Graduating from a boot camp as a Software Engineer was helpful in my decision to focus on blockchain development. I think trying to become a Blockchain Engineer without the fundamentals of software engineering would have been really hard, not saying impossible. Let me explain why.

The Journey

Before joining the boot camp I never did any coding. I purchased programming books such as Python and read about coding throughout the years, knew about HTML, CSS from my Myspace days but never really dived into actual programming.

Attending a boot camp you are hands-on. Yes, you have to read the documentation about a specific programming language, but we had exercises inside of a coding sandbox that had you interacting right away.

What I learned at a boot camp that helped me with blockchain development

I learned how to code and we built out projects for each coding language that we learned. Building out applications and seeing how HTML does this, CSS does this and JavaScript does this, gave me the foundation of how to code. With blockchain development, you still need to interact with the frontend, which means understanding the languages I mentioned above is important.

Interacting with the blockchain

Blockchain development has certain tools that you have to learn, such as web3, smart contracts, blockchain, and much more. If you have a foundation in software engineering or programming in general it's not that hard to learn the material. I was able to pick up on many of the concepts a lot easier. Blockchain is still fairly new, so the tools that are in production may have more bugs than usual, so you have to be a lot more patient with yourself while building out applications.

Overall, it is not impossible to get into blockchain development without having a foundation. You can learn bits and pieces at a time. It's just a lot that you need to learn and it's easy to get confused. If you are new to programming and would like to start straight with blockchain. I would start by reading the bitcoin white paper here and learn the foundations of software development, but keep up to date on the tools that are being used in blockchain. When you have the foundation down. I would find a tutorial to follow such as youtube.com/results?search_query=dapp+unive... Here you will find a lot of great resources.

I hope that this helps. Happy coding!