Community Blockstars Programme Elias Haase, B9Lab - GoerliCon 0|13

yes so by the way this is this is not a stock photo this is actually a picture of the of people in my company just saying okay hey so this is the next big project that we're doing with DoD so I'm Elias I'm one of the founders of p9 lab we've been training people on a theorem since 2015 we were like the first ones who had a full-blown a theorem developer course online and we've been running courses like commercially since then over the past few years we've got courses all across blockchain but there's always there's one thing that's kind of always bothered me a little bit which is like you know we run a whole team to keep the content up-to-date and we run a whole team to do mentoring and grading and feedback and all of that for students but that means that you know it's only affordable to like a few people mostly from the US and Europe so now this is an attempt at changing that and we're gonna need your help so I want to tell you little bit about what we're doing this year we are trying to train a thousand developers for free in 2019 we're planning to do this in two runs of 500 people each one starting in March and one starting in October the way that works is that people can apply background doesn't really matter it's just important that they know how to code already because we can't teach them coding so people can apply they go through a simple coding test and we take the best ones regardless of where they're from and regardless of background and they are get invited into the course the course is then nine weeks self-paced it's like text and videos and pictures we've been running this for years so we're quite good at it and also there is like full-time support by the Mentors there are coding challenges and we've kind of geared everything to to find a good way to teach people remotely and online so for we are planning to do to sponsor half of the seats but we are going to need your help to make this happen and that can take different shapes so either you you know like if you if you're working with a company that is doing something cool in etherium that is doing you know building a framework building tooling or doing something other that is interesting then please get in touch we want to make the process for students as interesting and as kind of colorful as possible so as they go through we want to run remote workshops and kind of video lectures and discussion groups through video calls and also local learning groups in kind of some of the bigger centers and so on so if you have ideas if you have something cool to do get in touch I'll show the email in a moment the second thing is we're going to meet money like we're running a whole team to do this and to focus on this and that costs money and so we are sponsoring half but the other half we need to help we need help with so what we need you for is is is to help a sponsor write so there are different ways that this can look like let me just go to that screen so either you can go two blocks hasta p9 let that come that contains all the information also I've got a stack of cards there are cards all around if you know someone who should you know who wants to learn but hasn't really been able to yet you can give them one of these it contains you know a link to where they can apply and but basically we need help sponsoring a lot of seats and so if you are working for a company that is benefiting from the ecosystem or would benefit from talking to developers fresh developers then you know please get them in touch with us or get in touch with us if you are in the position to make decisions about this tell people about this we have a few like sponsorship packages that means if you sponsor more than ten people like more than ten seats then you can you get access to the profiles of the developers who are looking for a job who has sent it to sharing their information if you sponsor more than 50 seats then our team will help you get some of your content and some of the stuff that you know your framework is about or your tech is about into the course so we need help from the ecosystem but also of course like every little bit helps we are raising we're raising this in dye so if you want to throw a few die into our community fund that would be absolutely [ __ ] amazing so the community fund is designed in a way where we get 50% up front because we have costs running it and promoting it and getting the word out to the right people worldwide but we get 50% up front and then after we have certified all of the people that have submitted that certification exam which is in nine weeks plus four weeks a certification to have time to do the exam and then four weeks for us to grade it after that after we've done that the next tranche is unlocked so we have two community key holders one is MP Thank You MP and one is Chelsea Palmer who you might know who is also very active yeah shout out to Chelsea so we're working with them we need your help to make this happen and so go two blocks up in nine lab comm if you want to contribute if you want to help us if you want to give the people who come in from all over the world who come into the themed community the best experience possible then you know email us and we can we can set something up if you want to help us make this happen so spread this around this is going to be this is going to be quite like a test for us because it's slightly more than we've ever done before and we really want to make this accessible we really want to make this possible so please help us make this happen and thanks for all the support that we've gotten so far already yeah are there any questions about how the course looks like about how we selecting what we're doing so um tell me tell me about the program actually you guys mentioned you're doing certification as well hence yes what are people gonna get so what is this what we've been doing for a while we obviously so this is our oldest course and that means that it's also our longest course with the most stuff some of you may also know like you remember might remember consensus Academy in 2017 we ran that for them so that's the base for the course but obviously we've kind of done a lot more since then and people usually love it so it's 12 modules you learn about block chain so people don't have to know about block chain yet so you learn about block chain you learn about solidity you learn about the EVM you learn about web three truffle deployment testing we also have a module around ethics we've build a an oath for blockchain developers which is basically a series of questions that people can ask themselves before they deploy to the main net we try to give people an idea of the responsibility both technically and ethically that they have when they put stuff on the main net and the whole thing is obviously you have access to the learning management system but also access to our community communication channels where our mentors are kind of full time during the week we've got people in different time zones so questions get usually answered within like half an hour we have obviously students helping each other and we have these coding challenges which is I think like the most important part of the training has has been these coding challenges know that is public so sometimes people feel a bit shy but usually we try to share this information around and we're working on making that a bit more accessible and the coding challenges include code review so for example one of our challenges in a theorem is build a splitter which sounds really simple and so it's like hey you know build a contract where someone pays in way it gets split down the middle and goes to two addresses and people build it and then we go like okay so what about if it's not an even number of way and people can yeah okay true and so step by step we kind of go through different vulnerabilities and different questions and that we found is like the most boosting part of the program that interaction getting the code review and building the confidence that you connect sure you know that someone says yeah that is good split split up I transfer equally what I'm really curious about is to people at the end of this get these cool apprentice pants do you guys know these things do you guys know what these things are so so this is so when you do I think in Germany I don't know if it's only carpenters is it only carpenters or is it any mostly carpenters so when you've done your apprenticeship in Germany you get these pair of pants that you're supposed to go out and work for a year wander around and do a free like traveling and learning year and you're supposed to wear these pants these are like one of those if you sponsor more than 10 seats I'm going to personally buy you a pair of these pants right yeah okay that's good one Casella Casella holes in ice and soda some frozen yeah it's imposing yeah [Music] are there any more questions about the program or about the whole thing yeah over that cancel is there a limit in age no not at all actually so like our youngest student so far has been like 14 and our oldest 78 so we've got the whole cool that guy makes me feel young actually we had it we had a bit of a beef where we had a 15 year old student and we wrote a blog post about them and then someone else who is also a student of ours and was 14 and replied to the blog post was like I'm 14 and I've done it and is so easy that wasn't denied and man was it so the question was how much previous coding experience do you need so we usually recommend that people have some experience with like working the command line and and you know some scripting and all having done something that remotely looks like object-oriented it can't even be JavaScript and we usually recommend that people have a year of some experience but since like if you have the time and you've played around with programming languages before and you know roughly how that works you can probably pick it up you're just gonna need to put in more time like because the interesting thing is what we've seen in training like thousands of people is like the thing that you need is you need to be flexible to latch on to the paradigm of of blockchain development which is or how block chains work which is just you know obviously different to to working on the metal or working and within a normal framework so the the ability to be flexible and latch on to that is more important than how much code you've written before and there's probably a Goldilocks zone somewhere where too much experience means that you probably have a harder time at adapting to it all right awesome so again we need your supports please throw some I'll bring the website up again please throw a few died our way please if you know anyone who should help us out with this or if you know someone who can run a cool program or if you can run a collection thing like that get in touch help us out we'll keep pushing this super hard during the month of February people can apply and go through the coding test and that's also the time where we're still accepting donations for this run obviously if you you know if you're a company and you help us sponsor this we will put your logo on the website you go into the communications from a certain number of seats you can be in the channels you can talk to the students so you know that there is it there is a benefit to it as well cool thanks a lot and thanks to the DoD for the awesome partnership on this Thanks Thanks thanks allies thanks a lot