Add Junior Developers to Ecosystem

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Background:

Being part of the Cardano community for the last one year, on one side I find a there is big vision, very well organized and thriving community determined to solve various world problems, on other side I find there is serious shortage of qualified development on Cardano be it Plutus or Atala Prism. 

In the case of India, the IT market is one of the biggest in the country with a market size of $197 billion in 2021 and projected to be $350 billion by 2025. 

The Indian IT industry employs 4 million workers with nearly half being software developers. Yet, of the 2 million software developers in India, only 5,000 or a quarter of one percent (0.25%) possess the necessary blockchain development skills.

Solution:

In India, every year 1.5 Million new engineers pass out of colleges and these fresh engineering graduates ( now on we will refer to them as freshers) are considerably filling the need of software developers in India and globally. These freshers could be also a solution to fill the gap of the developer requirement for Cardano. These freshers' aptitude is generally high, most of them are exposed to C++ or Java or Python programming languages during their 4 years degree course. As they are fresh out of college, it is easier to mold them to new technology and make them ready developers for Cardano blockchain. 

Process:

1. Marketing and Selection: We shall run awareness campaigns on social media and in private groups, universities and institutes and invite interested freshers to join this program to get on project training. Only serious candidates will be selected for the programs. 
2. Training and Development: They will be first guided for self-learning; regular feedback sessions will be organized. Once the self-learning part is complete, they will be put on project learning. After that they offer time to the community on live projects and will be partly compensated by this program. 

So basically 3 stages of learning

1. Guided Self Learning – 2 Months 
2. Project Based Learning – 2 Months 
3. Training on Live Project - 2 Months 

     In 6 months, we shall prepare 20 developers as Plutus and Haskell Developers. These developers will be available for the community to hire and engage on projects. This approach can help to quickly fill the shortage of developers on Cardano. 

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

The Campaign Brief states:

Without the supportive environment for developers, new innovations would be stalled. By supporting this challenge settings, more developers would be drawn into Cardano. There would be a bigger talent pool of developers that Catalyst projects can collaborate with and turn project concepts/Proof of concept into successful protocols which would enhance the growth of Cardano.

Guiding questions

How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?

What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?

What would make it a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create an app?

What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects - either internal or commercial?

This proposal is fully aligned with the challenge setting and guiding questions in a very direct way. Making available more trained developers on Cardano by attracting freshers in India and training them and also giving them on project experience. 

We also designed an onboarding model over 6 months which will make the developers ready to build on Cardano.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Risks:

Two key risks identified and mitigation

1. Not able to attract enough freshers as many pass out with high expectations, particularly on remuneration or they do not continue after initial interest. 
2. We are a well connected network of with universities
3. We shall do presentation to universities on scope and potential of blockchain and cardano
4. Monetary incentive to learn a new tech can compensate for it.
5. Placing ready developers on live community projects.
6. Already connected with various people working on multiple projects on Cardano and finding shortage of developers
7. As partial cost of these developers will be compensated by this proposal, it will be attractive for community projects to hire these developers 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Tasks

1. Marketing and Promotion 
2. Marketing plan to invite freshers to join this program
3. Keep study links and information on leaning organized 
4. Guided Self Study
5. Regular weekly study progress assessment
6. Helping with any queries or doubt they may have
7. Project Based Learning
8. Assigning project – could be sample project or already done projects
9. Continuous assessment of project progress
10. Training on Live Project
11. Identify projects from community and finalize engagement
12. Track and coordinate with project team
13. Providing any assistance to developer

September

Marketing/Promotion Contents ready

50 freshers identified to join the program - out of which 30 will be selected 

Collect resources for self initial learning - for examples join Gimbalabs playground, Atala Prism Canvas, developer resources  

October

Self-Learning over two month and completed

Training projects defined

November/December

Project based Learning done and completed

Live projects identified

We will connect with the Gimbalabs project based learning initiative https://gimbalabs.com/pbl

March/April

Live Project Training completed 

20 new Developers ready on Cardano 

Other Projects involvement

Udai is a member of 3 other proposals in Fund9 however involvement of him directly is not more than 1 hour per day and he has a large team of developers and manager in www.eRevMax.com to execute Fund 9 projects. 

Udai is member of one proposal in Fund 8, the eRevMax team is working in collaboration with other partners. Project shall be delivered before the start of this project. Also, the involvement of Udai is very small as team members are working on deliveries.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399697   

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Key budget components

1. Marketing/Promotion – Marketing required for two specific objectives, one to attract experienced developers and two to community projects sponsors. For these, one content creator person is required
2. Content Creator 1 – for 10 person- days x $250 per day = $2,500
3. Training and development Cost
4. Cardano Tech Expert 1 - for 15 person-days x $400 per day = $6,000
5. Partial project funding while developer work on community projects 
6. 20 Trained Developer incentive for on project work (for two months) = 20 x $750 = $15,000
7. Project managers - 2
8. 2 project managers x for 5 months x $750 per month per person = $7,500

Total Budget requirement $31,000

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Udai Solanki, travel industry technology expert, Founder eRevMax.com 20 years ago, served as CTO and since last two years as CEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/solanki

eRevMax technology team, mostly based in India, including Cotland and Java developers (related to Atala Prism software).

eRevMax is a leading travel B2B integration technology company, founded over 20 years ago and was a leading innovator in many of the industry state of the art solutions such as rate shopping tools and channel managers. The company has over 1000 technology integrations (i.e. travel websites, booking engines, property management systems) and is being used by hotels across the globe.

For more info visit https://www.eRevMax.com or their product website https://www.RateTiger.com view the following link

Udai is already active and is leading a fund 8 funded proposal: TravelerID https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399697 where Atala Prism is being used.

Narendra Das is an Enterprise Software Architect, Developer and Manager, having around 22 years of experience in Software Application Design and Development, Support, Integration and Management https://www.linkedin.com/in/narendra-das-bb375417/

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

• Java/J2EE, Spring, Hibernate
• BigData, Hadoop, HBase
• Python, Scala
• Mule, Pentaho,
• Blockchain – Ethereum ERC 20, ERC 721, Cardano, Haskell, Plutus, Marlowe
• Project Management, Risk Management

Narendra is already self learning plutus and marlew as well as joining the Gimbalabs sessions.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

No. As this provides a start of building a team of Cardano developers and we can carry on training more developers with our cost as we do see there is a serious need for Plutus and Atala Prism developers in the ecosystem. 

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Measurement of the project progress will directly align with the Deliverables & Milestones identified above.

The following milestones will be shared with the Catalyst community through community channels and/or monthly reports:

• Number of developers being trained
• Developers learning progress notes
• Projects assigned and progress
• Feedback from community project team when applicable.

We will present the community with the process of learning and names and profiles of the onboarded developers. We will also provide information about their engagement with the community and projects they are collaborating with.

We will open a dedicated Github to present the progress as well as include all relevant information in the monthly reporting and final report.

At the end of the project based learning we will communicate to the community through social channels and After town hall session about the available team members to collaborate on projects.  

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

20 freshers become Plutus and Haskell Developers with on project experience. 

This set an example in India and increase further aspiration in other developers to learn and become Cardano Blockchain developers. 

Success will also include integrating the developer with projects and companies working on Cardano and while getting paid in a way that we can train and onboard more developers to the ecosystem. We want to build a successful hub of training and onboarding developers.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

New Project