Ask HN: Getting started with Web3 ("decentralized web") development | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Getting started with Web3 ("decentralized web") development

27 pointslihaotan16 comments

I am completely new to building Web3 applications but am quite experienced with web development, wondering if there are high quality resources around these? I understand there is a lot of negative hype around this but I am trying to learn how things work.

Where should I start?

Resources I have found so far:

https://github.com/scaffold-eth/scaffold-eth - building decentralized applications on Ethereum

https://moralis.io/ - Firebase for Crypto(?)

https://thirdweb.com/ - Web3 apps?

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https://buildspace.so was good for introducing me to the ropes of solidity and web3. Since then I've realized how useless and inefficient web3 is outside of DeFi, and since DeFi can only be made by geniuses that also have enough money to pay security firms to ensure a single smart contract doesn't result in a hacker leeching all your funds, I've stopped learning everything crypto, but while I was still convinced, buildspace was a really good intro. I did their solidity tutorial (few weeks) and make an NFT webpage tutorial (few days). Not at all comprehensive, but it helps you get started really well and fast

I'm in the same boat, just got through with their solidity tutorial. Great course paired with: https://cryptozombies.io

I'm one of the founders of thirdweb, our goal is to make it super easy to develop web3 apps. We've started by providing a foundational set of smart contracts, SDKs in JS, python, go, unity, (more coming) and a dashboard so you can manage your contracts, teams, permissions easily.

The main feature of our platform is you own the contracts (we don't have access to them), your wallet deploys it and is effectively the same as if you wrote the code underneath. Our core platform is all on chain so you don't rely on us to be around for your apps to continue to run.

There's a lot we want to get to in the next few months: analytics, bring your own contracts and other chains like solana / flow.

Generally in the web3 space here's the projects/tools i found super helpful:

buildspace - https://buildspace.so

hardhat - https://hardhat.org

crypto zombies - https://cryptozombies.io

eth foundation learn - https://ethereum.org/en/learn/

web3 university - https://www.web3.university

OdysseyDao - https://www.odysseydao.com

DeveloperDAO Wiki - https://developerdao.notion.site/developerdao/Developer-DAO-...

Feel free to reach out if you need more resources or help getting started!

What do you actually want?

If you want decentralization look at WebRTC. https://webrtc.org/

If you want crypto you have to guess at what resources are valid.

Just keep in mind the only commonality in crypto is blockchain, which is a distributed form of third party storage. Crypto will not get you decentralization.

I don’t know if this is the answer you’re looking for because it’s not tied to a cryptocurrency but take a look at nostr: https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr

It’s a protocol that allows nodes to gossip event messages amongst each other. The event relays can be used as a backend to provide data to your web/desktop/mobile apps.

thirdweb is a pretty easy way to get started if you’re an experienced web developer. we use them internally at our web3 dev education startup for creating and sending nfts to folks who complete our tutorials.

we have a tutorial with them going on where we show you how to build a full stack web3 app with their sdks/platform. we’re rewarding folks who complete the tutorial with a bit of $MATIC and a cool nft[1]

another cool resource after you get your feet wet is this collection of tiny examples of popular web3 apps[2]

1 - https://www.pointer.gg/tutorials/thirdweb-nft-lootbox

2 - https://github.com/m1guelpf/lil-web3

You can checkout the tutorials of EatTheBlocks, one of the biggest channels for Web3 development.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZM8XQjNOyG2ElPpEUtNasA

Disclaimer: I am the creator of EatTheBlocks

https://plutus-pioneer-program.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pion...

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but here is a brain dump

Get started with:

- https://github.com/ethereumbook/ethereumbook

- https://docs.soliditylang.org/

- https://cryptozombies.io/en/course/

- Join crypto twitter. A lot of projects have twitters that you can use to keep up on with what's happening.

- Join discords. A lot of projects have discords that you can use to keep up on with what's happening.

- https://www.youtube.com/c/Finematics/videos

IDE and Basic Tooling

- https://hardhat.org/getting-started/ (dev environment)

- https://trufflesuite.com/ (dev environment)

- https://docs.ethers.io/v5/ (web3 tooling)

- https://openzeppelin.com/contracts/ (security)

Node Infra

- https://www.alchemy.com/

- https://infura.io/

- https://moralis.io/

Indexing and Analytics

- https://dune.xyz/home

- https://thegraph.com/en/

- there's more

Wallets:

- https://metamask.io/

- https://gnosis-safe.io/ (contract wallet / multisig capabilities)

- https://rainbow.me/

- https://www.coinbase.com/wallet

Monitoring, Alerting, Simulating

- https://etherscan.io/, bscscan, polygonscan, snowtrace, etc

- https://tenderly.co/

Security and Audit - Trail of Bits Tools: Slither (static analyzer), Echidna (fuzzing), Manticore (symbolic execution)

- ConsenSys Diligence and their tools

- there's more

Oracles

- https://chain.link/

- there's more but I'm lazy

Bridging:

- there's a lot here

- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jYZOfU2R3PdzRmnY9Nfc...

Governance and Voting:

- https://snapshot.org/

Other things you may find interesting

- https://uniswap.org/

- https://curve.fi/

- https://app.1inch.io/

- Networks: Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, etc

- https://ipfs.io/

This bridging spreadsheet is phenomenal. Unrelated to dev, but for using crypto and defi, patching together the right series of bridges to get from A to B as efficiently/cheaply/securely can be complicated. I had sort of internally constructed this spreadsheet in my head after hours of googling and asking around in discords, but the actual spreadsheet is an amazing resource

For doing stuff with IPFS, Fleek is great https://fleek.co/

https://cryptozombies.io is a fun way to get into solidity and smart contracts

https://getdweb.net/

Even going to the "resources" section of the website, most of what I see is ridiculously non-technical high-level fluff.

This is linked from there : https://decentpatterns.xyz/library/list/

High-level abstract ideas. There's no technical meat here, nothing illuminating about how these are done. The examples they do cite point to user-facing documentation. This resource is in 3rd gear, car's rolling, we're making stuff already: we still need some resources for techies to find gears 1 & 2.

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