Why it’s time to trade web3’s school of hard knocks for academy learning
There are two things that just don’t happen overnight: building meaningful products, and learning the tools that allow you to do so.
Early blockchain adopters were still imagining the first, and had to write their own book on the second — but when you’re breaking new ground, books tend not to get written. Tools and techniques are hacked into existence, their instructions hastily scribbled down and often in a strange new language. These might become foundational structures for future systems or be discarded as missteps, superseded by better approaches to the changing problems at hand. Everything had to be built from the ground up, because before them there was nothing.
As school of hard knocks experiences go, there’s not many that can compare. However, as those who struggled through the unknown move on to new projects, others follow them in. When later devs onboard onto the technology, they have to figure out these tools or be at risk of getting lost, and when people get lost they’re far less likely to stick around. However, there’s no reason for every new blockchain developer to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
In this post we’re going to explore the power of using structured learning pathways, such as academy programs, to onboard devs to a protocol and enable them to build viable and sustainable projects, and careers.
One ambitious dev, two web3 academies, and 32,252,793 kgs of certified recycled waste
Gjermund Garaba is CTO and co-founder of Empower, a Norwegian company that’s developing infrastructure for the circular economy through a platform that incentivises the collection, tracking, and recycling of plastic. “Even back in 2016, Norway recycled 97% of its plastic bottle use,” Gjermund says. “We had the idea to use this deposit system for any kind of plastic around the world. That set us on a long, interesting journey into both the waste sector and web3.”
Gjermund is also a graduate of two B9Lab academies — one of our independent programs in 2018, and now another run alongside our partner Interchain in 2022. He says his early training proved a major advantage, not just in implementing web3 tech but in strategising when to do so.
“We started on Ethereum, which lead me to the B9Lab Solidity course, and that made me pull the breaks on the most ambitious of our web3 plans. That course was so good, and it taught me just how dangerous and hard it is to get Solidity right. We decided to use Stellar for some basic functionality we needed, but otherwise just to wait for the technology to mature. We had enough problems to solve anyway.”
Four years later, the blockchain situation had shifted in their favour. “Last year is when I deemed the technology was mature enough to support our needs, and the Interchain Developer Academy confirmed that. We have built a big web2 platform along the way for plastic waste traceability and a digital infrastructure, but we are now ready to take our ideas back to where we started. We’re launching our own Cosmos chain in 2023, a decentralised solution that uses incentive mechanisms to align towards a common goal: circular economy.”
Empower’s careful path to success demonstrates it’s better not to dive in before your time is right. But even though the time for web3 solutions is here, it’s still a good idea to look before you leap. Maybe you can learn to swim by jumping in the deep end and hoping you don’t sink, but there are also alternatives. For example, you could take lessons.
DIY — Do It Yourself?
The early developers working in web3 were trailblazers for an entire conceptual movement — and when you go where no-one has gone before, the Do It Yourself mindset is a necessity. These were people who combined high levels of skill with a willingness to experiment and take risks. They used improvised tools because there were no alternatives, and pieced together rough-edged solutions based on hasty notes left behind by their peers and rivals.
DIY was their only option — you could even say it was half the point — and they thrived on it. But there’s a problem if we want to continue telling that story: Great civilisations aren’t built by a handful of trailblazers. After a route to the promised land has been sketched out, it takes a very different mindset to actualise the potential that has been revealed.
Not all devs are the same. Seems obvious, but there’s an important point here that can have a critical impact on the future success of blockchain. The much larger body of devs needed to populate a pristine ecosystem with a thriving range of applications are typically looking for something different when it comes to learning the rules of a whole new world: clarity.
DDIY — Don’t Do It Yourself
When B9Lab entered the web3 space in 2015, learning about blockchain still meant doing it yourself, because no-one was teaching what we needed to know. Having to go that route made it crystal clear to us the industry had an urgent need for exactly the kind of curated, cohesive training programs we didn’t have access to. So, we started providing them.
Through the B9Lab Academy, we designed, implemented, and ran specialised certification programs in Corda, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, Solidity, and Tezos. In addition, we provided more general blockchain training courses aimed at Decision Makers, Technical Executives and Analysts, Production and Supply Chain Management, and other learners.
Over time we pivoted to develop academies with partner organisations. The ConsenSys Academy, a one-time program run in conjunction with Smart Dubai, minted 100 Ethereum devs in ten weeks. With Solidified we ran the Solidified Auditor Course training on Solidity smart contracts. R3’s Corda Training and the Tezos Developer Portal are self-paced, open-access programs that double as knowledge resources for their dev communities. Our most recent project, the Interchain Developer Academy, aimed at injecting skilled talent into the Cosmos Ecosystem, is on track to onboard over 750 devs in its first twelve months.
Our early DIY experience had value, but the learning strategy that worked for us then isn’t a guaranteed win today. In fact, going that route could seriously undermine a project.
DIA — Devs In Academies
As ecosystems mature, the methodologies for learning about them must mature as well. Devs looking to move into web3 and build a career won’t welcome a seat-of-the-pants experience (they may already view just leaving web2 as a bit of a risk). They want reliable onboarding journeys, placement support, up-to-date and accessible documentation — the hallmarks of an industry that is ready and able to embrace them, and one that is capable of growing in an efficient, sustainable way as more people decide to transition across.
Academy platforms offer devs exactly this kind of foundational stability. Participants embark on a modular training program as part of of cohort of fellow learners, completing theoretical and practical exercises along the way. They receive guidance from a knowledgeable support team, achieve identifiable goals, and earn concrete rewards for their efforts. Academies also provide their hosting organisation with a variety of benefits: they foster a dev community familiar with their tech and loyal to the brand; create a long-term knowledge resource that devs old and new can return to; and they contribute to the general perception of web3 as a flourishing environment that can compete with the established legacy systems around it.
Gjermund’s experiences with Empower underline that web3 has undergone that last change. “With the benefits of hindsight, it is very obvious that had we continued pushing the blockchain solution in 2016 we would not have succeeded. The technology was simply not mature enough for what we wanted to do. Instead we got to spend these years on building and iterating quickly on circular economy problems. Now we understand those much better, and luckily blockchain tech has largely caught up.”
Taking the time to deeply understand key aspect of their business served Empower well, and now that web3 is ready to support their needs, getting the right kind of training will allow them to make the most of this opportunity. Blockchain isn’t a magic key that unlocks every problem, but academy learning can be the magic key that unlocks blockchain for you.
Andrew is technical editor at B9Lab. He’s worked with words in creative and collaborative ways for more than twenty years, and still does.
If you want to know more about how academy projects can impact both tech stacks and ecosystems, download our white paper, The Definitive Guide to Web3 Developer Adoption, and learn how to design a developer adoption strategy that fits your project whether you’re at 50 or 5000 devs.
At B9Lab, we’ve been designing and building developer adoption strategies for leading web3 organisations since 2015. Through our onboarding and learning journeys, we’ve minted thousands of developers. Our team covers the whole spectrum of developer adoption strategy and management. We’re developers, business strategists, marketers, and blockchain educators.
