How to Get NEAR Certified Developer (NCD)

This is one of the very few medium post of me.

In this post, I want to explain my road to becoming a Near Certified Developer.

How It Started?

I got into the crypto space when the market is really green and everybody was earning decent amount money in 2017. Everyone was winning so I did not want to lose this opportunity to get rich. But it did not age that way. After I entered the market they started to crash after crash. And years after years I started to get interested about the technology more than trading.

About a year ago I started to get interested about web3 technologies and decentralized application aka Smart Contract development.

At the beginning, I had no prior web development experience. Since web3 is still web development with basically ‘decentralization’ feature I realized that I need some knowledge on web development before getting into the wild world of the Decentralized Web.

What You Need To Know Before Start To Coding?

I started from the very beginning, how a web page structured using html, then continued with the styling of the web pages with CSS. After learning about static web pages I got into Javascript in order to learn how to make web pages actually working and interacting with users. Nowadays I am learning React JS since it is one of the most popular frameworks on front end web development between web3 developers. Btw, there is reason for this popularity and we can talk about it later hopefully :)

Since my final destination was web3 development, I was learning blockchain in general in order to get familiar with the concept before actually writing the code.

When I feel that it is time to get into the production phase I started to learn Solidity to write smart contract for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The reason for starting from EVM was very simple. It was, still is, the most popular blockchain which can run smart contract on it. Probably the most popular blockchain is the Bitcoin chain but we cannot run smart contract on it so it is not in our radar for development. Honestly this post is not really about Ethereum so I do not want go into details about it more.

I was interested not only about Ethereum but also other blockchains and learning about them.

Why NEAR?

I will not get into the technical details about blockchains in order to explain why I choose NEAR.

My main reason was that I feel NEAR values developers, but for most of others investors are far more important than the developers.

When I heard about NEAR’s certification program I joined kick of meeting session, I wanted to get the certificate but actually I did not have real path about how to do it. Additionally I though it was so hard that I cannot.

At the beginning it seemed very hard for me because they use Rust as programming language, but I did not have any prior information abut Rust. So I could not continue so I was not able to send a project to NEAR Team to get verified as Near Developer.

How Patika.Dev Helped Me?

One day I learnt about Patika’s Near Certified Developer program and I thought ‘yea this is the course I need’ and joined right away.

It was interesting because they were using Assembly Script to write contract. As I have some Javascript experience it seemed easier for me than Rust so I could learn and finally sent a project to NEAR Team.

Course Design

Course was split to two parts:

1- Web3 Fundamentals which teaches about web3 in general.

2-NEAR Developer Course which focuses smart contract for only Near

Patika’s team was really helpful during the process. I do not remember any question left unanswered. They opened separated Discord Server for the course and it was really active and helped a lot. There was so many people helping others in the Discord channel and I learnt a lot from them.

The course was actually self paced but they organized sessions with experienced Near Certified Developers. They analyzed projects which have been accepted to get NCD and told their stories. These sessions helped me a lot during the way. They encouraged me to believe that I can do it. Records to these sessions may still be available on Patika.dev Discord Server.

Road map and course tracks were well designed. Practical chapters had examples and we sent screen shots and project’s repository links to prove completion. At the end of every chapter, there was some questions we need to answer in order to complete the section.

The last 10% of the course was teaching about how to send your project to Near Team to get verified as NCD.

After completing the course I submitted my project to Near Team. My project was about whitelisting predefined number of early users when they interact with the our smart contract. After some predefined time period they can collect their rewards by calling the related function.

I consider to write separate post about my smart contract. When it is available I will edit this post and add link here.

How To Check Certification?

When you submit your project they send an email to confirm that they received your project and after one month reviewing they add your name and your project information to this Dashboard.

You can find my name and project information at line 80 or search for ‘yusufcnr’ in search bar.

Any NFT?

They said they will eventually send an NFT (Non Fungible Token) to prove the certification so you can prove anybody that you are Certified Near Developer. But for now I cannot see any NFT in my wallet yet. Hopefully they will send one.

You can click here to see my project on Github. At this repository you can find information about my project and how to use it.

Thanks for reading. I would be more than happy if you could contribute this post by letting me know about mistakes and your ideas.