# Your First Contract
Buckle up, we will now get first-hand experience with CosmWasm, by starting up our own CosmWasm-enabled blockchain (just one node for now), modifying an existing contract, deploying it to our system, and executing it via the cli. If you are more research first then get your hands dirty second person, you should go ahead to Architecture read it first and then head back here.
We will not dive into smart contract development in this section to provide an easy to digest introduction. Also, you can follow the steps here to test out smart contracts live on a testnet without drowning in smart contract development details. We will demonstrate setting up environment, compiling, deploying, and interacting. Then to make things a bit more interesting, we will show modifying the example escrow contract by adding a backdoor to it in the Hijack Escrow tutorial. It exposes an identical API to the original one, but has one hidden command added. This also shows the importance of verifying the source code behind any contract you run.
This is designed for programmers who are comfortable with the command-line and using Linux or MacOS. It is helpful to have a basic understanding of Rust and Go, but we will lead you through, so fast learners need no prior knowledge. The next tutorial, name service will assume knowledge of these basics. And it will show all the development flow from 0 to production.
# Sections
Installation will show you how to setup the required software tooling for CosmWasm.
Setting up Environment will show you how to setup the client environment, interacting with faucet.
Downloading and Compiling Contract will demonstrate downloading and compiling smart contract code to wasm byte code.
Interacting with Contracts will show deploying, initializing and executing smart contracts.
Next Steps is the last part of the tutorial that wraps up and sails you to the next dock, meaning new learning resources.
# Video Version
The coding sections for smart contracts are also available as a series of videos, leading you through the code structure (opens new window).
