Remove the boilerplate
The first three commits in the Solana curriculum repo are named github basics, clean up, and remove boilerplate. That was 15 May 2025. The repo held a starter workspace and nothing else.
Anyone who has run a live Solana workshop knows what happens in the first hour. Thirty people sit in a room with laptops open. Half of them have the wrong Rust version, three are compiling tools from source on conference Wi-Fi, and someone is stuck on a laptop error nobody has seen in two years. By the time everyone can run a single test, the session is half over.
After the room empties
I still like giving workshops because a live room shows you, in real time, the exact moment people get lost. Look across the tables and you know within ten seconds whether your explanation of Solana's account model landed.
Then you fly home. Nobody who missed the room gets anything from it, and the demo repository you handed out starts going stale the next time the SDK cuts a release.
I started building the curriculum repo so the material could outlive the trip. Seven tracks sit in there now, taking a developer from blockchain basics and Rust through Anchor, tokens, web frontends, and DeFi. The Anchor track runs fifteen modules and ends with the reader building a multisig wallet from scratch. I wrote the modules and the example programs and worked with a copywriter to clean up my English.
Three months after that first commit, in August 2025, Superteam Kazakhstan and Intebix took the material, translated it into Russian and Kazakh, and recorded thirty academic hours of lectures on top of it for Astana Hub's Solana for Developers program. They graduated more than 2,500 developers in that first cohort, brought the 15-week course into AlmaU, and have since taken over 8,000 learners through the curriculum without me ever standing at the front of the room.
When we audited the repository at the end of October 2025, five of the tracks scored above four out of five on our internal rubric, while the unfinished DeFi track lagged behind. Even in the finished tracks, links had already rotted and examples needed updating for newer releases, so we added a maintenance checklist requiring quarterly reviews and a working demo per module. Open that maintenance file today and the header still says Last reviewed: 2025-09-24. Even the document meant to stop bitrot goes stale if nobody touches it.
Templates that stay green
Reading a course explains how accounts and permissions work, but it still leaves you staring at an empty folder when you sit down to build. That first hour of wiring a wallet button, a network connection, and a build script is where most newcomers quietly close their laptop.
The templates repository already existed to power create-solana-dapp, but it only held a small set of internal starters. In October 2025 I rebuilt the metadata and preview pipeline and wrote the contributor guide so developers across the ecosystem could submit their own starters and have them render directly on solana.com/developers/templates. Twenty-one community templates sit alongside the official starters now, covering everything from payment servers to authentication flows. Automated checks install and build every template on a schedule so broken starters get caught before a developer clones them.
Teaching the agent
By early 2026, most developers in my workshops weren't setting up projects by hand anyway. They were prompting Cursor or Claude Code, and the models were confidently generating outdated Solana code from years-old training data.
On 12 January 2026, I committed the first version of solana-dev-skill, a set of markdown instructions that a coding agent reads before it writes Solana code. Within a week, open-source contributors were fixing mistakes in the examples and wrapping the setup into a single command:
npx skills add solana-foundation/solana-dev-skill
When a human reads a flawed example in a tutorial, they hit the error once and fix it. When a coding agent reads a flawed example in its instructions, it repeats that mistake across every project it touches. Today create-solana-dapp installs the skill into every new project automatically, so the editor knows current Solana patterns before the developer writes their first prompt.
There is an obvious catch in wiring all three pieces together. The skill teaches the coding agent, not the person sitting at the keyboard. A student can now scaffold an app, prompt their editor, and deploy a working program without understanding who is allowed to move funds or why an account check matters. That is why the fifteen-week curriculum still has to exist alongside the templates and the skill, even though prose lessons are the slowest of the three to keep current.
I still get on planes to run workshops. Watching twenty people in a room build something from scratch is still the fastest way to see where the next rough edge is hiding.