Paid internship: Engaging young developers

University students are getting enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general, but currently there is a lack of opportunities for them to learn while working with professionals from this field.

One of the best ways to integrate them into our ecosystem is to provide them with paid internships, so they can learn and have one of their first professional experiences at the same time.

We will be looking for interns worldwide, and we will provide them with the necessary equipment to work with us.

Candidates who are not selected will still be encouraged to join the Catalyst community, through projects such as the Catalyst School and Gimbalabs.

Internship Scope

The scope of this internship is Haskell and Plutus development, focused on the real applications being developed by Loxe Inc. during Q3 and Q4 of 2022.

A proposal for internship in a blockchain-backed company currently does not fit any of the other challenges available in Catalyst. Therefore, we are submitting this proposal in the Miscellaneous Challenge, since this challenge’s success is about “funding great ideas that focus on problems that are not covered by any other Challenge”.

Currently, there are not many Plutus developers out there. Even though we’ve been through 3 iterations of the Plutus Pioneers Program, only a few people actually complete the course. This could end up with us selecting an intern that has zero, or almost zero, experience with Plutus, which is not necessarily bad, but the time for them to work hands-on on real projects would be lower than in the other case.

August and September 2022

• Market the internship program
• Selection process with potential candidates

October to December 2022

• Internship period (3 months)

Budget

• Selection process: $500 per vacancy
• Intern scholarship: $500 per month
• Intern mentoring and training: $500 per month
• Intern equipment (laptop): $1000*
• Total, 3 months, 2 interns: $9000

*The laptops will be returned to Loxe Inc. at the end of the internship program, and they will be used for the following set of interns.

This proposal is going to be executed by Loxe Inc.’s team. The full team can be seen at https://loxeinc.com. The leadership team responsible for this project is:

<u>Matthias Sieber</u>

• Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
• Worked on Liqwid through MLabs internship
• Community-elected Moderator on Cardano Stack Exchange
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer
• Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
• Catalyst Circle v2 member representing the Cardano Foundation
• Cardano Ambassador
• Built successful marketplaces, startups, SMBs, and mission-driven teams
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• CEO Loxe Inc.

<u>Eli Selkin, L.C.S.W., M.S</u>

• Professional Software Engineer for over 10 years
• Plutus Pioneer
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
• ML architect
• CTO Loxe Inc.

<u>Victor Corcino</u>

• Energy Industry Engineer for 6 years
• Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• Member of the 1st Catalyst Circle as Community Advisors representative
• Catalyst Veteran Community Advisor and Proposal Mentor
• Co-creator of AIM Community Tools (CA/vCA Tools, Voter Tool)
• BSc Chemical Engineering and MSc Chemical Engineering and Software Development
• Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• PhD candidate, researching the field of Machine Learning applied to Computational Fluid Dynamics
• COO Loxe Inc.

<u>Ganesh N</u>

• Professional Software Engineer for over 8 years
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer (1st cohort)
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
• Has lead development of large scale applications
• Experience in the financial services industry

Internally, we will use the Agile methodology to manage and keep track of our progress on this project’s development.

Externally, for audit purposes, we will track the progress according to the delivery of the milestones presented in the roadmap included in the feasibility section of this proposal. This progress report will be done through the monthly meetings with the challenge team and coordinator meetings with the IOG team.

Successfully bringing two interns to work with us and having them learn plutus through hands-on Loxe Inc. projects.

KPIs to be measures:

• Number of candidates per vacancy: > 10
• Number of selected interns: 2

This proposal is a continuation of a funded proposal in Fund 7, for 3 more months of internship: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/381596>..