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