Best university classes for defi
This is aimed at people actively developing smart contracts: What courses at uni are especially helpful?
Posted Apr 10, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC
15
Any computer science course that covers the following:
Programming in interpreted languages
Computer Networks
Cryptography
And then Finance courses in your college of business would also be helpful.
1
Web applications, mainly Javascript and in general any programming might help. Everything else you'll have to learn outside university.
I already know javascript and have used a bunch of other languages (ruby,python,c,c++,c#,clojure,php,scheme,x86-64 etc.). I've been coding for over 10 years with small projects and have done professional penetration testing, know some cloud stuff, some AI and 101 cryptography, part of algs and data structures MOOCs, and more. I'm just self taught and need to know what economics, finance, or CS theory I probably have gaps in. Whether it be graduate or undergraduate.
For example, how deep in uni are Merkle Patricia trees and related material taught? If I want to learn where ETH might go next I should probably know the surrounding theory. Or will knowing finite state machines well help me design defi projects better. Or how important is it to know EC crypto when you're building projects.
This field is so new that I doubt university courses would have specific courses besides maybe business schools similar to MIT's crypto courses. Merkle trees would be lightly covered in security and cryptography courses unless that's something you plan on doing in graduate studies. If you really need structured courses, ConsenSys certificates or bootcamp would be your best bet.
If you know Javascript, then that's a great start, as most Dapps are Javascript based and use npm packages. This is Ethereum's main npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/web3
I would look at successful DeFi projects on GitHub. "Mastering Ethereum" is a good book by one of the founders if you want to understand EVM and Solidity deeply but the development documentation are usually good to start from. Cryptography is nice to know as foundational knowledge but not really needed for developing dapps. I'd say if you were working on protocols or core code, then cryptography knowledge matters, otherwise libraries have it implemented for you.