Getting started as a smart contract developer

The slides

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The one idea

Somebody wrote every wallet, game and token you have ever used. Blockchain development is a software-engineering job, and most of it is skills you are already learning: frontends, backends, databases, Git.

What changes is where the rules live. In a normal app the owner of the server can change any record. In a dApp the rules are a smart contract running on a shared network, the user signs with a wallet, and nobody, including the developer, can quietly change the result.

Learn it free: the official Solana bootcamp

Everything in the middle of the talk comes from one free course: the Solana Developer Bootcamp 2026. Twelve projects in about five hours, with reference code for each. Start wherever you are. The timestamps below jump straight to each project.

• Projects 01–02 · Install the tools and run a full-stack Hello World (8:18, 16:25)
• Project 03 · On-chain voting: your first real contract, with tests (31:05)
• Project 04 · Escrow: the program holds funds until both sides deliver (1:20:45)
• Projects 06–07 · Stablecoin and Stable Swap (2:51:33, 3:07:32)
• Project 08 · x402: pay a fraction of a cent per web request (3:33:47)
• Project 10 · Security checklist: watch this one twice (4:10:23)
• Project 11 · Prediction market, full stack end to end (4:16:07)
• Project 12 · Production readiness (5:01:52)

A real contract, and a real mistake

The arcade contract behind gamerplex.com is 3,018 lines of Rust with 24 instructions, live on Solana mainnet and open source. My first version made a classic mistake: it believed the player when they said they had paid, without checking that any money moved. My own audit caught it before launch.

The fix is a pattern you will use in every contract you write: never trust what the caller tells you, check it yourself. Before a payment counts, the contract now checks five things:

// 1. Emergency brake: the admin can pause all payments
require!(!ctx.accounts.payments_config.paused, ArcadeError::PaymentsPaused);
// 2. Called directly by the player's transaction, not smuggled in by another program
require!(get_stack_height() == TRANSACTION_LEVEL_STACK_HEIGHT, ArcadeError::CpiNotAllowed);
// 3. Exactly one payment per transaction
require!(rp_count == 1, ArcadeError::DuplicateIxInTx);
// 4. The right price for what you're buying
require!(amount_micro_usd == required, ArcadeError::InvalidScoreCommitAmount);
// 5. Look inside the transaction: did the tokens really move to the treasury?
verify_spl_transfer_for_mint_in_tx(&sysvar, &mint, decimals, &treasury, &player, amount)?;

From student to hired

Nobody hires you for watching a course. They hire you for what you shipped. Four steps, each one proving the last:

• Bootcamp: learn the stack, and finish a project rather than just watching it.
• Hackathon: build something real in weeks, with a deadline and judges. Colosseum runs Solana's global hackathons online, free to enter from anywhere. Most teams don't win. You still leave with a product, a demo and a repo.
• GitHub portfolio: five projects that climb (vote, token, student certificate, treasury, full app), each with a README, a screenshot, a devnet link and passing tests.
• Apply: paid bounties on Superteam Earn, listings on jobs.solana.com and web3.career, and a one-line message with a link to something you deployed.

Your first 90 days

• Month 1: JavaScript/TypeScript, Git, one web app. Bootcamp Projects 01–02.
• Month 2: wallets, transactions, your first contract. Projects 03–04.
• Month 3: frontend + wallet + contract on devnet, published on GitHub. Then enter a hackathon.

Resources

Run it yourself