Introduction
Hi, I’m Cryptochica and welcome to my first Hashnode article! 👋 Recently I partook in Emerald Academy’s Cadence Bootcamp, and after completing the bootcamp I decided, why not write about my experience? 🙂
What is Emerald Academy?
Emerald Academy is a collection of resources created by the Emerald City DAO to educate others about the Flow blockchain and the Cadence smart contract programming language.
Emerald City is the first DAO built on the Flow blockchain, paving the way for future DAOs on Flow. Within Emerald City are three sectors or ‘Guilds,’ to achieve their goals of creating tools for future DAOs. These three guilds are: the ‘Education Guild,’ ‘Building Guild,’ and the ‘Governance Guild’.
Wait.. what is Cadence? 🤔
Cadence is the smart contract programming language used on the Flow blockchain, and was modeled after multiple programming languages such as Swift and Rust; making it fairly easy to transition into if you have previous programming experience. Due to its strong type system, Cadence is able to maximize its efficiency and maintain a high level of smart contract safety and security as well.
When comparing Cadence to Solidity, Cadence is a more beginner-friendly programming language to learn. An example of this is Cadence’s clarity and readability. Cadence is written in a way where a developer can directly express their intentions whilst programming. Cadence is also an easy to read language, even if you're still a beginner when it comes to programming.
A Little About The Bootcamp
Emerald Academy’s bootcamp extends over a four-week period, and aims to teach those who are absolute beginners about the Flow blockchain and the Cadence programming language. After completing the bootcamp, you also receive an Emerald City certificate of completion in the form of a FLOAT.
- A FLOAT is one of Emerald City’s tools built to show proof of attendance.
I had found out about this bootcamp through a friend on Twitter and decided to sign up; as I already had some knowledge about Flow and I was intrigued to learn more about Cadence.
The bootcamp is structured into 5 chapters (and 1 additional extra credit chapter), each containing between 3-5 lessons; that can be completed daily. After each lesson, you complete a few ‘quests’. These quests consists of both questions and coding exercises. As you progress throughout the bootcamp your quests will increasingly become difficult.
However, if you don’t have the time to complete a lesson everyday, no worries! One great thing about this bootcamp is that you can go at your own pace.
- These daily lessons can be found in Emerald Academy’s Cadence bootcamp github repo.
Throughout the entire bootcamp, weekly workshops take place in the Emerald City discord. In these workshops the Emerald City team reviews the lessons from that week, and everyone in the workshop works together to complete a quest as well. These workshops are a great way to better your understanding of the concepts taught in each of the lessons. At the end of each workshop you receive a FLOAT as well. 😉
My Experience In The Bootcamp
I enrolled in the bootcamp on June 6th, and recently completed it on July 5th. It took me almost an entire month to complete the bootcamp, although I went through the bootcamp at a steady pace, I also took breaks when needed. Therefore, doing one lesson a day is 100% manageable; since these lessons took no more than an hour to complete.
At the start of the bootcamp, I didn’t have much knowledge regarding Cadence but I did have previous experience with Solidity and other programming languages such as JavaScript. This made my transition into learning Cadence fairly smooth.
As for the daily quests, I found that there was a perfect mixture of simple and straightforward quests, along with some more challenging ones. As you begin to progress further in the bootcamp the lessons and quests become more hands-on. Towards the end of the bootcamp, you learn how to create your own smart contract that mints NFTs.
- As well as go over a real-life example of a smart contract that implements the NFT standard all NFT projects on Flow use.
Once you've completed your daily quests, you can submit them to be graded by the academy instructors in Emerald Academy’s discord. During my time in the bootcamp, I received very helpful feedback from the instructors; anytime, I had trouble with a certain quest, they were always there to guide me.
Emerald Academy also records each of their weekly workshops, with each being made publicly available on their website. Perfect for anytime you want to review a difficult concept! 🤩
Emerald Academy does a great job of not only teaching you concepts about Cadence, challenging or not, and teaching you how to use them in a real-world setting. For example, in the bootcamp, you learn about resource interfaces (at first they may seem a little daunting) however, as you progress throughout the course you begin to grasp the concept more and more; until it becomes second nature. 📚✍️
I really enjoyed and appreciated how organized and thought out this bootcamp was. There wasn’t a moment where I felt confused about a concept, and I couldn’t find any additional resources to better understand. As I mentioned earlier, the academy instructors and weekly workshops are your best friends throughout the bootcamp.
Conclusion
Overall, after completing the bootcamp, I’ve come out of it with greater knowledge regarding both the Flow blockchain and Cadence! If you’re interested in the Flow blockchain or just want to try something new and exciting, I’d 100% recommend joining Emerald Academy’s Cadence bootcamp. At the time of writing, Emerald Academy is about to start another bootcamp very shortly! You can sign up here.
Let’s Connect
If you’d like to connect, you can follow me here or on Twitter. If you got value out of this feel free to comment and share.
Until next time, CryptoChica 💕