Contributing to Solana feels familiar in the wrong ways.
At first glance, many of the surface concepts line up. Accounts exist. Transactions exist. Programs execute on-chain. Coming from Ethereum, it’s easy to assume the rest will follow naturally.
It doesn’t.
What I’m realizing is that the biggest challenge isn’t learning new tools — it’s unlearning old defaults.
Tooling Forces You Closer to the System
Solana’s developer tooling is still early.
Things work, but not always in the way you expect. Debugging requires more direct interaction with runtime behavior. Abstractions are thinner. When something breaks, you don’t just inspect the contract — you inspect how accounts, programs, and execution contexts interact.
At first, this feels uncomfortable. You spend more time reasoning about state transitions and execution paths than writing application logic.
But over time, it starts to feel intentional.
The system doesn’t hide its mechanics. It makes you face them.
Sequential Thinking Doesn’t Translate
Ethereum trains you to think in sequences.
Transactions arrive. They execute one after another. State changes are globally ordered. Even when things get congested, the mental model remains linear.
Solana breaks that instinct immediately.
Here, programs must declare what they touch. Accounts aren’t implicitly shared — they’re explicitly passed. If two transactions don’t conflict, there’s no reason for them to block each other.
This forces a different way of thinking. Instead of asking when something executes, you start asking what resources it needs.
Execution becomes a coordination problem, not a queue.
Explicit State Changes Application Design
This shift changes how applications are structured.
On Ethereum, it’s natural to rely on global ordering guarantees. On Solana, you design around state access. You think about contention, parallelism, and isolation from the beginning.
It adds complexity upfront. There’s no avoiding that.
But it also removes a ceiling I didn’t realize I had accepted.
Things I used to assume were “just how blockchains work” — delays, retries, unpredictable execution — start to look less fundamental and more like design trade-offs I inherited without questioning.
The Ecosystem Moves Fast — Because It Has To
Everything here is evolving quickly.
Runtime changes land often. Tooling improves in bursts. Patterns shift as people learn what works and what doesn’t. You can’t treat the platform as static.
That pace can be exhausting, but it also creates a tight feedback loop. Builders influence infrastructure. Infrastructure shapes what builders attempt next.
It feels less like working on a finished platform and more like helping define one.
A Broader Realization
What this transition has clarified is that blockchains aren’t interchangeable environments.
They embed assumptions — about execution, about safety, about scalability — and those assumptions quietly shape everything built on top.
Effective contribution isn’t about porting ideas wholesale. It’s about aligning with the philosophy encoded in the runtime.
For me, working on Solana has been less about learning new syntax and more about revising my mental model of how decentralized systems can behave under load.
That revision feels uncomfortable.
Which usually means it’s worth doing.
