Solana India Fellowship - The beginning

This post is a part of a series of posts documenting my experience as a fellow in the Solana India Fellowship. You can find other posts in this series here.

Context

The Solana India fellowship is “a hands-on 8-week program for the best developers to learn building on Solana”. One of my friends (who was familiar with my previous work on Solana) asked me to apply to the fellowship; and after a couple of rounds of (async and live) interviews, I was selected.

SuperteamDAO

After the selection process, all fellows were on-boarded to the SuperteamDAO as a member. Superteam is a DAO consisting of a bunch of cool people working on tech, media and other content in the Solana ecosystem. They also know how to make dank memes.

The fellows were then split into groups of 5, and each group had a mentor assigned.

Like most DAOs, superteamDAO runs on Discord. A lot of the members work a $DAYJOB, so people are usually active in the evenings or on weekends. You can simply DM someone if you want to talk to them and everyone I chatted with was welcoming and friendly.

Week[1]

The kickoff meeting was held on 7th Feb, where we were given a quick rundown of the fellowship.

Solana India Fellowship 2022 rundown:

  • 20 fellows, 8 weeks.
  • Weekly Mentorship sessions and office hours.
  • Every week, we are given new quests, which are small exercises to learn Rust and Solana.
  • All fellows also work on a fellowship project of their choice for 8 weeks.
  • The fellowship ends with a Demo Day, where every fellow presents their work.

Then, Chase from Solana Labs discussed certain trends and ideas the fellows could build on.

Quests

I already had prior experience programming in Rust and Solana, so the tasks for this week were pretty straightforward. They involved setting up a Solana dev environment and deploying a few programs on a local test validator. There were also some programming exercises which required intermediate Rust knowledge.

Riptide

During the week, the Solana Riptide hackathon was also announced:

The hackathon submission deadline overlaps with the fellowship, so I guess most fellows will end up submitting their fellowship work to the hackathon as well.

Brainstorming

I spent some time brainstorming a bunch of ideas for the fellowship/hackathon project. I was originally planning to work on building a NFT fractionalization framework for NFTs as I already have some experience in that space. However browsing through the various tracks of Riptide, and some other developments like the launch of Solana Pay have given me a few new ideas I would like to explore.

Next week, my plan is to sort through the ideas, decide on one and start building! See you then.