Work Hard yes. Party Hard yes - A Polygon Fellow's journey

Shlok. — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:00:25 +0000

10,000 applications for selecting 50. Obviously I thought I wasn't getting in.
Then came the mail.

You're accepted to the builder's track of the Fellowship '22.

I was super stoked to be a part, the dream had become a reality. Finally got the chance to be a part of the country brightest, best and most fun blockchain devs.

The 1st month of the fellowship was remote, giving me time to iterate on my idea and to learn various technologies that'd help me solve the challenge.
With my mentor's Aravindh Kumar, CMO Arcana help, I was able to figure out some technical and business challenges of the product and laid out the implementation strategy for the coming weeks.

For the 2nd month, all the fellows were invited to The Polygon Hacker House in Bengaluru. Meeting these brilliant folks, interacting with them and collaborating with them unlocked a different set of my abilities I didn't know existed.

Throughout the week, we had speaker events from the top business and technical minds from the field of blockchain technology, and also had impromptu networking sessions.(sometimes till 1AM. Well web3 doesn't sleep)

Like all amazing the things, the time at the hacker house had come to an end. In the end, we even had Top VC's visit us and give personal feedback on our project ideas and provided assistance on how to turn these projects into viable businesses.

The learnings during the weeklong trip at the hacker house enabled me to build on the project.

The result of the fellowship?
(https://bytekode.vercel.app) -> A multichain smart contract analysis platform that enables devs to decode smart contract functions with AI-assistance.

A developers' journey through the Celo India Fellowship '21

Shlok. — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 12:22:49 +0000

What is Celo & what's the fellowship about?

About Celo

Celo is a mobile-first blockchain platform that lets anyone with a smartphone access the world of crypto and decentralized finance. Read more about it here:
Celo Org.

Celo India Fellowship '21

Celo India Fellowship is an 8 week program conducted by Devfolio wherein the fellows learn about the Celo blockchain eco-system and the different tools and tech for development. The learning process is usually 4 weeks, where each week the fellows and mentors get together to discuss our progress.

My Selection Journey

I've been an avid hackathoner since the beginning of the year and regularly participated in hackathons conducted by Devfolio, that's when I came across this program.

I submitted my fellowship application and had an interview scheduled a couple weeks later.

In the interview call, I was asked some basic questions regarding Celo's mission, protocol and few basic questions related on blockchain.

I previously had some blockchain development experience on Ethereum & Polygon and full-stack development with React-Typescript, Tailwind & Node. I was asked some questions on these topics and to differentiate between the Celo & Ethereum eco-system.

I answered all the questions with confidence and was really happy with the interview. A few days later I got a selection letter and I consider myself really lucky and blessed to be a part of 10 students from more than 1000 applications for the first batch of CIF.

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The Development

Week 1 & 2 📝

Kicked off the fellowship with learning the basics of Celo protocol, the various tools of the eco-system and taking a deeper dive into blockchain.

Week 3 📝

For the third week we were tasked with creating a mini-project based on our learnings during the first two weeks of the fellowship. I had decided to create a payments checkout page that could be used for ecommerce stores to accept payments in Celo.

Week 4 📝

For the final week, all the fellows were given a case study on existing apps in the ecosystem. I was tasked with doing a case study on the The Graph Protocol. Link to the case study: Case Study - The Graph

The Final Project 🚀🚀

Based on my project on week 3, I had decided to build a B2B invoicing platform for merchants to accept payments using CeloUSD.

Merchants simply have to enter their email ids to create accounts(no passwords whatsoever) and they'll be taken to a dashboard which allows them to create payment links to accept payments.

The decentralized login is done through Magic, frontend was designed through React Typescript & TailwindCSS, the backend is done through Express JS & Supabase is the chosen database.

To Summarize

The 8 week fellowship was instrumental in my learning of blockchain technologies, and elevated my research(read googling skills), programming and development acumen.

As Devfolio puts it: NEVER STOP BUILDING.

DEV Community: Shlok.