Hello everyone, welcome and thank you all so much for being here today. I'm super excited for today's Twitter Spaces as we're joined by two amazing teams who have just recently announced a partnership and are
working on some amazing things that will be incredibly impactful for anyone building a Web 3 startup. So without further ado, I'll go ahead and hand it over to the wonderful speakers to introduce themselves and kick things off.
Hi everyone, this is Vanessa. I'm the marketing lead at Encode Club and I'll be joined by my coworker, Umji Paraku, who is the head of research and programs at Encode Club. She's the face of Encode. She is the first person you'll talk to when you meet
us at conferences. She's usually the kind of urisal bunny jumping all around, meeting all the hackers, making sure everyone is super happy and excited to be building. And I'd love for her to say a couple of words about encode and what she does and what her vision of what three education is.
Hello, everyone. Can you hear me well?
Awesome. First lucky. Thank you for inviting me here. It's like great opportunity to meet a super passionate talent. He's builders around the spice. I'm on G from Inkat Club. Inkat Club is Web 3 education community. I'm having the research and program departments where you can meet a lot of lucky, different
and near Horizon Education Program with us, which means that you're gonna see me perhaps time to time and also like our team members who gonna be running the events and meet you and support you throughout the older programs. Today, we're gonna unpack what kind of things we're gonna do. I'm super excited to share more information.
Awesome, thanks, Amji. And today we also have Laura Cunningham, who is the general manager at the Newfoundation. So welcome, Laura. And maybe you want to introduce yourself, tell us what you're doing at the near. Yeah, hi everybody. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to dive into the encodes
and near program that we developed and really really want to thank our encode club partners who have been amazing. So I am the general manager of near Horizon and we'll dive in more to you know what Horizon is and everything through this session but
Really excited to be here. Our big mission is to attract amazing founders to build with Nier and then to support them in taking off. So this is a big part of our strategy. So excited to dive in and thanks, thanks everyone for being here.
Awesome. Thank you so much. I think our first question today is actually for you, Laura. Could you give us an introduction on what near horizon is and what you do? Absolutely. So near horizon is a startup support platform. So it's actually a product.
And that product connects founders with people, organizations, and resources to help them be successful. So our big call the action actually for everybody on this call is to go to near.org/horizon and create a project profile.
So you can start looking around the platform, making connections, and putting out basically your needs so that all of the people that we have created partnerships with in the background can start to help you be successful.
Awesome. And could you explain and a little bit more detail how near horizon supports builders in this space? Yeah, absolutely. So within horizon founders can do a bunch of things. So first they can access learning resources. So we actually have a whole section that is geared specifically
for founders in Web 3 and we have resources that cover things like business fundamentals, you know, like how do you actually create a legal entity within Web 3? What are some best practices there? You know, best practices around go-to-market strategies and find
product market fit. We also have links to a bunch of technical documentation that, again, you can use to get started. This I think of is our jump start your self-help section. We also have
You know, after you sort of create your project profile and make yourself known on the platform, you are will be able to find people who basically want to work on your project. Right. So contributors who want to either in a part time or a full time capacity join you on.
on your journey and support you. We also have mentors and then of course other founders who can provide advice. And one of the big things we've been doing is actually contracting with a lot of service providers. So those are people like marketing and legal agencies, you know,
specifically within Web 3 who can, you can actually like contract with and that they, you know, who can help you in the various ways that, you know, we know that, you know, founders, there's so much to do and there are so many questions
We all have as we're getting started or even sort of you know a little further down down our journey. The other big thing I wanted to call out is we also have horizon credits. So what you you can apply to receive these credits and if you do
you receive them, then you can use those credits to pay for the service providers within the platform. So it's kind of a little sort of, you know, jumpstart injection of essentially, you know, funding that you can use to help, you know, move along.
And then if you are someone who is not a founder, but you have skills that you think would benefit early stage businesses, you can actually register yourself as a contributor. So you could, you know, if you have great engineering skills,
or great product marketing skills, you can sort of set yourself up and then actually start to work with, you know, dip your toe in, right, and meet other meat projects that you might be interested in participating in and get a job with.
And the benefit really here is you're going to have access to hundreds of projects that could use your skills and your services. So there's the opportunity for people who aren't necessarily founders yet, but who want to be involved as well.
Thank you so much. And yeah, you've just mentioned people who kind of are maybe looking for a jumping off point for getting into crypto or want to be found or is but haven't started yet. And I think this is the perfect opportunity to discuss the encode and near program. So could you discuss what the program is about, who the target audience is? Yeah.
Absolutely. So the target audience, actually, we have session for and sort of, you know, programming for both technical and non-technical talent. So we have kind of four series. The first is an education series, which is, you know,
a series of public workshops. So it's going to be over the course of four weeks with one to two lessons a week, where you're really going to deep dive into the technology and ecosystem of NIA. The second series is a bootcamp series, which is more intensive training and lasts over the course
of eight weeks for hand selected developers to really learn to meaningfully code on here and be able to hopefully launch something on TestNet and then move to MainNet. We have then a hackathon series which are online
And those are really actually for both technical and non-technical talent to be able to build on near and the winner of those do get prizes. And then finally, this all culminates in an acceleration series. So basically, the folks who have been successful in the hackathon have, you know, the next place where
they can go, which is this acceleration program, where it's really focused on supporting your start-up growth and really kicking off your business. And then I just wanted to also note that unlike some accelerators,
In code club does not actually take equity in any of the projects. So it is a different kind of accelerator than some, you know, some of some of the others that are out out on the market. But again, there's ways to get involved if you are there's a lot, you know, for our technical talent and then also ways to get involved if you are non technical as well.
Amazing. Thank you so much. And since encode is actually running this program, I'm going to ask Omji to introduce us to the concept of encode and near educate series. What is it about? How it works? What developers and non-developers can expect from the content and just a general overview?
So like you first the edit case series is as Laura just mentioned, it's part of like you know grand program, which gonna have like four different fights. And the case series, they like a first one, which is opening the door for everyone who can get ready and like learn more about like a near ecosystem near horizon itself and also
If you never heard about it, yeah, this is also a great time because it's one of the few I think content you can have an interaction with the live instructor. So overall this educate series is a four weeks online program. You're gonna have like multiple workshops given by Susan the instructor across the different like near ecosystem.
but different ecosystem partners. So first few going to be given by our senior team directly into to near and also about the horizon program and then I can how to build all the components on the boss. It's something you can start with afterwards we're going to have ecosystem partners coming in Cali Merrill workshop or over
or like octopus, kind of explaining about concept app chain, all those things are something to prepare you different features, what kind of things you can build on top of near before going into the blood camp. A lot of people are asking that if you're not having the couch set like a non-tech
background if you can join the educate series. So educate series is like public ones so that anybody can join if you're interested in your ecosystem. Workshop or whole session gonna be still technical content yet not coding heavy. So if you're a builder but not necessarily developer but you want to understand near ecosystem you want to make
your project on the horizon. So there you want to understand how to build there, how to utilize the infrastructure. This is extremely recommended to join so that you can see how to use them and then you will have a chance to ask questions to instructor live session and then also you can talk to people
who are interested in similar topic, who are going to be the same cohort people and they're going to be helping you along the way. And also, of course, Incotim is going to be right there. If you have any questions, or even if you missed the session, we're going to have a recordings, but we strongly recommend you to join the live session to maximize the impact.
Thank you. I'm going to kick you back to Laura for a second and ask, could you give developers and non-developers a little bit of an overview of what the key features and benefits they can expect from the program? Yeah, definitely. So the first is skill development.
code club focuses on coding and programming skills that are increasingly in demand within Web 3 and specifically for across our near projects. The program really enhances your employability and
open, you opt opportunities for careers within the near ecosystem, whether that be you want to be a founder or whether that be that you want to participate in someone else's project and contribute to that project. So it sort of opens up a lot of opportunities.
from the skill development standpoint. The second piece is that their encode is really focused and I would say this is a huge focus for New Year as well on accessibility. So we have a commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. So we're really trying to make
coding education accessible to all regardless of your background or your prior experience. And that's because we're really offering this free coding resources, workshops, and mentorship experience that can empower you to take a seat.
within this coding universe that might sometimes feel a little bit scary and inaccessible. The third is community building. So in Cove Club really focuses on building a very vibrant and supportive community of both learners and enthusiasts. So they
They focus on doing collaborative projects, of course the hackathons, online forums, really through all of those resources, participants can connect with life-minded people, share knowledge, collaborate on real-world challenges.
of community I think really enhances the learning experience it makes you feel not quite you know so alone as you're as you're going through and and learning something new. The fourth piece is that they had they there's a big focus on practical application so of course it's it's you know helpful to
to do kind of like the the book learning around coding but really is I think we all know we learn best by by doing and by not just focusing on kind of theoretical concepts so include club really encourages participants to work on real world projects that solve real problems.
And so you get hands-on experience and you can develop further develop your problem solving abilities, which as we all know, I think are some of the most important skills to have as we think about the work ahead of us. You also get industry exposure and so
You know, as we just heard were the there's going to be a bunch of near, you know, founders and subject matter experts who are going to be actually doing the guest lectures. There's also access to, you know, industry panels and mentorship programs. So that really a lot.
allows you to align your skills with the requirements that are within the near ecosystem and really enhance your chance of success. And then the last thing I would note is there's a big focus on long-term impact. So really the goal is
to have a very positive impact on individuals, community, and actually society as a whole. So by equipping you all fully with coding skills that you can use, we are trying to really promote technological innovation at MIR.
And this, you know, hopefully will lead to an increase in number of amazing projects that are being built and the number of jobs that are available. And so really sort of give our overall ecosystem a big boost.
Well, we hope to achieve those goals as well. Um, um, could you tell us what makes an in code club education program different from just following a YouTube tutorial or a video?
That's a good question. So of course, like everyone has a little bit different learning style. So some people are more used to watching videos in a self-paced manner. But also, we cannot ignore the fact that having a cohort and having a peer group learning together and having live instructor with
you. So like one of the like biggest difference is of course it's a live session. It means that you can ask questions to instructor directly and instructors can see that like if audience is having some questions in particular things then they can go into deeper and also you can see that there's like a different people who is in
same group having similar cashier, similar interests, you can hang out with them. We have a private Discord channel for all those programs so that if you're in the educate or if you're coming to the bootcamp, you are going through a similar phase and you're going to see that like, oh, I saw those name multiple times. You build up like a peer learning group and then you continue
And often when we look back in our previous program, always some of the teams that newly made during this process and they are perhaps living across the different continents and they even get connected and they're building something together. And afterwards they even like to build a company.
together or like they're going somewhere like working together and so on. So one thing is like it's a live session so you have a opportunity to ask questions to instructor and the second thing is because it's live session you're going to build this like a peer learning group and you're going to have your cohort who are going to be like you know staying together and building together and learning to
together and even helping each other because in our group we're going to have quite a mixed bag of developers always joining. So some are a little bit more advanced and some are more beginner in different aspects. Perhaps some is like a very deep in the near ecosystem but they didn't have previous programming experience in different things.
So they're rather like a junior but yet like a very deep in near ecosystem and then some developers has a like a senior experience in rap 2 but near or like blockchain itself is completely new to them so then they're helping each other. Sometimes we see the students like who have experienced with the rust but they never have experienced with a smart contract or all
the other way around there's a solid development in developer, maybe who didn't have experience with the rust, then someone is teaching the difference. And all those kind of things, of course, you can see Ricky and reading the documentation as well, but sometimes it's just much faster if you have someone who can answer, especially in the system,
which is keeping changing every few weeks or a few months. So certain documentation you're going to realize it's a little bit obsolete and it's not working when you ask people can help each other. We don't have unfortunately a stack overflow in Web 3 yet and I think in code is one of the subgroup we have a people who are helping each other and
you can actually ask passion expecting someone going to answer you, especially because we have a teacher. And then something you cannot ignore is that you have us. We are a pacemaker, let's say, so you are the runner, both who is running right next to you and support. So many members at Incodes, perhaps like
we ourselves are not smart contract developers, some members of us are not the developer or like a technical person, but what they're going to help with is they understand your programming connected to the right people. So you're, let's say, building some with that on both and you realize that you didn't like it, you don't know how to, I don't know, use like a certain
and then we're going to be helping you to reach out to the instructor or if someone said they're like, "Oh, I have experience with the solidity and some kind of EVA compatibility, then we're going to tell, ah, then you need to look into the Aurora." And if someone is like saying, "Oh, I'm looking for an enterprise solution," or like, "I'm looking for some
So basically, in code members are helping you like being provided information. So while you have like hundreds of information floating around, we are helping you like up to that information that workshop with the information that you have.
instructor in collaboration with the instructor, ecosystem, and then like we are helping you to communicate with your peer group. It's quite difficult you organize or communication by itself. So we make a group chat for you, like a group level in the Discord forums, you can have a chat with your group and building something
and we check in with you so that you can ask questions. So overall, like, it's not a magic thing, but the real magic is happening because we care about that and we are checking step by step in which learning phase you are and you will get extra support from human and depending on which level you are.
Exactly. And this educational series is actually just the first piece in the puzzle. We have a lot of exciting stuff coming up. So could you tell us what developers and non-developers can expect from encode club in near in the coming months?
So as we mentioned the education series itself is like you open to everyone. It's public education series which is going to be following a followed by but scam and boots came is a little bit different setting. This is exclusive while you must apply first and then once when you get accepted you can join
and it's quite intensive program. So throughout the like eight weeks, you're going to learn about like a rust, a more focused on like a near and like a near smart contract feature. If you want to like to say like learn rust in really tough, maybe like just eight weeks using whole wax for rust is
is already not enough, but this time we're going to focus on the features on near and like a smart contract part. And then looking near account system, smart contract, security, building visits on both after you learn that. And we are expecting that you're going to start to build some projects going onwards.
So you can join the hackathon afterwards. You can also make your project fly in Horizon. As we mentioned, but Cam, you're going to have live instructor and TA going to be helping you. So you're going to have a lessons from the teacher. And then after that, you're going to have some other activities in group like a working on your looking
a home or go projects there if you have cash in when you're asking our T.A. who is seasoned hacker in near ecosystem who have experienced like winning some hackathons in near can it be also helping you out with some practical tips like what kind of things you need to look into or like the latest resources you can check in.
And could you maybe tell us what the admissions process will look like for the bootcamp since it's an acoustic program and we definitely do not have enough spots for everyone who's interested. So what should people, what kind of skill said should people have, what should they look out for when they're applying? Yes, yeah, it's like on the first
Fortunately, it's so sad to say that we cannot accept everyone, but there is a reason because it's a life session, very intensive course. One is we want to have very engaged people in the cohort who are going to be spending like 90 minutes learning and doing homeworks and coming back.
And then the other hands also, due to this intensive nature, you need to have some prior knowledge. So it's open to anybody to apply, but to gather the old competition, you're recommended to have a prior knowledge in programming. So what gonna happen is you need to apply first.
If you go to the Inkat Club like in the AirBudscamp page, you can apply and then we go through the older like document screening and then you will get invited to the interview stage. So then you will be lucky to submit your interview and after interview, if you pass the interview stage, you will get an offer so that you can join to the Budscamp.
Regarding some tips, often people just apply with their email address and some simple contents, then it will not actually help you move in force, so please write down your motivation and also more importantly your previous experience or what kind of blockchain or a program
know that you have, it can help us a lot to process your applications thoroughly. And also if you have some like a portfolio and so on, don't be shy and please put your GitHub there and make those repost public. An important thing is like we want to see that how actively you're building and you're willing to build some
So even though your project itself now is not fancy, which is completely fine, we want to see that what kind of things you're building. So if you want to show something, if you're building some project before, please like even to do it, don't be shy and put it to your report and make it public. And if you think you're
experience is quite limited, but you really, really want to join our bootcamp. There is a T-buy want to give. So this is 6th of June, and our bootcamp is going to be starting in July. Four weeks you still have. So play, join all near educate series, which is going to make you also have start, because you're going to understand near ecosystem well.
and also learn basic programming in parallel so that before joining the bus cam you can have some programming knowledge and try to explain what kind of things you are in plan and what you are going to do till you get accepted so that we can look into your application. There's a quite rare case but I see some successful cases of
people who can take us four weeks in advance, they are going through now like a JavaScript or like trying to understand like basic concept and building simple app and then they are going through all the educate workshops so that they can join the bootcamp often quite successful because they have some experience or if you have a rust experience a little bit
Also try to keep watching the tutorials and maybe building something simple, even though it's not Web 3 app, even the Web 2 examples, then once when you join, it's going to be much easier and also it will help you to get accepted by doing so. And once when you're practicing those kind of things, don't hesitate to
push them to your repo, even though it's just like a tutorial or even copy app because you're practicing it, it's just showing your activities and we can see that you actually learned something before joining so we can consider you may have the knowledge we are expecting by the BootsCamp starting date.
- Amazing, awesome. And I'm gonna kick it back to Laura. I think this is our last question before we open up to the audience. So Laura, do you have any advice for new developers who want to succeed in learning how to build a new year?
Yeah, my two pieces of advice are just just start building so start cloning repositories of examples playing around with the code see a counter add a plus two function button see a to-do list add a due date
And then the second is, you know, leverage the community. Like this is an incredible community. And, you know, very active.
very dedicated builders within it. Even within this market, we have people who really love near, love the tech, and so leverage those resources as you can.
Awesome. Thank you so much. And now if we have any questions from the audience, it's time to raise your hands.
Okay, we have a question.
You are muted just to let you know.
What are the secret measures that we take from you?
Hello, can you hear me? What are these measures that have been taking? Hello? Hello? So we cannot really hear you well. Can you say that? I said what are the security measures that have been taking?
So you mean the security measures all these educators? Yes, yes, yes.
I'm not sure if I understand your question. Well, but if you're a mesh, if you made that like a fair covering some security topic in the boot camp, we're going to be covering near like a smart content.
okay, like security topics, but not in public editor theories.
If anybody else has any have different questions?
While perhaps I give on as I is like a checking and maybe inviting someone who have questions I really want to echo what Laura said. Like you need to start build build something just like sharing a little of my story So I have a like a mechanical engineering background, which means that like a technique
But not really like computer science or computer engineering background. What happened was I was really like nausea and curious person. And before like a joining web 3, I just wanted to learn programming a little bit because hackathons seems really fun. I used to go to web 2 hackathons with the sleeping bag, sleeping in the venue.
That time I was learning that JavaScript and I wanted to have some goal because sometimes if you're learning alone without goal, like you can get distracted and maybe not continue anymore, which I think that it's really good at it in Cutter Club. You're going to have the peer group and you're going to have a goal to achieve. But that time I set up the goal for myself.
self was going to hackathon and build something which is a theme that's given there. So I used to go to hackathon and building apps and surprisingly even though I was still quite beginner I started to win some bounties there which was quite fun. He gave me some confidence and then blockchain was my hobby and I was learning
things. And again, I wanted to set some goals again. Otherwise, you know, you will be learning, but without some direction. So what I thought is, there's some different types of boundaries out there. Why not building for that? So it can be hackathon bounty or it can be some other types of bounty in web too. It's quite common to have like
security or bug bounty, but in Web 3 luckily, even though you are not an advanced developer, there's a lot of small bounties to perhaps create an article even if you're a non-tech person or like making a tutorial or making a dashboard or casting certain features. So I was taking those small bounties for fun, which was really
like great opportunity that I get to know more people in the space and also like a people just recognize you, you're quite active in ecosystem. Then different types of opportunity coming to you and now I'm like working for a tiny web in web 3 and still enjoying learning things. So I really want to tell like everyone
Don't be afraid of building something not fancy yet. I mean, everyone need to start from somewhere. Don't let imposter syndrome like a Mac you down and build something and even like a make it in a public repose so that people know that you're actively building something and ask for help.
and like in-court club is just like a magic space that you can do that because a lot of people are like just your kind, same wavelength. They're all doing things like this and you will see like in six month this and in 12 month this you're going to be in completely different space, different positions.
I think this is the last call. If you have a question request to speak now or we're going to wrap it up. So unless someone has a question, I'm going to thank Laura and Omji for their time today and for providing advice and insight to our developers and
on developments like we hope to see everyone in exactly a week at the first workshop which is going to be an intro to near and horizon. I think one of our speakers is actually here now so hey Jared happy to see you in the listener section and yeah
Yeah, guys, sign up. We would be happy to help you join the discord, ask questions. We will be happy to answer or connect you to experts who do have advice for you. So connect with us. We're in Twitter. If you see an encode, remember in Twitter, our DMs are
are always open for questions and we are more than happy to help you. And of course, a huge thank you to near protocol for hosting us here today and yeah, we'll talk in more Twitter spaces regarding the hackathon, the bootcamp, the accelerator, so stay tuned and thanks again for coming.
Awesome, thank you all so much for being here and presenting as well.