Introduction
I recently took a course on coursera.org offered from IBM about Hyperledger. It was titled “IBM Blockchain Foundation for Developers”. You can check out the course here. I audited the course so I did not pay for the certificate that comes along with it. The course is wrapping up but they have many sessions that you can also take. They start every two weeks through the end of March.
- Feb 12 – Apr 2
- Feb 26 – Apr 16
- Mar 12 – Apr 30
- Mar 26 – May 14
I thought I would get the word out about the course to any potential developers interested in dabbling with blockchain technologies. I feel like this is a good starting place for that. You may not use Hyperledger for your end product but at least this can get you familiar with aspects of developing a distributed technology and also make some resources available to you. I also wanted to share my experience in the course.
Coursera.org
First, I would like to take a small tangent to talk about Coursera. I thoroughly enjoy Coursera. If you have never heard of it before, it is a massive open online course (MOOC) system where they have major universities upload online versions of courses taught by the actual professors at the universities. You have the chance to take open college level courses where you can learn anything you can think of. The best part is, you can do it for free for almost all of the courses. I wrote about it a while ago at this post but just like to plug it again. I have audited so many courses on there and have learned so much and it was all free. It is amazing! Go check it out!
Hyperledger
Hyperledger is an open source collaborative project from the Linux foundation to promote blockchain and distributive ledger technologies. They have lots of frameworks under their umbrella. They include Fabric, Sawtooth, Burrow, Indy and Iroha. They all have different focuses and features available to them. I do not plan on going into the differences to them in this post. They have to do with the type of consensus being used and the underlying architecture of the network. It also has to do with making your network permission or permissionless. I know many may take issue with calling something with permissions a blockchain so that is where the distributed ledger technologies terminology comes in.
Hyperledger also offers different sets of tools for interacting and creating networks and blockchains. These include Cello, Composer, Explorer and Quilt. They all have different features and uses to help a developer. Composer helps with the development process. It creates templates and skeletons of networks for you. You can use this to build on and adjust to meet your needs. They claim you can have a fully functioning blockchain network up within hours using Composer.
The course focused on using the Fabric framework and the Composer tool to help with quicker development. There is another course I will mention later that talks about Hyperledger more generally and goes into some of the differences between the frameworks.
My Experience
On to my experience with the course. I enjoy my first course in blockchain development. I didn’t know what to expect at first. I have learned so much about the technology over the last couple years but no a huge amount around the development side of things. I watched videos here and there but they were all disjoint or just focused on one specific thing. This actually helped me from beginning to end. Using the tools provided I feel like I can bring up a simple network and develop a basic application on it. It gave me a good foundation for me to expand upon to create my application ideas.
The course itself was easy to follow along with. The instructors explained everything and each part was all well documented. It consisted of 4 different labs, easy to follow videos and tutorials and some small knowledge checks along the way. It wasn’t extremely time consuming. It is broken down into 6 weeks but I was able to go through the entire course within a couple of weeks. It is really up to the person. You can go at your own pace and do not have to stay with the designated time schedules initially set.
Conclusions
I really found the course helpful. It allowed me to focus on the development process of blockchains., not just cryptocurrencies or consensus algorithms. I also didn’t have to search through a ton of youtube videos trying to find all this info. Overall, a really good experience and starting place. I have already taken what I have learned and the resources from the site and started developing my own blockchain network and application. I am excited to see how it turns out. This may be just a first pass or maybe it could turn into a nice working product in the near future.
I also came across another course offered by EdX. Another great MOOC site that offers courses on a huge amount of topics that you should also definitely check out. This one looks like it goes into more detail and also looks at Hyperledger as a whole and not just focus on a single frame work and tool like the one from IBM. When I get through this one I will write another review on my experience. I hope this helps some people out there. Good luck and always keep learning!