#7 Looking back on learning about blockchain

We want to start investigating blockchain, what it can be used for and start building an application on top of a blockchain.

That’s how it started out about halfway through 2018. We decided to dive deep into building applications based on blockchain technology. Although we said we would dive deeper into the tech of HyperLedger, we want to zoom out a bit and look at what we learned about learning about blockchain.

Tutorials, tutorials, tutorials and more tutorials

Where do you even start when you need to build something with technology you’ve never used? Tutorials. Lots and lots of tutorials. The quality of them can vary greatly, even the place on which you can find them vary. Sometimes it’s here on Medium, sometimes it’s YouTube, even other times it’s official documentation of the technology itself. Anyway we have seen our fair share of them. We have learned a lot about each technology through them, but we have also learned a lot about them by following along with them.

The good the bad and the ugly

We’ve found that a good tutorial strikes a balance between the depth it achieves and how fast it goes in depth. Too shallow isn’t good because then you don’t learn enough from it. Then again, to deep isn’t good either, because at some point you can start to figure out things for yourself and you don’t need it anymore. The speed matters too, if not more than the depth. Because when it goes too slow you want to go faster and maybe start skipping parts that are necessary. However when the tutorial ramps up the pace early it will become a wall of text you don’t understand a word from.

We aren’t saying we’re good at writing them ourselves, we just have seen a lot of them and you get to see what helps and what doesn’t. We have seen tutorials that dumbfounded us and made progression difficult, also we’ve seen ones that spelled out every single letter and made us skip parts, only to find out we missed crucial information. However there also were tutorials that were a joy to work with.

Hopefully we can employ the experience of using the good ones and the bad ones in the future when we write some more blogs that go in depth with the tech.

Scraping the barrel

Blockchain is a fairly new concept and it evolves quickly, there are a lot of blockchain types that are just starting out and we’ve switched a couple of times, also to some that are not used much. We’ve found that the amount of information to be found about a technology is directly proportional to the amount of people using the technology. Having more people use a technology greatly increases the chance of someone publishing some info about it. Usually we at Xuntos build websites with content management systems and webapplications based on the .NET stack, both of which have thousands and thousands of videos, articles and other pieces of info on the internet. Some of the technologies we’ve used in our blockchain endeavours on the other hand struggle to fill the first page of Google with useful content if you just search for their name.

Then you have to make do with the stuff that there is. Sometimes that takes a lot of work but you can eventually find your way, other times we’ve hit a wall and just could not figure out how to continue. We had to accept that that is part of the game we’re playing.

Trial and error

Figuring out new technologies is not easy. People can teach you things, but sometimes you have to fend for yourself. Whether it’s because you don’t get the tutorial or, there is not enough info at all, sometimes you need to just go and try it. Although that isn’t without falling and getting up again (as we say in Dutch). We had to make mistakes and figure out what we did wrong and how we could do right the next time. We had times that it took a day or more to get some tiny little thing working. That can be frustrating, but when you figure out how to get it working, it’s very satisfying. Key to this all is getting to understand the errors thrown your way when you haven’t gotten it right yet. Because failing is only a failure when you don’t learn anything from it.

In conclusion, figuring out blockchain technologies has taught us a lot more than just how to work with blockchain. It has taught us about tutorials, about having to work with the resources available and figuring things out for ourselves. Having built some working POC’s and having started over a handful of times showed us we learn things indirectly while studying other subjects. All in all we’re pretty satisfied with what we have accomplished. It has created new opportunities for us with others who are also interested in blockchain and we hope to build an actual application in the year to come.

Have you tried out new technologies? What did you learn from it when things didn’t go as planned? Let us know in the comments, and if you thought this was helpful, give us a clap!