This Solana course is designed for engineers with a beginner or intermediate background in Ethereum or EVM development to get up to speed quickly with Solana program development.
- The difficulty engineers face when learning blockchain programming for the first time is they have to learn a new computation model, learn a new language, and learn a new development framework.
- If you have already developed on an Ethereum or Ethereum compatible blockchain, you already have a pretty good idea of the computation model and can focus on the language and the framework instead.
- Our goal is to leverage your past experience with Ethereum to learn Solana faster.
It is not necessary for you to start from zero.
Rather than jump into explaining all the differences, this tutorial attempts to compress key information into the following paradigm:
“I know how to do X in Ethereum, how do I do X in Solana?"
And under certain circumstances,
“I cannot do X in Solana, why is that?”
We’re taking this approach because it’s far easier to develop a mental model for something new if you are able to map over concepts from a mental model you already have.
If you’re like most programmers, Solidity was probably easy to learn for you. It’s nearly one-to-one with Javascript. However, designing smart contracts was probably a challenge because it’s quite unlike other applications.
We want you to come away with an understanding of how Solana and Ethereum are similar, as well as the key ways in which they differ.
(Note: We talk about Ethereum often throughout this series, but all the ideas are applicable for other EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Avalanche and Polygon).
Solana does have a radically different architecture, but it’s fundamentally doing the same thing Ethereum is doing:
It is a distributed state machine that undergoes transitions based on signed transactions where the cost of execution is paid in the ecosystem’s native token (ETH for Ethereum, and SOL for Solana).
Our goal is to leverage your EVM knowledge as a springboard for your Solana development journey.
Consider this analogy:
If a frontend web developer and a backend API/Database engineer both decided to learn mobile app development, most engineers would say the frontend web developer has a massive head start over the backend engineer, even though web development and mobile development are not the same field even if the dev experiences can be very similar with some toolchains.
Using that line of reasoning, we at RareSkills believe that a competent EVM smart contract engineer should be able to pick up Solana faster than an engineer who hasn’t programmed a blockchain before.
This course is designed to lean into that advantage.