A .NET Dinosaur in Web3. Day 1 - First Smart Contract

I've been writing .NET for many years. Today I deployed my first smart contract.
Here's what actually happened.

I'd like to share my journey into Web3 — every single day.
Maybe it'll be helpful for someone out there.

I love what I do — really. I'm a .NET Dinosaur and Azure-passionate developer,
but let's be honest — the .NET niche isn't exactly overflowing with money 💵.
I've been meaning to try something new for a while. Something with a cool and
live market. Something different. So I chose Web3.

The Setup: I Built Myself an AI Mentor

Instead of drowning in YouTube tutorials and boring courses, I did something
a little different. Well — I have ADHD. And I know my brain. It needs dopamine
to stay focused (weird combo, ADHD person and software engineer — but for me,
coding is my dopamine). My brain needs a clear win every single day, not a
promise of understanding. So I configured Claude as my personal AI mentor:
one goal per day, theory only when it's actually needed, and an honest debrief
of where I got stuck.

Think of it as a personal trainer who never judges you for asking "stupid"
questions, and is available 24/7.

So — today was Day 1.

The Goal

Deploy your first smart contract to a test network and see its address
on the blockchain.

Simple, concrete — and I received detailed instructions, step by step.

What I Actually Did

1. Set up MetaMask. "Piece of cake" — really. I already had an account,
   but I'd forgotten my keys (things happen). So I had to create a new one.

2. Switched to the Sepolia test network. A staging environment where
   everything works exactly like the real Ethereum network — but you're not
   using real money.

3. Got free test ETH. ETH is needed for "gas" — the fee you pay for
   every piece of code the blockchain executes. It's free, but finding a working
   faucet with an empty wallet took 3 attempts.
   (I'm a beginner — I don't have funds for that yet 😅)

4. Wrote my first Solidity contract in Remix IDE. Solidity, by the way,
   reads really easily — like other typed languages. For a .NET brain, it's
   immediately familiar: classes, constructors, typed fields, public methods.

5. Deployed it. One click, one MetaMask confirmation, 30 seconds of
   waiting — and pure happiness when I received a contract address.

Where I Got Stuck

MetaMask's UI has changed. Sometimes my AI mentor provided instructions
for the old version, so finding things took a little more time than expected.

Three faucets, one winner. Getting free test ETH required more tries
than expected:

Day 1 Score: 9/10

Easier than expected, honestly. The .NET background helps more than I thought —
typed languages, deployment concepts, staging vs production thinking. It all
maps over. I played with the code and the environment.

Solidity feels like home. A strange, decentralised, immutable home — but home.

Stage: Dinosaur 🦕 — mapping the terrain.

See you on Day 2. 🚀