Let's see where this goes: Personal coding accountability log

Smart Contracts Showcase
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Hi everyone, I’m starting out my coding journey. I know some HTML and that is about it.
Am working on a group project for a smart contract course I am taking but a lot of the basics I am still unsure about. I decided to just take it one step at a time and document it here for accountability purposes and to make it more fun rather than having it as a lonely endeavour. I found the crypto zombies, built my factory, now I will learn how zombies can attack their victims (Lesson 2).

Since I am only now starting to blog about this, I count this as day 1.

So for today, I completed the second lesson and had some cryptozombies eat cryptokitties.

  • chapter on mappings and addresses: why would we need to have both, a mapping that tracks the addresses that own a zombie and a mapping that tracks how many zombies an owner has, can’t it be done with just one code? I mean once I know the addresses that own a zombie, should be easy to identify which addresses own how many - still trying to get into the coding logic here I guess and wondering about the intricacies of mappings.

  • It is interesting that information on the blockchain, i.e. in this case the crypto kitty DNA can be used in my smart contract.

  • The term “API” popped up, I heard it several times, will have to look it up, it seems to be connected to a web server and it is not decentralized, rather centralised and could be a company’s API, such as the image of the cryptokitties.

  • Now I am wondering if images as such can be stored on a blockchain at all, I think I read something about “Avastars” that claimed they could store the images on the blockchain, unsure how that is possible, maybe when I get to later stages, I will understand better.

  • As a coding newbie it was rather challenging to get correct answers right away but it did not discourage me from trying again. Only when I could not come up with the correct answer after multiple tries, would I check the answer. Out of 14 chapters, that was three.

–> I had a challenging time regarding storage vs memory
–> unsure when underscore needs to be used before a word and when it is not necessary (such as _id vs id)
–> when do I need to use " " and when can I just type in a word, e.g.
_createZombie(“NoName”, newDna), why do I need " "?
–> some value % 100 gets me to the last two digits of that value (yeah pretty nice)

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Day 2 (yesterday):

Group discussion, many things to go through still, will revise previous lectures and try to understand the basics better

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Hi @codingbibi,

Welcome and thank you for sharing your #coding-journey :pray:

Everyone was new once, see: Recommendations for new developers

What is the course that you are doing?

I recommend the following Solidity learning resources (additions and updates appreciated).

Feel free to create new topics whenever you have questions. You can also answer questions, I find this is a great way to learn.

I am looking forward to following your journey. :rocket:

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Hi @abcoathup,
thanks for the welcome. Yes, I am a newbie! :smiley: Great resources, thanks for sharing!

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Day 3: Ethereum basics, such as gas fees, gas limit; difference between Bitcoin’s UTXO and Ethereum’s account based model etc.

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Hi @codingbibi,

Sometimes it can be fun to take a break and just deploy something to play around with.

When you get to that point, you could try: Create an ERC20 using Remix, without writing Solidity

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