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Comment by ronanyeah | Hacker News Reader

Look into web3/blockchain/NFT technology, most of it has been around less than 2 years so experience is less of a hard requirement than in other fields of software engineering.

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Gonna hard disagree on this one. Blockchain is a flash in the pan niche tool. There are some legitimate uses for it, but most of it is all style and no substance. It's way too narrow a focus, with far more people playing around than there are jobs. You'd pick up general software skills along the way, but there are better ways to do that with a focus on more useful and practical technologies.

Web3 is like knowing HTML in 1995. Act accordingly.

I don’t see how is that a valid analogy. Html was useful in itself, all this new crypto stuff just convolutes existing solutions.

There were plenty of people in 1995 who did not understand the utility of HTML. That is the nature of revolutionary technology.

You mean some people understood html to be revolutionary even back then.

If you are someone who knows crypto to be revolutionary, would you be able to help me understand why is it so?

I like this perspective: https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1440026949838069763

For example, predicting Airbnb or Patreon in the early days of HTML/CSS/JS would have taken a lot of foresight and vision.

We also had uncountable useless products made from html/js.

Also the mentioned services make sense. You rent your unused flat to someone, or you ask for money for creating something regularly.

I really tried “getting” the web3 benefits, but all I see is mumbo jumbo / dotcom crash type hype.

Could I get more clues? How might someoone hire a 40 year old for NFT/blockchain?

Solidity (language for Ethereum Smart Contracts) is relatively easy to learn. There's also tons of free resources in learning them (https://cryptozombies.io/). I would say this would be one of the hottest languages of 2022.

Yeah Solidity has many resources and is worth learning. Solana is another smart contract platform which uses Rust, and Rust is a fantastic language, though it is tough.

Both ecosystems use Node.js for scripting/tests/frontend so that is going to be advantage to learn.

A good progression might be:

  - Modern JS / Node.js
  - Solidity / Ethers (https://docs.ethers.io/)
  - Rust
  - Solana / Anchor (https://project-serum.github.io/anchor/getting-started/introduction.html)

Yes. This feels like 2007-level of hotness. Thank you.

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