TechNERD Mission End of Season Update
The TechNERD mission proposal was designed to increase technical support in the Optimism Discord Server. We’ve learnt a lot from this program, but overall the program went very well! TechNERDs hit the ground running, making PRs for docs fixes, updating guides and most importantly supporting their fellow developers to deploy!
Critical Milestone 2 was set over optimistically and did not account for varying difficulty and size of support tickets, however the other Critical Milestones where hit, and the overall goal of the Mission (being developer support) was more than accomplished. As a result we believe this Mission should receive its grant.
Critical Milestones
Milestone 1: 
Training TechNERDs
TechNERDs complete training, 4 weeks after program kick off. TechNERDs should receive the cash portion of this grant during the training to cover equipment costs. Program participants agree to return the cash portion of the grant if they do not complete the remainder of the milestones.
TLDR: Despite the Mission proposal not receiving cash grants, participation in the training was good and resulted in 9 candidates.
Details on Training
Attendance started strong, peaking in the second week of the training. By week 3 the class attendance began to filter attendance. We finished strong with 9 TechNERDs-in-training.
Training material was focused on deeper sections of the Optimism codebase. The idea of the course was not to take participants from 0 to 1 (no experience to beginner) but for participants already deeply comfortable with the web3 development environment, and ideally the Optimism ecosystem, to gain a deeper insight. This insight was essential for developer support.
Exercises during the training focused on topics that have a high frequency support need.
Milestone 2: 
Supporting Optimism Developers
Each TechNERDs should be active in the Optimism Discord server (defined as a minimum of 40 messages a week), and close (solve) at least 3 tech support tickets a week, every week, for the 6 weeks after training to qualify for the OP portion of the grant.
TLDR: The aim of 3 technical support tickets a week was overly optimistic for developers who have not provided support before. Out of the 4 active TechNERDs, 0 reached this goal of 3 tickets a week consistently for all 5 (so far) weeks. This goal did not account for different sizes of tickets (some issues take significantly longer to resolve, for example, syncing a node can take up to 3 weeks as such debugging can take a long time).
Details
The support portion of this mission had to be pushed back by a week, resulting in the 6 week deadline being shifted by one week.
Below you can see the recorded tickets closed by each TechNERD over the course of the program. Notes that some TechNERDs start with higher numbers as they are supNERDs (non-technical support).
We believe this overly optimistic goal should not redact from the real impact the TechNERD program has had on developer support, and that this goal should be considered met.
Milestone 3: Overall Developers Support Performance
The TechNERDs program should, as a whole, answer a minimum of 30 support tickets in the 6 weeks. This info is not currently public, but will be posted every month to the governance forum by the Alliance or a superNERD.
TLDR: Cumulatively the TechNERDs closed 68 support tickets, overshooting the goal by ~227%
Details
The distribution of this contribution was nicely spread between the TechNERDs, with Chomtana taking a strong but not disproportionate lead.
We hope to apply next Season to refine and expand the program to meet the needs of the fast growing Optimism developer community!
As always, stay optimistic <3