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Document Version 2021_10
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The
README.mdis the entrypoint for this organization and repository. -
The about document explains what the Icarus Initiave is about.
- The Icarus Initiative is not affiliated with Solana, SOLHACK, or any other entity. This is a community-driven learning initiative to promote group study and creating a better learning experience for newcomers.
- There is no promise of a job or that you will become a senior Rust/Solana/Blockchain developer as you progress through. Life gives you what ultimately put in.
- This initiative is not perfect and evolves in time with what the community defines it to be.
What is the Icarus Iniative?
- A zero-cost, crowdsource community of Rust/Solana learners that iteratively improves the curriculum by building projects, evaluating resources, and voting on curriculum development.
- It's a malleable community that is shaped by its members and very open to improvements.
- Admins are just facilitators to smooth the process for builders and learners.
What are the requirements to join the Icarus Iniative?
- The developer is recommened to have already completed Figment's Solana Protocol. This will warm you up for the expeditions.
- Also recommended to have some programming experience like javascript or python. We don't cover programming basics here as there are better places for that.
- To get a better idea, glance at the minimum skills for the 1st Expedition Wallet Guidelines.
What's the cost of this initiative?
- It's completely free and community-driven.
- This community empower members to take the lead to help foster a learning community.
- Each pilot contributes in their own way whether it's by voting, creating content, or sharing deliverables.
- When you listen, you learn. When you talk, I learn. When you teach, we both learn.
What are the benefits of joining this initiative?
- A passionate community to learn with.
- Having an impactful voice to building the curriculum for future learners.
- Earning domain visibility in the industry.
- Making professional and personal connections.
- Creating tangible projects to showcase.
- Discord for community interaction.
- Github Organization for aggregating useful deliverables.
- Twitter to socially interact with the online community.
- Future growth is planned.
What role(s) can I play in this initiative?
- Member - A member of the community who wishes to observe or is looking to join/create a squad.
- Pilot - Active learners who embark on learning expeditions by building recommended projects and evaluating different resources. Pilots are recommended to have completed Figment's Solana Pathway before starting the 1st expedition.
- Captain - are also pilots but take more of a leadership role in a squadron by merging PRs, organizing the groups, capturing squad members thoughts & concerns, communicating with admins to build out the curriculum further. They would help with merging PRs, gathering the group, and communicating with organization admins.
- Commander - Set up systems and infrastructure for squads and the organization, optimize systems to demystify knowledge and make content accessible, and handle any public relations.
How to squadrons briefly work?
- A squad of 4-6 members embark on expeditions to level up together. A squadron builds a recommended project and evaluating at least one course, video series, or code problem sets on an expedition.
- There's many variables left up to squad interpretation. A squad might be in different time zones, have varying life responsibilities, have desires to pursue different projects/resources, and want to try new ideas.
- At least one of the members will be the captain, who will delegate and serve as a representative for the squadron. It's recommended that there's 2 captains to make the squad flow smoother.
- While there's the personal learning aspect, the social aspect will promote cohesion and camaraderie. Pilots are encouraged to tweet at #icarussquadron.
How do I sign up for this initiative?
- Head over to the Discord Channel and use the
#start-hereor say hello in#general. Please be patient at the#entrance. - Depending on the roles mentioned above, you'll see different instructions how to get started.
What are some of the methods of the organization?
- Crowdsourcing can be a powerful tool to help build the community.
- The initiative aims to harness and transmute this energy into a platform for new learners.
- The aim is not to make a set curriculum but kept purposely malleable to accomodate rising demands.
- A lot of the power is distributed to each squadron to as how they want to guide their own learning. The squadron comes together and validates ideas to contribute back to the initiative. Think of the Socratic method meet blockchain concepts.
- Members, pilots, and captains are encouraged to take charge of their own learning, disseminate knowledge and experiences for future learners, and blazing a trail where there were none.
- These contributions can take various forms such as voting on resources, creating deliverables for consumption, helping to answer technical questions, or leading events.
Who do I contact about this initiative, comments, and proposals?
- Reach out to an admin on the Discord Channel.
- Create a shortPoC video on youtube.
- Organize the weekly virtual hangouts.
- Implement learning tracks (DAOs, NFTS, Anchor, etc).
- Create resource voting/token system.
- Consult actual companies and see what they are looking for. Use job postings as guidance for now.
- Create a feedback system to capture experiences after expeditions.
- Create a formal process to update the curriculum.
- Create an Expedition creation process.
- Create a website.
- Have logins, interactive features, etc on the website.
- Gamify the process to display account achievements.
- Create a communication platform with Discord.
- Create a forum system.
- Selection System on how new members are recruited.
- Idea 1 - Remove the selection process, have multiple squads instead of a single squad for a squadron, add divisions into the names like 22nd Squad Division A, and all 22nd squads can connect with 21st for mentorship and help.
- Idea 2 - Each member of a squad branches out to lead a new squad. This fan-like pattern is another option but most likely more intricate to implement.
- Community tokens rewards.
- Wings NFTs for members who have completed expeditions. Provided by an expedition Project.
- SOL Rewards for completing expeditions.
- Github - host project/group project, organization notes
- Discord - to communicate between squadmates
- Discourse - knowledge hub and forum
- Twitter - for daily motivation, progress updates, and fun interactions
- LinkedIn - to professionally network and bolster their online reputation
- Datahub - to use as a blockchain backend
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Icarus Initiative (Icarus for short) is a community-driven, iterative curriculum and group learning experience for learning Rust and Solana blockchain development. It involves waves of small teams, called squadrons consisting of pilots. Each squadron can have from 4 pilots up to 6 pilots max. Squads iterate through expeditions (aka sprints, phases, etc) where they will build a project and evaluate at least 1 of the listed resource or a newer resource. The squad decides together what they will evaluate and more resources are encouraged if time permits. Projects and resources are not locked in and could potentially shift if the squad makes votes.
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The project aspect: reading is not the same as doing. Working to build a real project and more practical come time for the job hunt and helps keep your github green. The first project can be individual but it's recommended to build together for future projects thereafter. The squad element adds an accountability factor and the camaraderie will hopefully make the experience pleasurable. There will always be someone ahead of you and someone behind you...well except the 1st squadron. 🙂
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The resource aspect: There can be a max of 5 resources slots per expedition.
- This positional scarcity will make it so only the highest quality of resources remain in the list.
- In short, pilots will receive tokens that they can vote resources into the open slots for expeditions.
- Pilots gain tokens through completing expeditions for now but future ideas will come.
- There will be a set of core expeditions but hopefully there will be elective expeditions created by users.
- The resource list scarcity and the ability to cast votes makes each vote hold more weight.
- The curriculum gets better as more iterations have passed and the higher value resources will be funneled to the appropriate expedition to match skill against challenge and also ranked within the lists. The sequence of the resource matters as the ones higher on the list is deemed more content valuable.
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The social aspect: having teammates to discuss and ask questions about the concurrent material helps cohesion. Social media interactions help foster friendship and build a reputation in the online community. LinkedIn and Github helps establish professional connections and domain visibility. Twitter is a place to have a faster, agile way to interact with the developer community. Tweeting at #icarussquadron and your squadmates is fun to see when others are tweeting their progress.
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What is the initiative name derived from? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus.
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Squad Dynamics
- The group environment serves to standardize the resources that all pilots use so there can be more active discussions and keep everyone on the same page for learning cohesion. Again, the squad gets to choose the number of resources and which to evaluate so it's not too restrictive. The shortfalls are the opportunity cost of evaluating other resources and having to stick with the group pace.
- Squads recommended to engage in coding, pair programming, weekly meetings, and social & professional connections to gain additional value. The level of engagement is not defined and left to the squad to organically form. The pilots should also be posting projects to GitHub as a portfolio builder and a reference for newer squads. It's recommended to fork off the organizational repository and use the Github workflow. A GitHub organization has been set up for general guidelines and group projects. Admins can create a project repo upon a captain's request. Individual projects are encouraged to be version-controlled on personal GitHub accounts. See Methods section.
- The 1st squadron pilots were self-elected. Afterwards, a new user wishing to start a squad should contact an admin to create a team so that they can recruit for their squad. The captains needs to recruit 3-5 more people to join their squadrons in order to start. The selection process is left to that squad. The newly created squad's teampage on github will allow a place for discussion and recruitment. This process is left again to the squad to decide on how to recruit for factors like time zone and skill matches.
- To advance to the next expedition, the current squadron must present their projects to any of the squadrons that have flown before them. With Icarus, it's more friendly in tone and aimed to give helpful criticism and praise as there are no stakes at risk. Ego and arrogance are left at the door. This is much like in deployment where the developers have to present their features to the stakeholders at the end of a sprint.
- Each squadron:
- Works to complete 1 project and evaluate at least 1 resource on each expedition. See each expedition for possible choices. If a group decides to add additional choices, a good starter list of resources can be found here.
- Expeditions can last as long as it takes for everyone to finish the project and evaluate the resource(s) It's recommended to use 1 month to strike a balance for developers with full-time jobs and various responsibilities.
- Before expeditions, a team formed by the captain will make a pull request to the
squadrons.mdmarkdown file in themainrepo. The file should have the pilot's preferred name, discord handle, country & time zone, Twitter handle, Github handle, LinkedIn profile, and amount of expeditions completed. The pull request will be reviewed and added accordingly. - Before expeditions, an additional folder called
[insert squad number]_squadron_corein the organization will be created specifically for that squadron so they can link their projects from personal accounts, meeting notes, notable resources, and anything else they'd like to share with their squad and the public. All this is public! - Before expeditions, set up a discord chat channel for that squadron. All other pilots, captains, and admins can see all the channels. Members will NOT be able to see a squads chat channels. This also allows pilots to freely engage in conversation in other squads.
- During expeditions, have weekly voice or video meetings for show and tell, asking questions, pair program, and set the goal for next week. This can be adjusted according to the group's needs.
- During expeditions, squadron members are encouraged to tweet weekly progress and tag their teammates in the tweets. Hashtags are currently being worked out but for now, tag your teammates and #icarussquadron.
- After expeditions, a squad will present to another squad that has previously completed the same expedition in the past. It could be adjacent or even higher up. The first squad presents among each other. This is also a good time to brief the next squad on the next expedition.
- After expeditions, each squad use tokens to cast votes on where the evaluated resource(s) get placed in the most appropriate expedition(s).
- After expeditions, pilots are encouraged to write a LinkedIn recommendation for squadmates about working on Icarus together. Upvote skills like rust, web 3.0, javascript, and whatever skills they've used in their projects. Connect with your squadmates if you haven't already done so. 🙂
- After expeditions, squads will be recognized by the latter squad they've presented to and notify an admin to update the squadrons.md file by making a pull request notifying that the former squad succeeded in their expedition. It is the responsibility of latter squads to make the PR or notify admins for this.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2021 icarus-initiative
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