Coming into Solana, I honestly expected blockchain data to feel abstract and complicated, like something hidden behind layers of cryptography that would be hard to reason about. In my head, I thought it would look nothing like the databases I was used to in Web2. But the reality surprised me. Once I started working with accounts and RPC calls, it began to feel less like “mystery tech” and more like a different kind of database, just one that’s public, distributed, and stricter about how data is accessed and modified. The biggest “click” moment for me was realising that Solana is basically a public database where everything revolves around accounts. Instead of tables and rows, you have accounts and programs. Instead of backend logic controlling access, the network enforces rules through signatures and ownership. That shift, from “my server controls everything” to “the network enforces everything", really changed how I think about building applications. One thing that surprised me was how direct RPC calls are.…