Haskell & Coffee ☕

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Haskell & Coffee

Hundreds, if not thousands, of developers are currently learning Haskell, aiming to afterwards become Plutus developers and start building smart contracts on Cardano.

For many people, Haskell is quite challenging since it is a functional programming language, which is quite different from the most common programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, Java and C-like languages, which are imperative programming languages. Therefore, developers need to adjust their mindset when learning it; this may cause confusion for beginners and experienced developers, especially when they are learning by themselves.

At the same time, most learning content available to learn Haskell is not related to Cardano or smart contracts, so learning independently using openly available resources might be too distant to the final application for some students, which might discourage them when they face new challenges.

A possible solution to these problems is attending a fun and welcoming virtual environment, with colleagues and experienced tutors to help them on improving their skills from scratch, step by step, until they can develop their first applications and more. This is the idea behind Haskell & Coffee, a virtual, weekly meetup where tutors and students meet for a couple of hours to work and learn together.

The first iteration of Haskell & Coffee will last 12 weeks. The sessions will increase gradually in complexity. All sessions will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube, so new students can catch up with past content and join the sessions even if they didn't know about them from the start.

Partnerships

The proposing team works closely with other educational initiatives in the Catalyst ecosystem, such as Gimbalabs and Catalyst School.

These sessions will be offered in partnership with Catalyst School, in order to reach a broader audience that already follows that project, and, eventually, experts from Gimbalabs will be invited to participate in some Haskell & Coffee sessions as tutors and special guests.

Why submitting in 'Community Events'?

With the Haskell & Coffee initiative, we are aiming at onboarding new Haskell and potentially Plutus developers into the Catalyst Ecosystem. It has been a known pain of the community that we are lacking blockchain developers, and most Community Events initiatives are focused on general onboarding.

Haskell & Coffee aims at being one entry point for more technical new Catalyst members who are willing to learn and work hands on, either on their own projects or by supporting other projects ideated by the other community members.

Roadmap

After receiving funding, we will run the hangout, caffeine powered coding sessions for 12 weeks straight, during the period of February to April 2022.

Success Metrics

After 3 months, we will have ended our first iteration of Haskell & Coffee workshops. Therefore this proposal will be completely delivered by then.

As KPIs to measure the success of this initiative, we will track:

• Total number of participants in all sessions.
• The retention rate, i.e., what percentage of participants continued until the end of the sessions.

Team

Matthias Sieber

• Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
• worked on Liqwid through MLabs internship
• Conflict Resolution Specialist (Mediator, Facilitator, Peacekeeper, Educator)
• BA in Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacebuilding
• Master of Dispute Resolution
• Community-elected Moderator on Cardano Stack Exchange
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer (1st cohorts)
• Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
• Catalyst Circle member representing the Cardano Foundation
• Cardano Ambassador
• Built successful marketplaces, startups, SMBs, and mission-driven teams
• Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member

Eli Selkin, L.C.S.W., M.S

• Professional Software Engineer for over 5 years
• Plutus Pioneer
• Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
• ML architect
• B.A. in Psychology

Ganesh N

• Professional Software Engineer for over 8 years
• Plutus Pioneer (1st cohort)
• Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
• Has lead development of large scale applications
• Experience in the financial services industry

Budget

• Tutor cost: $100/hr
• Preparation time per session per tutor: 1.5hr
• Session duration: 2hr
• Total cost per session: $100 x 2 x 3.5 = $700
• Total number of sessions: 12
• Total cost: $700 x 12 = $8200