Base Network launched an 8 week training course for blockchain engineers

By: Michael Wilson

October 21, 2023 8:08 AM

Students in the Base Bootcamp will have weekly sessions with a mentor, access to Coinbase and Base engineers, and a dedicated Discord server.

The Ethereum layer-2 base network announced on October 20 the beginning of an eight-week training session designed to transform programmers with conventional experience into blockchain programmers. The new program has been given the name "Base Bootcamp," and it is completely free of charge. However, it is intended for "mid- to senior-level software engineering individual contributors," and enrollment is via application only. Only 20 students will be selected for each "cohort," and the application deadline has been set for October 27.

According to Base's press release, the initiative is warranted because many programmers lack the expertise to create Web3 applications. "Today, there are fewer than 30,000 on-chain developers," it says, "compared to nearly 30 million software developers." Considering this, it's safe to assume that just a tiny fraction of programmers are employed in the Web3 sector.

Base released a free, publicly accessible online training program dubbed "Base Camp" earlier this year. This, however, was deemed insufficient due to the fact that "keeping the momentum to learn a complex new skill alone can be difficult." Developers who don't want to learn independently will have additional resources available to them thanks to Base Bootcamp, it adds.

Each student at the Base Bootcamp will have a weekly meeting with a mentor. It also provides them with a team of engineers from Coinbase and Base who are available during business hours to respond to inquiries. The team will set up a private Discord server and assign additional tasks for team members to evaluate in order to facilitate student-to-student and student-to-base engineer communication. Each student will be responsible for developing their own Web3 application and presenting it to the class as a final project.

Although there is no tuition associated with this course, students are required to put up 1 Ether (ETH) as a completion guarantee. This deposit, according to Base, will be reimbursed to the student after they finish their education.

Qualified Web3 developers are in short supply, which is a challenge that has been widely noted. Some Australian teachers have proposed mitigating the issue by introducing high school students to Web3 development. Several companies have tried to create tools that make Web3 development simpler. For instance, Circle has just released a suite of tools for deploying contracts with common Web2 techniques.