My first experience learning NEAR protocol development

The NEAR protocol (hereafter short as NEAR) is a new generation of PoS public blockchain. I have known a lot about it before, and I think its biggest advantage is developer-friendly. After reading the article “Developers are invited to join NEAR’s learning path” from Chinese NEAR community, I immediately registered an account to learn more about it.

Figment.io is a node hosting service provider, they cooperate with NEAR to promote this educational activities, not only to let developers know about NEAR, but also to improve the quality of the service. It’s very meaningful.

After entering the site for the first time, what surprised me the most was that there were tutorials for other popular public blockchain include NEAR.

NEAR’s tutorials are divided into 5 sections: establishing an RPC connection, creating an account, querying chain information, initiating a transaction, and writing a deployment contract, which are the minimum necessary knowledge to operate a public blockchain. Compared to NEAR’s official development documentation, Figment simplify a lot of the content, but key content details remain. The tutorial is easy to copy and paste, and just a few lines of code need to be changed to complete the tutorial. If you have experience in web development, you should be able to finish the tutorial in less than an hour. If you encounter any obstacles, you can ask questions at discord.

All requests in tutorials are sent through Datahub’s NEAR node, and with NEAR’s consensus mechanism, you can get results in 1–2 seconds after send a request, which is very fast. This is overwhelm other old blockchains such as Ethereum.

In the learning process, I encountered two problems: the Node version was too high so the SDK could not be installed, and the form was lost due to GFW after website refresh. The guy name Yannick-Figment at Discord was very friendly and assisted me quickly to solve the problem.

The worst part of my experience is that when I fill out the form to get the reward, it need 3 NEARs to fund my account, and I have to go to Binance to buy and withdraw, and need to wait few minutes.

In the end, I received a reward of 107Ⓝ, equivalent to 100 dollar. The rewards are generous.

It is worthwhile for people with some development experience to participate in this activity and experience the speed and convenience of NEAR. learn.figment.io is a great learning site, you can pay more attention to it. I have applied for the tutorial to unlock the Avalanche protocol, and I will finish it later.