Students often struggle to find an entry-point into the Cardano ecosystem via startups, due to the former's lack of experience and the latter's lack of disposable resources.
In the spirit of the challenge (point 2 of the challenge description), we propose an internship in one of the emerging startups in Cardano, focused on smart contract & infrastructure development.
This is the total amount allocated to Fund 6 months of part-time student internship at Harmonic Laboratories.
None.
The project depends on the existence of Harmonic Laboratories as a legal entity; fortunately, the dependency is already satisfied.
Project will be fully open source.
Between the types of proposals expected in this challenge this is one of the two directives:
Activities to foster student Catalyst proposers and blockchain engineers
→ Increasing the number of student Catalyst proposers and blockchain engineers will lead to the development of the Cardano ecosystem in the future. Specific examples for educating them include holding seminars, creating and translating content, forming a community hub, and so on. Let's make use of your experience and position to promote student onboarding.
We feel that this proposal perfectly matches the description.
Jayden is a CS student and Cardano enthusiast with an existing grasp of the eUTxO model and familiarity with tools for developing on Cardano (Lucid, Aiken, etc...).
At Harmonic Laboratories he will further his experience with Cardano via hands-on mentoring, while contributing to the ecosystem through the development of open source software and infrastructure.
Alongside supporting the onboarding of a new developer to the Cardano community, this proposal will ensure that a tangible open source output is produced which actively enhances the developer and user experience on Cardano.
Jayden's progression as a Cardano developer can be measured by his output, which will be public for the community to judge. This will show Jayden's development throughout the course of the internship, as well as the value of his input in the projects he will be working on at Harmonic Labs.
All the work and projects completed by Jayden will be fully open-source. Therefore, anybody can view the outputs and results on GitHub.
Harmonic Labs is a leading Cardano start-up with numerous ambitious projects. As such, they can be expected to hold Jayden to a high standard. As for Jayden himself, he has experience working in open source cryptocurrency projects in the past (i.e. a big-data and live-streamed analytics platform for on-chain and off-chain data), and his academic results demonstrate his natural talent for computer science and an ability to learn quickly. Given that all work is public, the cardano community (as well as Harmonic Labs) can hold Jayden accountable.
While the primary goal is to onboard Jayden into the Cardano ecosystem in an efficient and effective manner, we also aim to benefit the Cardano community directly via the development of open source software. Hence, at the end of the 6 months, we aim for Jayden to have made a significant contribution to one (or more) of Harmonic Labs' open source projects. We can validate the feasibility of this goal by allowing Jayden to try out multiple roles and projects within Harmonic Labs to determine where he can best fit in and contribute.
Funds will be released biweekly over 6 months. The extra month is allotted to allow for inevitable situations such as exams which may require breaks from development. Funding is wholly contingent on satisfactory contributions to OSS in the specified technology.
The dispersal of funds amounts to ₳1645 per week (24 weeks in total). We believe this is fair compensation for the work that Jayden will be conducting in producing quality open source software to support the Cardano ecosystem.