Publish your Solana NFT journey on DEV

The Scenario

At the beginning of this arc, you minted your first NFT on Solana. You stamped metadata directly onto the mint with the Metadata extension, wrapped it inside a collection using Group and Member extensions, audited every byte on chain, and then mutated the metadata live on devnet just to see what would happen. That is a real arc of work.

In your Web2 life, this is the moment where a colleague would stop by your desk and ask “wait, you built what?” You would try to explain it in three sentences and immediately realize that your understanding has more shape than your explanation does. You would open a blank doc, start writing, and somewhere around paragraph three you would discover the thing you only half understood. Writing is how engineers turn moves into mental models.

Today you are going to do exactly that. You are going to publish a short technical post on DEV about what you learned building NFTs on Solana this past week. Not a marketing post. Not a recap of every line of code. A post that helps the next Web2 developer who lands on Solana wondering whether NFTs are still just JPEGs with an owner field.

The Challenge

What you’ll need

• A free DEV account (sign up with GitHub if you do not have one)
• The notes, code, and screenshots from Days 44 through 47
• Your favorite Markdown editor, or just the in-browser editor on dev.to
• About 30 to 45 minutes of focused writing time

Steps

1. Open the new post editor on DEV and give your post a working title. Something concrete beats something clever. Try a frame like “What I learned minting NFTs on Solana with Token Extensions” or “Solana NFTs without Metaplex: a week of Token Extensions.”
2. Write a short hook in your first two sentences. State the question a Web2 developer would actually have. For example: “Before this week I thought a Solana NFT was a Metaplex thing. It turns out you can mint a full NFT, with metadata and a collection, using just the Token Extensions program.”
3. Outline the post before you write the body. Four sections work well for this one:
   • The mental model: what an NFT actually is on Solana (a mint with supply 1, decimals 0, and metadata)
   • What you built: the single NFT, the metadata extension, the group and member extensions
   • The surprising part: what was different from what you expected coming from Web2
   • What you would build next
4. Fill in each section in plain language. When you reference a tool or concept, link to the source. Link the Token Extensions overview, the Metadata extension docs, the Group and Member extension docs, and the Solana Explorer. The goal is for a reader to be able to follow your trail without already knowing the ecosystem.
5. Drop in one or two short code blocks from your previous days. Use dev.to fenced code blocks with a language hint so syntax highlighting works:

   ```rust
   // fenced code blocks on dev.to take a language tag right after the backticks
   ```
   

6. Add at least one screenshot. The best candidates are the Explorer view of your NFT showing its metadata, or a terminal screenshot of the audit script from Day 46. Upload images using the image button in the dev.to editor, which inserts the Markdown for you.
7. Set the post metadata in the frontmatter at the very top of the dev.to editor. The block looks like this:

   ---
   title: What I learned minting NFTs on Solana with Token Extensions
   published: true
   tags: solana, nft, rust, webdev
   cover_image:
   ---
   

   Use up to four tags. Good candidates are solana, nft, rust, webdev, tutorial, or blockchain. The cover_image field is optional; if you have a banner image, paste its URL there.
8. End the post with a one-line plug for the challenge and the hashtag. Something like: “This post is part of #100DaysOfSolana. Follow along or jump in any day.”
9. Use the dev.to Preview tab to read your post end to end before publishing. Look for three things:
   • Every code block has a language tag and renders with highlighting
   • Every external link opens the page you intended
   • The first paragraph would make a Web2 developer keep reading
10. Click Publish. Copy the URL of the published post. You will use it in the Submission step below.

What Just Happened

You took a week of scattered code, mint addresses, and Explorer tabs and shaped them into something a stranger can read. That is not a side activity. That is the activity. In Web2 work, the people who get pulled into design reviews, conference talks, and senior roles are almost always the ones who write about what they ship. You just did the Solana version of that.

You also did something quieter but bigger: you forced yourself to compress the model. While you were writing the “mental model” paragraph, you almost certainly hit a sentence where you were not sure if you had it right. That hesitation is where real learning lives. NFTs on Solana are not magic. They are a mint with supply 1, a metadata extension pointing to a JSON file, and optional group membership. The fact that you can now say that without thinking is the whole point of this arc.

Last thing worth noticing: by publishing, you put your name on the search results for “Solana Token Extensions NFT” for the next developer who lands on this question. That is the network. Every Web2 community you have been part of grew this way, one short post at a time.

Resources

• DEV Editor Guide covers every supported Markdown feature, frontmatter field, and embed.
• Dynamic Metadata NFTs with Token Extensions is the official Solana guide that complements what you built this week.
• Solana Token Extensions documentation is the canonical reference for every extension you touched.
• Metaplex Core is the alternative NFT standard worth knowing about so you can explain when you would reach for it instead.

Submission

Share the published URL of your DEV post below!