S4 Intent: 3
Proposed Mission: Optimism Solidity Survivor Bootcamp
Proposal Tier: Ember
Baseline grant amount: 48,484 OP
% of total available Intent Budget: 04.85%
Please check here if access to upfront capital is a barrier to completing your Mission and you would like to be considered for a small upfront cash grant: [yes]
Alliance name: BCAMP
Alliance Lead: LizardBrain
Contact info: lizardbrain@bcamp.dev
L2 recipient address: 0x0E73F03b5B553CD295842Cb5f9A04768B6225aAc
Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:
LizardBrain - Director
- BCAMP - Director
- yAcademy - Core Team Member
- Icewater.money - Operations
Samuel Miranda - Applicant Outreach
- BCAMP - Communications
Obakeng Mothibedi - Participant Support
- BCAMP - Operations
Justin Bebis - Partnerships
- Byte Masons - Chief Executive
- Reaper.farm - Lead Architect
- Granary.finance - Lead Architect
- BCAMP - Guest Speaker
Please explain how this Mission will help accomplish the above Intent:
A bootcamp could be one of the most effective ways to share the Optimistic Vision if the bootcamp experience is shared via live streams, articles, and videos about the participant’s experience. One bootcamp doesn’t scale very well, but real life stories of developers making a transition into Blockchain will resonate. It will also allow the participants, who will be experienced developers that will contribute to the ecosystem, to internalize the Optimistic vision by having them build projects that have been proposed as ecosystem contributions. (Optimism Ecosystem Contributions 🔴✨ · GitHub). For nerds like us, watching developers overcome challenges and build cool stuff, could be as engaging as Survivor itself.
This experience would be a 6 session virtual program where participants choose a project from the proposed contributions or propose their own project to build on Optimism. Each session focuses on one aspect of the development process as follows:
- Session 1: Idea Generation and Proposals
- Session 2: Architecture and AI
- Session 3: Production Smart Contract
- Session 4: Web3 Front-End Development
- Session 5: Security
- Session 6: Final Project Judging
Final project judges and guest speakers each week will be invited from across the Optimism Ecosystem to provide feedback on the projects and connect with the developer participants.
We make the entire experience interesting by rating and giving candid feedback on projects during every session and eliminating the lowest rated project each week. This candid feedback and elimination anticipation makes for good content. We plan on live streaming sessions 2-6 and doing write-ups to document how the participants explore and overcome challenges to increase the awareness of people building on Optimism. One participant in the first cohort of BCAMP leveraged his experience to land a role as a smart contract developer less than one month after the cohort which increased his salary over 25%, and continues to excel in the role.
What makes your Alliance well-suited to execute this Mission?
LizardBrain is the director of BCAMP, a new Solidity bootcamp focused on experiential learning, and was one of the original team members that started a blockchain security program called yAcademy in 2021. Along with Sam and Obakeng, the team has run multiple successful bootcamps through the entire process of finding and screening candidates, managing the sessions, and helping participants find developer roles where they can thrive after the bootcamp. We have the developer network, software infrastructure, and processes to smoothly run bootcamps.
Justin Bebis is an experienced blockchain developer and active community member in the Optimism Ecosystem. He helps ensure that the curriculum and projects are relevant and up to date with the needs of the industry. He also has connections with blockchain media outlets to facilitate the sharing of stories and content.
We bring a modern reality approach to education that makes the bootcamp experience much more memorable than traditional learning environments. The bootcamp is not just a training program; it’s a transformative learning environment that stimulates curiosity, fosters a thirst for knowledge, and most importantly, kindles the internal spark of motivation that we call “ignition” in participants.
Please list a critical milestone. The critical milestone should be a measure of whether you’ve made best efforts to execute what is outlined in this proposal or not. If you fail to achieve your critical milestone, your grant may be clawed back.
- Graduate a cohort of 20 developers that build projects on Optimism.
How should Token House delegates measure progress towards this Mission: These should focus on progress towards completion. Including expected completion dates for each is recommended.
- Get at least 50 bootcamp applicants - By July 30th, 2023
- Review applicants and make acceptance decisions for up to 30 developers - August 1st, 2023
- Run the 6 session bootcamp - September 18th, 2023
- Measure the overall engagement of session live streams, participant story write-ups, and how-to articles from the bootcamp - Ongoing
How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission? These should be focused on performance and may be used by badgeholders to assess your Mission’s impact in the next round of RetroPGF.
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KPI 1 - Bootcamp graduates
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KPI 2 - Graduates placed in Jobs
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KPI 3 - Total Engagement with bootcamp related articles, videos, and podcasts shared via social media.
Breakdown of Mission budget request:
- Bootcamp Participants - 5 MVP participants and 3 winning project teams will each receive awards 1K OP (8K total)
- Organizers - Will be reimbursed up to 6K OP each (24k total) based on contributions.
- Content Creation - 18K OP for generating articles, videos, and podcasts about the projects, participants, and experience and will be shared with the broader ecosystem.