Honest Review on Build Space: A Web3 Learning Platform
There has been a lot of skepticism around the Web3 ecosystem and the application of the technology recently. Within reason, every new technology has good applications and also can be used to manipulate people eager to be first in the space.
As a person with an open mind and growth mindset, I decided to go down a rabbit hole and try to understand what Web3 really means and entails. I watched Youtube videos, read twitter post, listened to podcast, used decentralized apps (dApps) on Meta Mask, and even purchased NFTs. However, I still felt that there was a disconnect between what I was seeing and what was going on under the hood. As a developer, I always want to uncover the “magic” of the systems.
Fortunately for me, a good friend of mine Emanuel Perez, prompted me to checkout a company called Build Space and encouraged me to do one of their courses. I was shocked because it was free and was teaching all the latest and cool stuff in crypto such as building an NFT mint page, building a DAO, and building dApps. So I signed up and awaited for the start date of the first cohort.
Ugh another discord….
First and foremost, you might be curious how are these classes free ? Forza, one of the co-founders explains how they make their money.
Now that we cleared that air on that, let’s hop into the curriculum.
I got up bright and early on a Saturday morning and attended a kick off workshop on Twitch. Farza was going in-depth about the project and what lies ahead for us during the week. We would be creating a site that allows you to upload gifs and have them stored on the Solana network. It was dope, it felt like I was in freshman orientation all over again.
This is one of the projects I created and can be found here , its based off one of the APIs I built in one of my other posts.
Even though the curriculum sounds super intense, depending on the difficulty of the project, you can be a weekend warrior or you can spend the whole week completing the project. There are currently about 5 different projects you can choose from to learn, with different start dates. It’s like a buffet of Web3, you eat at your own pace 🍝. There are 4 sections that build off each other. Its projected based learning, so they don’t expect you to know everything out the box, but don’t expect you just to copy and paste.
For support, you get assigned a cohort and are added to channels in a discord to help you through different sections. I used discord to search for common errors that I encountered to get me out of problems quickly. It might be easier for me to debug issues since I am a developer, but there are a lot of helpful people in the chat who want to see you win.
FWIW, I have no clue how to program in Rust, but I fumbled enough to and used copy and paste fu to the point where I got the app working and even added my own customization.
To keep you motivated, they have you take a screenshot of your progress and upload it after every section and post it in the discord, so you don’t feel like you are in a vacuum. Seeing other people get their projects working got me motivated to keep working.
After you complete the project, you then upload your app to a hosting platform and share your newly created web3 project to the world. It felt so fulfilling and I felt like I was on top of the world.
For your due diligence in completing the course, you receive a free NFT with your cohort details. It’s similar to completing a course and getting a certificate. The NFT is a badge of honor that you spent the time to learn Web3 skills.
The NFT has utility, they are using them as a token in a sense giving users the ability to receive future airdrops and voter privileges because of the ownership.
All and all I have had a great time with Build Space community and look forward to doing more on the curriculum.
You can follow me on twitter to keep up to date with my random crypto thoughts ❤️.
