Been spending the last ~10 days getting hands-on with Solana as part of a hackathon. Went in expecting things to feel completely different from what I’m used to.
It wasn’t as far off as I thought.
What I’ve Done So Far
- Generated a keypair + airdropped devnet SOL
- Created a wallet and checked balance programmatically
- Understood SOL vs lamports
- Connected a browser wallet
- Read on-chain data (accounts, transactions)
- Fetched recent transactions
- Built a small browser dashboard
- Compared devnet vs mainnet data
- Tried mapping accounts vs traditional databases
What Took a Bit to Understand
Fetching data wasn’t the hard part - it’s pretty similar to calling APIs.
The shift was in how things are structured:
Accounts aren’t users, they’re just data containers
There’s no backend I control
Data is public, transactions update state
The point where it clicked was pulling transaction history for a wallet and realizing there’s no access layer in between. You just query it.
Building in the Browser
Moving from scripts to a simple dashboard helped a lot.
Showing balances, listing transactions, switching networks - it made things feel more real than just running CLI scripts.
MLH Session
Also attended an MLH session with Brianna (Solana Developer Relations). where she briefed on:
- Anchor Framework
- Validators
- PDAs
- Program structure on Solana
I haven’t used these hands-on yet, but it gave me a better picture of what’s happening under the hood.
Still Figuring Out
Program design
Handling storage (accounts + rent)
Better ways to query data beyond basic RPC
