Lovelace Academy: Plutus Experience 2.0

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Walker Leite

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Requested funds in ada

200000

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Guide programmers in developing real-world dApps with Cardano. Build 'Plutus Experience 2.0,' review and add new use-cases. Enhance developer experience with templates and additional tooling.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

NO

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

MIT for GitHub, public domain for all video material.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

Besides Plutus Experience, which has been on the Lovelace Academy channel, we have completed the written material production. During the process, we have identified several areas that require attention:

• Revisiting each module:
• Review video content reducing its length, transforming video content in text and image material
• Review breakthrough, keeping it as a solution for the exercise.
• Mostly in the last modules, add more focus on concepts, beyond explaining the steps to build the solution.
• Look for dependencies upgrades and fix breaking changes;
• Upgrade examples to optimized nix-templates
• Improve nix loading times on each module by using materialization or other caching techniques
• Additional modules (subject to change)
• Using different backends (Blockfrost, Kupo+Ogmios)
• Staking
• Property based testing
• State machines
• Plutarch
• Registering NFTs
• On-Chain Governance
• Generative NFTs
• Support and community engagement
• Through community channels (Discord, StackOverflow)
• Through weekly cohort’s
• Peer to peer mentoring
• GitHub Issues

We prioritize Plutus as a single integrated solution for a focused learning experience. While to-Plutus solutions are still developing, we leverage the abundance of documented Haskell examples and idioms (Haskell, PureScript). Nix is being used as infrastructure glue code between on-chain and off-chain code.

In our course, we prioritize real practical usage scenarios, ensuring that every subject is reproducible and applicable to real-world situations.

The demonstration of impact comes from engagement on the community channels and number of projects being created because of Plutus Experience. Our GitHub has 17 stars, the majority of it being developer profiles from different languages. Our YouTube has 1k subscribers and 9k views, with a weekly average of ~30 new subs every week.

The first Plutus Experience module was released on Nov 22

So far we have few projects directly and indirectly related to Plutus Experience:

• nix-templates (https://github.com/LovelaceAcademy/nix-templates): Created to support the project bootstrap process on Plutus Experience;
• ctl-nix (https://github.com/LovelaceAcademy/ctl-nix): cardano-transaction-lib overall tooling improvement;
• cardano-nix (https://github.com/cardanonix): community effort to improve Cardano nix solutions.

And testimonials of key contributors of Cardano ecosystem:

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

We believe we’re impacting two main areas of the challenge:

• Technical documentation & education: By producing a specialized written material and video material demonstrating how to solve real-world challenges using Cardano technology;
• Technical standards: By working together with upstream dependencies to guarantee that CIPs and other standards are being followed;
• Research & development: By introducing a robust stack as an alternative to developing Plutus and Cardano;
• Native asset tools & software: By introducing a way of minting and managing native tokens using the browser.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Besides not being directly funded on Catalyst before, I’m an active proposer and Cardano builder with previous history of deliverables, including Plutus Experience first version. Maria is a community educator, SPO and well known in the ecosystem, she is helping me mostly with community engagement and material publication.

We’ve been working together to guarantee the delivery of the previous Lovelace Academy Plutus proposal.

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

• Review, upgrade and writing of 6/12 modules
• 2 hour cohorts every 2 weeks

• Review, upgrade and writing of 12/12 modules
• 2 hour cohorts every 2 weeks

• Publication of 3 additional modules
• 2 hour cohorts every 2 weeks

• Publication of 3 additional modules
• 2 hour cohorts every 2 weeks

• 
  

• Publication of 3 additional modules
• 2 hour cohorts every 2 weeks

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Walker Leite - Plutus Pioner / Instructor

GitHub: https://github.com/klarkc

Author of Plutus Experience (LovelaceAcademy)

Maria Carmo - Educator / Community Manager

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-carmo

Cardano SPO

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

• 1x Plutus developers (U$ 35/hour) x 12 months (2,080 hours) = U$ 72,500
• 1x Community manager U$ 200 per month Telegram and Discord = U$ 2,400

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Bringing new developers to the ecosystem is guaranteeing the next generation of builders, we need to build an easy path so people can follow and learn with less friction possible.

Every new builder we know complains about the lack of material, we did a great job in Plutus Experience, and we want to bring it further to more people with updated content.

With the reward incentives in the Lovelace Academy: Learn Platform, we’ll reward developers who complete or contribute with the program.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund Rules and also that data in the submission form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept