Advice

eannak89

I just dropped out of school before I was meant to sit my exams as I felt I wasn't learning anything that interested me. I want to move into software development as computer science was the only subject that interested me. I saw the upturn Stellar took recently and it has intrigued me even more now. Any tips/ advice on how I could learn more about the software behind stellars?

jma

eannak89

Disclaimer - I am not familiar with the Stellar Core code base!

The software behind Stellar can broadly be grouped into two sections: Core and Horizon.

As its name implies, Core is the “backbone of the Stellar network”. The network itself is a collection of Stellar Core instances.
Horizon is the API through which applications and developers interact with Core.

To begin with, https://www.stellar.org/developers/ is probably the place to start. Here you will find links to various references, guides and the software libraries used to call the Horizon API.

The guides sections, specifically https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/get-started/ provide a good overview of both the Horizon API, and Stellar core.

If you are looking to start developing an application using Stellar, then this reference section https://www.stellar.org/developers/horizon/reference/ would be a good read. The various libraries included will allow you to interface with Horizon using a variety of languages.

With regards to the actual code powering Stellar:

The code for Core can be found here: https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core

The code for the Horizon API can be found here: https://github.com/stellar/horizon

Hope this helps.

bkolobara

Hi eannak89, welcome to GalacticTalk!

Instead of giving you specific advice on this I feel like it's important to give a more general life advice, speaking from my personal experience. Maybe it helps you in some way.

I always loved everything related to computers, but it took me almost 10 years to get my master in CS. You will always get some classes where you don't see the point or feel like it's completely useless. Not only in school, but also at work we need to deal with boring and repetitive tasks. Everyone wishes to work only with the stuff they like at the moment. The good news is, dealing with annoying tasks is a skill you can learn and with time you'll get better at it. This is one of the things that helped me succeed the most: getting shit done when nobody else wanted to do it. If you get a bit out of your comfort zone, I'm sure that you'll get great opportunities.

I don't know your personal situation so I can't tell you what to do, but investing in knowledge is never a bad idea. Maybe sticking with school and switching to a more CS oriented curriculum is not a bad idea. Now when I think back, I would really regret quitting university. I made so many great friends, did amazing internships that leaded me to super cool jobs. Even if I didn't learn anything, this was a great time of my life. You can always try to learn more on the side, but don't miss out on the social activities of being a student. Learning how to deal with people is way more important than writing code.

Depending on how much you know right now, it may take some time until you can make money doing software development. At this point stellar may not even exist anymore. So I think you shouldn't worry about learning stellar concepts now. Instead, you can focus on getting a more general idea about software development. If you have a good foundation, picking a new language and platform won't be hard.

Cheers,
Bernard