Extended Developer Program Update

As we are getting closer to the release of our products and the opening up of our GitHub repo’s, we want to highlight a very important aspect of the company’s success; our ongoing external developer program.

About the program

At the start of this year, we began the extended developer program (EDP) with a selection of evangelists and close relations to securely scale and improve the testnet before releasing it to our wider community. In June we opened up the program, and the responses were overwhelming: within a week we received over 3000 responses and we currently have over 5000 developers in the waiting line for the program.

To give all of our participants an optimal experience, we started with small batches to ensure the quality of the program before starting to scale it. We currently have 12 batches (50+ developers) that are working on the program and we are planning to onboard hundreds of developers before the end of the year! If you would like to learn more, make sure to join our Discord!

“The Extended Developer Program has been in the works for months, and it’s amazing to see the hard work we put into the network and program come to fruition. There’s an incredible amount of testing required to establish a structure to establish a secure network that’s built from the ground up, and we could have never gotten here without the input of our external developers.”

Martijn Broersma, CMO Cere Network

The bigger goal of the program is to cultivate a strong developer community for the long haul. We aim to produce a self-selecting group of evangelists who believe in the Cere movement and align them to Cere’s open and decentralized growth path. A couple of examples are building software components, running validators, external software/app integration development, and much more.

The extended developer program is the perfect place to get acquainted with the blockchain technology that is powering Cere and the Decentralized Data Cloud. As a program participant, you receive front-row insights on the progress that’s being made on a weekly basis, how this technology is applied in real-world use cases, and -most importantly- how you can contribute to the growth of the network through social bounties, technical bounties, grants, and more. The Cere team will be releasing weekly incentivization campaigns to keep participants engaged to ensure they’re with the project for the long run.

Didn’t sign up for the developer program yet? Join here!

To achieve this continuous engagement from our participants (and people in the waiting line), we’ve created a program in which the developers can grow and earn more rewards, with more opportunities being available to them depending on their continuous reliability and input.

Participants can join in several bounty categories to level up and start earning. In the game system there will be two types of bounties:

1. Social bounties

A social bounty example could be for developers to read a recent technical article from the team, write a short review/analysis/application opportunity and share this on LinkedIn and other social media channels. The program admins will pick the best ones and share them back to the community as examples, and learn about our tech ourselves as well!

2. Technical bounties

The core team, together with the program admins, will provide multiple tasks that can be completed by the participants to earn extra tokens. Upon completion of the tasks and sharing the results, participants can level up and participate in the following bounties.

There will be multiple ways of earning Cere tokens when participating in the EDP. The bounties mentioned above are just one of the many ways in which the participants can show their value in the program. All participants are challenged to showcase their skills & commitment to level up and receive extra benefits. By progressing to higher tiers, participants can earn Cere tokens and have a share of the community bonus pool. After completing all these tasks + bounties and getting their first payments, the participants can take a shot at the ultimate goal: running a Cere Mainnet Validator.

Community

We’ve received some questions from our (non-tech) community on how the Extended Developer Program is pursued by insiders. As most of the developments have been going on behind closed doors, we wanted to give some more insight into what has been happening within the program. The team chatted with some participants, admins, and Cere developers to give a multi-angle overview of the program!

#1 EDP administrator: Michael

Working together with the CERE team and contributing to the success of CERE is a unique opportunity. It is great to see the involvement of the core team and founders during weekly calls, elaborating on progress and the roadmap. New members join the boot camp every week, whereby every single participant brings their own interesting capabilities and skill set. All participants in the program are privileged to have a first glimpse of the blockchain and products built upon it.

#2 EDP participant: Tomek

What do you do for a living?

In my daily life, I work as an Android developer. I specialize in AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure), think about the smart heat/energy meter in your house.

How did you experience the program so far?

I really liked the tasks that were strictly related to the Cere functionalities. In weeks 3 and 4, I could already interact with the Cere DDC, send data to the network, and read it from the blockchain. A lot of projects are in their very early stages during the fundraising and listing, and Cere already has a working product. Being a token purchaser myself, gave me a lot of confidence in the project.

#3 EDP participant: Suresh

Occupation: Data engineer

How was your experience with the program?

I’m Suresh, who participated in the EDP program organized by Cere. Last week I was delighted to complete Cere’s Developer Program. My day job is as a data engineer so, from the early days', Cere Network attracted me a lot. I was curious how Cere Network by blockchain technology solves the problems my company is facing such as data privacy, scaling, data as a service Through EDP, my questions were answered. I learned how to work with a Polkadot sub-network, how Cere designs as well as organizes Cere DDC (which is a pretty cool disclosure), and so on. I’m very happy to have participated in this program and look forward to Cere expanding EDP to developers

#4 EDP Administrator: Ben

Occupation: Front-end developer

What can you tell us about the program?

As one of the admins of the EDP, we are responsible for the quality of the program. Our role is to manage and onboard new participants and keep in touch with the core team. It’s very cool to be in touch regularly with Fred (CEO), and the rest of the core team. With the constant growth of the program and the high demand for new batches, we are continuously improving our processes and adding new features.

What is it like to monitor these groups of developers?

Having so much knowledge from different departments is just amazing. We see it as our task to ensure that everyone’s knowledge is used to its full potential. What is more, the discussions that we are having with the developers give us great insight to further improve our program. We have developers that joined and tested over 15 testnets in the last 3 years and their input is directly being incorporated into our feedback loop.

#5 Cere Developer: Andrei

Occupation: Lead Software Engineer

What are the benefits of having the EDP program for the core team?

First of all, we want to build a community that understands the value of Cere Network products. Once they have passed ‘boot camp’, the first 3-week program to test their technical skills and reliability, you notice that they’re longing for more.

Secondly, participants help us to check technical/procedural flows so we can confirm the level of quality and introduce fixes if needed.

Thirdly, a large amount of feedback we’re receiving on the program and tasks is invaluable to the team to continuously iterate and improve on the program, which will benefit every stakeholder in the long run.

How have you experienced the EDP so far?

We know that if you want to build the best product (with the Cere developer program being one of these products), you should work hard to bring true value to your users. This is the vision we shared from the start with the team and we are still chasing that goal. With the help of all the external developers, we are going full throttle towards reaching it!

Conclusion

This rounds up the first update of the extended developer program. We will be releasing more articles and reviews from participants to further inform everyone about the program in the near future. In the upcoming weeks/months our focus, for the EDP, will be mainly to onboard as many developers as possible while maintaining the quality of the program.

As part of our technical content campaign, we will be releasing more tech articles, paired with the release of Github repos and/or security audits of our smart contracts.

We are excited to have everyone on this journey and we can wait to introduce the community to our products and other solutions that we are building within the Cere ecosystem, stay tuned!

❤,

Team Cere