B9lab Academy

I took the Ethereum Developer course as part of the 1st ConsenSys Academy program and was so impressed that I also subsequently recently completed the QA and testing engineer course. I highly recommend this for anyone who is serious about learning Solidity... Read More and thinking about jumping into Blockchain engineering.

The Ethereum Developer course was very detailed and touched a lot of fundamental topics; before diving into full Solidity development, you also get a fundamental overview of blockchains. You learn fundamental things such as compiling/op codes, memory/storage, testing, code efficiency, common vulnerabilities/attacks and security. The quality of instructors is top notch; instructors are among the highest rated contributors on Ethereum stack exchange.

Also one great part of the course that may not be apparent but I can not understate is the community and connections you make through it. Taking this course is a great way to get involved with the Ethereum development community. Even now, just about 10 months after our ConsenSys Academy/B9Labs course started, we still have active, informal chat groups with people from the course including instructors; you get to meet and interact with people from all over the world, many of whom are working on or go on to work on high profile projects throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. It's really exciting to see and hear what people from the course is working on.

The instructors are certainly knowledgeable and very good as instructors. That being said, I find the applied components of a course to be the most important ones, and I think B9Lab is really lacking in this respect. I think the gold standard is Udacity,... Read More where they have you build several portfolio pieces using up-to-date practices/standards. Although B9Lab gives you a very thorough education on the knowledge of being an Ethereum developer, their assignments and projects are lacking. It basically consists of a bunch of unmarked, small assignments (that don't make good portfolio projects). Then, there's one big, final project at the end of the course which makes up the majority of your mark. This assignment doesn't have you build any kind of application that's even remotely practical. Instead, you're given a very strict set of tests and interfaces, and you need to build an implementation around them. The implementation is based on a fictional model of a system that they describe. To meet the requirements of the interfaces and tests, you need to write a some shitty code so that the tests pass. You don't really get much choice in the matter of design choices with the code. I can say the course made me a LOT more knowledgeable and competent as an Ethereum developer, but I would be embarrassed to show an employer any of the code I had to write in that class.

This course was hands down the best blockchain/ethereum overview primer in depth dev course ive ever taken. I read a lot of the material on my own but never was it explained as well as b9labs. It isso clear and easy to understand the various conventions... Read More and ideologies behind various things that it makes solidity

Pros:
1. One of my biggest issues with training series is so many times they assume you know nothing and you have to wade through tons of material to just pick out the parts you don't know. This is something B9Labs does not do. They provide content that... Read More is interesting and informative for beginners and advanced users. I was learning things in the first module but there was plenty of content and links to explain the more complex data without being too overwhelming. I've gone through a lot of training and they are one of the few who do it right.
2. The sheer amount of content is amazing. Even after I finished the course, I was going back and re-reading articles and content. I was also going back over code examples and still learning quite a bit from links inside other links.
3. They provide a wealth of information but they also show you how to learn the content and future content more efficiently. I really like the way the course is set up.
4. The instructors were very helpful without giving answers or too much away. They helped guide you in the right direction but still made you work for it so that you learned instead of memorized. I really like that! I need these skills for my job so it's important I understand the content through and through.

Cons:
1. Some of the material might be a little advanced for beginning learning
2. I finished the weeks content about half-way through and I was chomping at the bit to get the new content. That part was painful for me having to move at the slower pace. That being said, it's probably a good pace for everybody. I was really excited about the content so I spent a lot of time on it.
3. I felt like the documentation for Hyperledger specifically was somewhat lacking but that's not B9Lab's fault. Hyperledger is a new project and still evolving. It isn't really a con but I felt I should put it here so that others know what to expect.

Summary:
I would recommend B9Labs to anyone who's serious about learning the content.

B9 has been the best online class I’ve taken so far.

The content is extensive. The course has tutorials, reading material, videos, quizzes and projects. The videos are very in depth and are updated very regularly. A student mentioned the sound quality... Read More needed to be improved in one of the course videos, and B9 uploaded a new video the same day.

My favorite thing about the course has been the projects. The teachers offer invaluable support.

I took the course having a lot of development and consulting experience. Most of my background has been in front-end and enterprise development, but have been very involved in blockchain space from a 'hobbyist' and 'investor' perspective. As many can... Read More attest, the barrier of entry is very high for blockchain work, if you dont have the right network.

The B9Lab course provided me great opportunities to get into the space. They helped develop fundamentals i needed to be successful in Ethereum and Smart Contract development.

The instructors are very active in their Slack channel. Responds very quickly to questions on projects. The interactions with the instructors are by far the most valuable part of the course.

The one minor con, is the coursework is still a bit buggy, some of the quizzes had some issues, and some of the content could be presented in a more optimized order for learning.

The small and final projects were outstanding, i gained a lot of experience, skills, and now have a great point of view on a lot of Ethereum related topics that i can share with others.

Would highly recommend the course.

The instructors are knowledgable and engaging, and the material goes into a nice level of detail for someone starting out with ethereum. It goes through best practices for solidity development and testing, then goes into some auxillary technologies like... Read More web development to bring a contract to the real world. I think the course could continue deeper into solidity, covering topics like state channels, or more generally off-chain actions that can be submitted to the chain at a later date.

There were 3 projects and I think 3 mini "challenges" that were more like recreating famous hacks on smart contracts. All of the projects were pretty basic, and they were all designed by the instructors and implemented by the students. There was no opportunity to design your own use case and then build it.

What I think could be improved would be to spend less time on web development, since the instructors don't have the same level of expertise in that, and it's something that can be learned elsewhere pretty easily. I would replace those weeks with more solidity (either a deeper look into the EVM, maybe a review of some complex deployed DAPP contracts, something more on topic). I would also like to do something more collaborative with other students. If not a group project, at least some time to all get together and chat, maybe a Q&A livestream with the instructors or something.

All in all, I think there are other courses out there that provide more "value", either something free like crypto zombies, or Steven Grider's course on Udemy. The B9 course is far more in depth, but the first 2-3 weeks of the B9 course are 90% covered by those other options, and then the final 2-3 weeks of the B9 course are sort of auxillary to the core of ethereum development. So there's a core 2-3 weeks in the middle where you're getting instruction that you won't find elsewhere, but there's a bigger part of the course where you're getting instruction that you can find elsewhere for cheaper. In any case, throughout the course, the instruction is good, and the instructors are active in answering questions, so I'd definitely say the course is offered in good faith, and I think they're working on finding the sweet spot for material and pacing.

In sum a very good course and I have learned a lot, also the support via slack was really great. I can really recommend this course. The crypto part is a bit hard and I missed a little bit the application development with node.js and chaincode. I think... Read More in this section there should be a little bit more done also more background information would be nice, maybe with video lectures.

Pros:
- Access to a thorough and deep curriculum
- Each section links to 1 or more related articles, which allows the student to efficiently go more in depth on a topic if they would like to
- I liked the idea of having the accompanying slack channel, but... Read More it needs work

Cons:
- Slack channel instructors were sometimes not responsive. I understand that they're busy and there are many students but there were times when questions would go unanswered for days and then when there was an answer it would sometimes be vague and not resolve the issue
- Some of the material was either slightly out dated or unclear which could lead to errors in trying to run code.