There is a handful of opportunities where you get to learn with highly motivated individuals and get paid for doing so, and Polygon Fellowship sits right at the top. The Polygon fellowship is of 8 weeks, wherein seven weeks are online, and the final week is spent IRL in a hacker house organized by Devfolio and Polygon.
Let me begin by discussing the first seven weeks of the fellowship, each week consists of an assignment, and the week is spent focusing on a specific use case of Blockchain such as DeFi, DAO, Storage etc. Blockchain is such a vast tech space that it is very intimidating for most beginners, but the curriculum is well designed to get a good glimpse of different areas of Blockchain. The resources and support provided by Devfolio are helpful, and the assignments certainly took away some of my weekends.
I was assigned to the ThirdWeb cohort and mentored by Samina and Raza. They were very helpful in ideating for my capstone project. They helped me understand how an end user perceives a decentralized application and what they would be ideally looking for in one. Every week we would have speakers give sessions related to the theme of the week and give us an insight into how they regularly dabble with these technologies at their workplace.
So more about the capstone project, All the beginner fellows had to demo a project on the final day of the fellowship, and we had to ideate and plan it during the seven weeks online. From the beginning of the fellowship, I have been ideating about finding a way to collect data by leveraging blockchain protocols. The aim was to ensure that we do not rely on someone's discretion and that they would not misuse our data to profit from it. It is pretty tricky to solve this problem at a grand scale, so I decided to make changes at an atomic level in the form collection services. During this period, I also found a teammate: Kundan Mishra, who shared the same vision as me about data collection services.
Now let's jump to the final week of the fellowship, the best week. Aniket from Devfolio had promised us that it would be ten times better and would also be better than another hacker house(shall not be named, lol). So expectations were high going in, and boy did they deliver. The hacker house was set up at a luxurious hotel in Bangalore, The Paul. Each of the fellows had their rooms inside two-bedroom suites. A grand hacker hall was created, consisting of 27-inch 4k monitors everywhere ( I hoped they would give me one of those as swag xD). We had sessions with industry experts every day for about 6-8 hours, each about different topics that were very interesting. I cannot recap all the sessions, but some of my favourite sessions were by Mudit Gupta from Polygon, Harsh from Polygon and Pranav Maheshwari from Graph Protocol. I enjoyed Mudit Gupta's session and was happy to know that he is a fellow Rustacean and had previously worked with Substrate, so I got to ask questions related to that.
Usually, or at least in my case, I rarely get to talk about Blockchain news with my friends and share insights; however, during the week, I got to discuss various Blockchain-related things openly. We had two significant hacks that week, which would be the first thing we discussed over breakfast. I remember asking about Blockchain Bridges being vulnerable to attacks. On the following day, We witnessed the chaotic nomad hack, which was ironic. Some fellows helped me understand the hack A-Z which was damn cool. The hacker hall was a fantastic place for coders to work during the night and have deep talks as the night progressed.
Lastly, I would like to talk about the swags we received, and there were so many. We received many T-shirts and a cool bag from Polygon, which I will always take with me. My favourite T-shirt was the latest NSB T-shirt by Devfolio. There are a lot of things I'm missing out here in this blog, but I can conclude that this is the best fellowship I've ever been a part of, and I hope beginners get a chance to be a part of it.
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