that a technology made them change their lifestyle, point of view and outlook towards the world and this made them question the working system right now. And that made me curious. For me, I’ve never seen technology from a philosophical point of view. In the starting, blockchain was just bitcoin for me. But here came decentralized systems and Web3.0. And it felt huge to me. Something which will shake the whole world not only from the technical point of view but from a philosophical, financial, social and business leg too.

Well, I almost didn’t apply. And after applying I almost didn’t give the online test. Only one reason for that “almost”; self doubt. The insecurity that people attending this Bootcamp will be experienced and successful in their area of expertise. There will be people who’ve been actually studying blockchain for quite some time. But I’m glad I jumped over the gap between the insecurity and the urge to learn. Well, rest is history.

The Bootcamp

The Bootcamp was about Ethereum. Everything decentralized. Everything blockchain. Everything new. Everything I didn’t know.

7 days before the Bootcamp: We received our reading list. This was a chance for me to prepare and get ready for the next week. Hence I chugged every single word on all those blogs. The most challenging part for me was to complete the homework; writing dapp ideas. Let’s be real, I didn’t have a single idea about what dapps were. :)

Day 0: We met the cohort, went through the plan for the next seven days, and discussed and exchanged ideas. That was the time I realized that we all are in the same boat, doesn’t matter what level of experience I have or not, we all are here to learn something new. I just need to close my eyes and jump into this chaos.

Day 1: We started on what is Ethereum and learned about Token Economics from Haseeb Qureshi. We even had a breakout session and I met the first person, I didn’t knew then, was going to be one of my team members.
The catch was we needed to form teams of 4 and build a dapp and present it at the end of the week. I was a bit scared about this part; the formation of teams. But I did ended up in a team with three fantastic people and we talked about the project that night.

Day 2: We talked about Ethereum use cases. We discussed Defis and NFTs with Defi Dad and Jesse Walden in depth. We got to meet our coach that day and discuss the plan. Shubham was very patient and open to discussion and debate around our idea. He helped us a lot throughout the making of the project.

Day 3: We started with basic Solidity along with Rajesh Sir. And discussed with Balaji S. Srinivasan about the unsexy problems of blockchain and how to solve them. We also started with the building of contracts with our team.

Day 4: It was all about how to integrate the frontend and contracts to build the dapp. We also learned how to validate a contract through etherscan.io.

Day 5: We had a hands-on session about the security and testing of the dapp. We also had a mind-blowing session with Omar Bohsali. We also got to interact with two super stud Polygon engineers and they talked about its pros and easy usage. It was the second last day of the Bootcamp and we still didn’t have a UI for our dapp. So we started brainstorming and working on it.

Day 6: It was all about Ethereum 2.0 (Proof of stake and sharding and beacon chain). We had a guest lecture from Zahoor Mohamed. A wonderful and motivating session. We got to interact with two super amazing Coinbase Engineers who answered all our questions and stigmas regarding working in a top blockchain company. We finished the UI and deployed the dapp on Ropsten. There were still some loose threads but that was for the final day

Day 7: Before the d-day we had to tie up those loose ends and work on our presentation for the last day. We also hosted our dapp on IPFS (ofcourse Shubham guided us). A few practices before the lecture and we were ready to rock! The presentation went super well. All the presentations were amazing. I could feel everybody was going to miss these 7 days and the routine we ended up in. But that was it. The end of the Bootcamp but the beginning of our journey.

(If you didn’t catch a few jargons above, don’t worry I have your back.)

Fun fact: was working on a 5-year-old laptop with me waiting when this oldie will stop working. :) (It didn’t)

all the best things about this Bootcamp (basically everything):

1. A great thing about the Bootcamp was the planning and execution. Preethi put a lot of thought into it; the way the 7 days were divided and the total working of the Bootcamp was flawless.
2. The coaches (Shubham Kanodia, Rajesh Muppalla, Sameer, Preethi) were very patient and supportive with all the people and were as passionate about helping and teaching us as we were to learn.
3. The guest lectures from Haseeb Qureshi, Defi Dad, Jesse Walden, Balaji, Omar, Polygon Team, Zahoor, Coinbase team; were very insightful and changed our opinion and perspective about a lot of things.
4. The classmates: all the people, mind if I say, were from totally different parts of the globe and different walks of life. Throughout the lectures, there were people asking questions that I never could’ve thought of. And that was amazing. As we said in the class; the chats were gold. The conversations we’ve had and the exchange of knowledge during the dapp building part was one of the most precious things. It didn’t matter what age or place or experience a person had, here everyone had one purpose: to learn.
5. Active learning: The fact that you could learn and build something in just seven days with the help and support of the people.
6. The team: I got to listen to some really great people and their ideas on Day zero and one of them was Monica (who later on became my team member). I was instantly in awe of her and her idea and the way she presented herself. I knew at that point that I wanted to work with her. (And I did!). I met Saurabh on Day 1 breakout session. Later on, was checking his idea doc and was about to ask him about it, before he contacted me. And we got on a meet and discussed the idea. And voila I got a team. Later that night I met the whole team and I met Karthik. I had read Karthik’s dapp ideas and thought were mind-blowing. I couldn’t have asked for a better team. They were supportive and understanding and ready to hustle up. All three of them answered all my questions and doubts patiently and taught me so many things. Well, we all worked on tech stacks which we’ve never tried and at the end of those 7 days brought a fully functioning dapp, from the frontend to the contracts, on the table. Super cool, right? :)

The team! (CW: Karthik, Monica, Saurabh, and Me)

These seven days went by fast and yet slow. Too much to read about. Too much to learn. I definitely messed up my sleep schedule. Didn’t go out of my room for seven days. Definitely was on zoom calls and google meets for almost 17 hours a day. For consecutive 3 days, we attended our lecture from 6:30 till 10:30 pm. The team came to meet at 11:30 pm and went to sleep at 4 am and woke up at 12:30 pm and again came to meet at 1 pm till 6:30. I forgot a world existed outside. But there were so many opportunities and things to experience throughout the Bootcamp and I was sure I didn’t want to miss it.

all in all, a great experience!

So here is the plan. I need to go through these 7 days worth of pile of resources and I want to blog. Hence I’ll go through each day of the Bootcamp every week and conclude my learning here. Sounds cool, right? If you’re still reading this blog, then congrats. If you are interested in learning stick with me for this. We’ll be going in, not one, but many rabbit holes in detail.

And if you want to be a part of such a wonderful and knowledgeable experience, here you go:

Preethi Kasireddy on Twitter: “If you’re interested in joining the next cohort, sign up for the waitlist here: https://t.co/7KpLLFNHpX" / Twitter

Thank me later!

GitHub Repository for our project: https://github.com/saurabh-lodha-16/solve.org
To read another experience, you can check out Monica’s blog too: https://link.medium.com/W8bILhVw9ib