Review of the Consensys Academy: Blockchain Developer Course

What’s this online bootcamp offer? You’ve probably read their marketing:

An end-to-end Ethereum course designed to provide experienced developers with the knowledge and skills needed to become industry-leading Ethereum developers. This online course covers foundational Ethereum concepts and an introduction to smart contract and dApp development.

It’s an accurate description. As a web developer with shallow exposure to Ethereum beyond the whitepaper, it fulfilled my needs. There are many components of Ethereum’s architecture to unpack and underlying technical concepts to understand before you can successfully build a dApp. There’s no programming until about halfway through the course, so if you already have a solid understanding of Ethereum’s internals and purely want to learn smart contract and Web3 development, there are likely better alternatives.

I enrolled in the October 2018 to January 2019 cohort and am now employed as a full-stack software engineer in the Ethereum space. Here’s my take on what Consensys Academy does well, areas to improve, and alternative options to consider. These are purely my opinions to help you form expectations — I didn’t receive compensation from anyone.

Where the Consensys Developer Program Excels

Curriculum

In the internet age of abundant information, content curation is king. All of the information in this course can be found by Googling around. The value is packaging it into digestible modules, whittling down concepts to their core, providing relevant exercises that challenge your understanding, and successively building off each lesson to provide a path towards mastery.

Nowhere is curation more important than within bleeding-edge technology industries like blockchain, where many resources come from Medium posts of unknown authors and best practices are rapidly changing. When researching on your own, don’t be surprised to find outdated tutorials, documentation, and stack overflow answers. Consensys Academy cuts through the cruft, saves you from stumbling down many interesting but non-essential rabbit holes and delivers the up-to-date information needed to get you building and launching dApps.

Content Quality

Most course modules contain a mix of video lessons, programming exercises, and links to articles and tutorials for further learning. The production quality is high — particularly the videos — which include developer interviews and interactive slideshows. The polished graphics help clarify the otherwise dense, complex concepts found within white papers or technical specs. Kudos to their content and design teams.

The programming exercises leverage Github University, in which an exercise involves cloning a Git repo that contains the scaffolding of a smart contract or application (e.g. a simple bank or a multisig wallet). Implementing the additional functionality to make the test suite pass gives insight into using the Ethereum software libraries (i.e. how to write tests and practice TDD with smart contracts in a Truffle application) without having to start from scratch.

Where the Consensys Developer Program Fails

Professional developer support

The course did offer limited “office hours” with course instructors but generally, the course lacked access to any of the Consensys developer teams, who would have been helpful for project feedback and troubleshooting. The good news is, many of the tools (e.g. Truffle and MetaMask) are open source and the teams are responsive in their Gitter channels and on Github issues. The primary resources available in the course are your fellow student peers, where you can discuss exercises and projects in a Slack-like forum. Which leads me to my next grievance…

Setting a bar for course acceptance

I understand Consensys Academy wants to scale the course, which means encouraging peer-to-peer collaboration vs. providing in-house developers as a resource. To do this right, however, the quality of students must be high. It is not. There’s no interview or vetting process — the bar for course acceptance is merely signing up and paying the $1,000 admission cost. It was clear that many students in my cohort had never programmed professionally. For my final project (the main component of the course), the only feedback came from peer evaluation. Most peers reviewing my project were new to web development and could not provide much valuable feedback.

Providing objective resources

When linking out to articles, they often push their own content (the Consensys blog). When it comes to developer tools, they promote internal projects, e.g. Truffle for smart contract development, MetaMask as an in-browser Web3 provider, Uport for identity management, Infura for hosting Ethereum nodes. In their defense, those are the most dominant players in each of their categories, but they could have at least mentioned alternatives. It makes the program come off as a bit of a shill, but ultimately, can we blame them? They made no promise to be impartial or to not endorse their products. At the end of the day, they’re a for-profit company. Just keep that in mind.

Building an on-ramp to employment

I heard in past years when the number of students was in the tens vs. in the hundreds, that the course was an effective way to get scouted and potentially recruited by Consensys or its partners. I wouldn’t factor this into your decision process. I feel this is a missed opportunity on their end, given they provide a wide array of consulting services to enterprise clients who are likely looking to hire blockchain engineers. Perhaps an area for them to capitalize on in the future, but for now, it’s up to you to build a network in this space.

Summary

As with most decisions, it comes down to what you value: time vs. money. If you can afford the $1,000 for this course, the curation of relevant, up-to-date information is worth the cost. Again, although all the content can be found publically on Google, I feel Consensys is arguably one of the most important companies in the blockchain space and is uniquely suited to provide this service. For years, their companies have been actively developing software in areas across the Ethereum stack: core infrastructure, open source frameworks, developer tools, enterprise solutions, end-user applications, research, security, and design. They understand best practices, how the layers of the Web 3.0 stack fit together and how the software development process differs from traditional Web 2.0.

Alternatives

I can’t speak from experience but I’ve heard these are programs are worth exploring, particularly if you’re on a tight budget:

• B9lab Academy
• Blockgeeks
• Ethereum and Solidity: The Complete Developer’s Guide (Udemy)
• The Complete Smart Contract & DApps Course (Coursera)

Thoughts? Questions? Please drop a comment below.