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Comment by iRomain | Hacker News Reader

Like with any software engineering field, start looking at OSS. This is especially true with blockchains and web3 projects which are more often than not open sourced.

Then decide wether you want to jump on the blockchain/infrastructure bandwagon (Go, Rust, etc.) or the smart contract/app bandwagon (Solidity, etc.).

Then start contributing back to the OSS projects that interest you. If you do that, you should have no issue landing a job in the field.

Source: I did hire solidity developers a few years ago and I would totally look at their open source contributions as proof of their knowledge since this was/is such a new field.

Some repos:

https://github.com/OpenZeppelin

https://github.com/ConsenSys

https://github.com/ethereum

https://github.com/input-output-hk

https://github.com/solana-labs

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why should a dev become a blockhain developer tho?

Because it is fun and full of exciting opportunities?

As is machine learning, cryptography, learning Cantonese and snorting cocaine. Is it special in any way though?

You do know that most faang employees work on methods to maximize ad revenue right, because last I checked google or Facebook weren't in the business of trying to cure cancer? What about Lockheed-martin or other companies making missiles that kill civilians for their oil?

Blockchain is just a technology, one shouldn't have such strong feelings against it just because one is a contrarian and lots of idiots are shouting that it'll end world hunger or building scams using it.

You speak of machine learning and cryptography, both are tools, some use ML techniques to discover tumors in medical images before humans can spot them, and others use it to analyze your data to know which product should be advertised to you to make you spend more money on useless things.

> Blockchain is just a technology

I am definitely a cryptocurrency contrarian, so I was going to stay out of this thread - it wouldn't help OP to have people questioning his fairly straight-forward request.

But I don't think there is such a thing as "just a technology". Technology comes out of people's desires, and you can't disentangle it from the context it's created in. You can argue that blockchain is just an append-only database, but that ignores all sorts of externalities its adoption is causing.

This would be true if cultures didn't change, but they do. Switch your argument to something else, say splashing water on fires using tools. By your logic the technology can't ever be disentangled with the purpose of extortion, a bad purpose. Yet time passed and now firefighting isn't an extortion in which your house burns down unless you pay the firefighters. In that case, splashing water on fires really is just splashing water on fires. It also isn't like the business model was without perverse incentive - start a fire and you potentially get paid for putting it out.

This isn't me saying you're wrong that people are making a mistake in ignoring externalities, but more that the reason why it is a mistake isn't that they correctly articulated one component in the problem they were thinking about - its because they ignored the other stuff which interacts with it.

Not everyone needs to have interests, I guess...

I’ve enjoyed the challenges of learning about distributed systems, consensus, formal methods… Whatever one might say about crypto in general, blockchain projects can let you work on some things that are fairly hard to find otherwise.

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