Hi everyone!
I have been learning smart contract programming for a while and have been sharing my process on my blog. To this point, I was writing blog posts about weekly projects or the solutions to the CTFs, but not about my progress.

I decided to share monthly recaps for the previous month and goals for the next month. I think this will help me in the future as a feedback mechanism, and let me see if I am still on track.

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What did I do in March?

My biggest achievement in March was submitting the final project and completing the Alchemy University Bootcamp. As my final project, I've created a decentralized application that integrates soulbound NFTs to surgical consents, and I published my blog post about this project on the 4th of March. My project has been approved and I got my certification a few weeks later. Check that out!

What else?

I know a lot of people are saying that don't get stuck in the tutorial hell and build something, and I agree with them. But, I had to watch Patrick Collins' 32 hours long freecodecamp solidity course. I had to. Even if everyone says "just do one course", I knew that this video is like a sacred temple, and should be visited.

I studied that video and I'm glad I did it. Yes, there were some parts that were repeating with the Alchemy course, but there were also many different parts too. Actually, taking the Alchemy course before this one helped me a lot to finish it much quicker and grasp some of the knowledge better. I know this space is moving fast and everything is changing but I think I will visit that video a few more times in the future too. Because I know that it has so much value and so dense content, which will teach me more things when I watch it again in 6 months with a wider perspective and more experience.

In Patrick Collins' video, I learned how to interact with real-world protocols like Chainlink, Aave and others, I learned how to use mocks and more complex issues too. I also want to add that this video is a follow-along tutorial and it does not force you to do something, if you don't want to do it, you don't. I think the best part of the Alchemy bootcamp was that. You have to do a lot of things by yourself to complete that course, and it forces you to build & learn. So, long story short: I'm glad I completed both and here are my Patrick NFTs.

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Okay, what else?

I'm interested in the security of smart contracts. All the things I learned until this point were for getting the basics, understanding how everything works and learning how to build (at least to some point). From now on, it's time to focus on the security aspect of things.

I started to solve ethernaut challenges in the middle of March, and oh my God! I enjoyed it. I absolutely loved it. Amazing. It was exciting to try to hack those contracts, and the feeling of accomplishment was amazing on some challenges. I have to say I struggled a lot on some of them and needed to look for solutions a few times, but in general, I did most of the challenges by myself.

In the last two weeks of March, I studied ethernaut challenges and completed 25 of them. Only 3 left. I also created an ethernaut blog series on my blog, which will consist of three posts, and published the first two.

March was an extremely productive month for me and I improved significantly. I hope I can keep up like this.

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Goals for the April

• Complete the ethernaut challenges and publish the last part of the blog series.

• Focus on security full throttle.

• Start Secureum bootcamp. Attend the Secureum race in April. (Place doesn't matter. Attend the race)

• Start reading past Code4Arena reports

• At the end of April, make one auditing contest submission. It doesn't matter if it's only gas optimization or informational, start contests.