This megathread will be used to post progress updates for the Secret University initiative.
What is Secret University
Secret University is a concept that will evolve over time to fit the needs of our developer community. It will serve as a launchpad for developers new to our ecosystem, allowing them to jumpstart their journey and build on Secret Network. Our team does not want to do this alone - we can only scale these efforts with our thriving developer community. Therefore, we purpose setting up a framework in which developers can be incentivized to document and create educational materials, enriching the onboarding experience of our network for future developers, and providing a path for those who aim to follow in their footsteps and build their own private decentralized applications. This effort will hopefully save time for critical network resources, lower the gap for learning to build secret contracts, and propel our developers into more advanced topics that are supported by leaders of the development community.
Milestone 1: Introduction to Secret Network
Secret University has been funded on-chain for Milestone 1: Introduction to Secret Network. For those of you new to the initiative, you can view the previous proposal here: https://secretnodes.com/secret/chains/secret-4/governance/proposals/99
Hey Agents! In case you missed it, Secret University was funded last week through governance! Rest assured, the team is hard at work building.
Web Platform Progress
The front end for Secret University is open-source at GitHub - secretuniversity/scrt.university. There’s not much to look at the moment, but feel free to look around nevertheless. (It’s a Sveltekit app)
Over the next ~2 weeks, I’ll be getting the markup laid out for the site’s architecture and applying some base styles to make for an experience that feels at home on Secret Network. In 2 weeks, the site will still be in early development, but you can expect to see some nicer (more fleshed out) screenshots in these types of updates.
Secret Pathways & Secret Boxes Progress
We’ve been collecting the opinions of network leaders to help guide our choices when creating our initial Secret Pathways (developer courses). We will be bringing on additional help next week to help us ramp up for the smart contract pathway “Building Your First Secret Smart Contract.”
On the Secret Boxes (fully-integrated starter projects) side of things, Jeff & Kate have been hard at work making it so the UI/UX of our first Secret Box is clear and stylish + more. The team has also decided to try to integrate our Secret Boxes with another cool project that is quietly building on the network.
Other Progress
We’ve spun up Secret University’s own validator! Commission earned will go towards supporting the university’s operations, and in the future, it will also fund other developer education materials, made by members of our community.
Collaboration is essential to the success of Secret University (and the network as a whole), so as a piece of early homework to the community, I ask you all to start thinking about the kinds of lessons, projects, and examples that you’d like to see on the network. The leads have a lot of ideas ourselves, but we want to hear your ideas too!
The build of the Secret University web app is on track and making good progress. Based on the existing Secret Network design system, I have begun to add a base layer of color to the site. I hope to wrap up this portion of the build later on in the week so that the initial variant of the site can make its way through internal and external QA. Next up, I’ll be handling the front end logic.
Secret Pathways & Secret Boxes Progress
Making Cosmwasm 1.0 a priority for new developer education materials, @laura has successfully converted the secret-template smart contract to Cosmwasm 1.0. She is also nearly done porting over the smart contract that will be used in two of our introductory Secret Pathways.
Speaking of which… we’ve decided to use a Secret Dice smart contract for two of our introductory pathways. We feel that a dice contract gives us the opportunity to cover some of the more talked about use cases of Secret (like randomness) while also managing to be a fun, easy to understand, & interesting starting application for developers new to the network.
And! We’ve brought on @DDT to help us with the content for our smart contract pathway! DDT’s experience on the network is quite expansive, and being the creator of Scrt-RNG makes him the perfect expert to help us better explain the nuances of private smart contracts. We are certain our developer community and future students can learn a lot from his expertise, and we are grateful to have his help!
The site has begun going through internal QA with the team, and changes are being made as feedback is delivered. This process will likely continue over the next couple of weeks as development moves forward. Soon we will be asking other network leaders for their thoughts to continue the QA process.
Currently, data is the biggest target on my todo list for the site as solidifying the data models for contributions will clear out a couple of tasks stuck in my backlog, so I’m currently working partially on the primary backend service which will be managing community contributions while also continuing to improve the frontend functionality of the site.
Secret Pathways Progress
@laura has successfully ported the Secret Dice contract to CW 1.0 , and @DDT has written the integration tests for the dice smart contract which not only adds utility to our pathway’s smart contract, but it will also assist in making our pathway for frontend developers easier to create (since the integration tests are written in TypeScript and some of the code can be reused).
@fuzzzypizzza has also started working on our introductory pathway which aims to be a friendly introduction to development on the network, and he is currently working on highlighting the specific value capture a developer can gain by building on Secret Network.
Other Progress
We’ve made contact with a familiar artist on the network , and believe we’ll be able to spruce up the site with illustrations that help Secret University match the brand and vibe of the network.
We are also already seeing messages from interested developers who are either new to the network or are new to smart contract development on Secret. It’s awesome and motivating to see this interest, so while we can’t take on new contributors yet, we will be working to make sure the process for submitting contributions of all kinds is well-defined come launch day.
Side Note: If you are a developer on the network who feels certain topics should be covered to better onboard developers, know that this megathread and the Secret University discord channel are excellent places to leave your feedback, comments, and concerns. Also, my DMs are always open at @sinplea on Discord & Telegram. Get in touch! We would love to get your thoughts.
TLDR:
Site is undergoing internal QA and revisions are being made.
Work on the backend service, which will be managing community contributions, is under development
Improvements to front-end functionality are continuing to be made
Laura has ported the Secret Dice contract to CW 1.0
DDT fixed & wrote the integration tests for the Secret Dice contract
Darren has started working on the intro Secret Pathway
On-brand illustrations are in the works
Interest from new developers has been noted by the core team.
I’m so excited to have something truly engaging for all the devs our Agents meet around the world!
Do let us know if you need help testing the site, we set up a new working group for beta testers & have well over 100 experienced testers in there now.
Feedback from the dApp teams that have utilised them has been outstanding so far
Grateful to have the agency support with beta. I will reach out to let you know when the MVP is ready for testing, and I’ll be sharing some more soon! I’ll also be writing an introduction article to SU before launch to help with onboarding
The backend service for managing contributions sent to the university is mainly complete. This was a lot of data hierarchy design work and working to figure out how to structure contributions on the backend to ensure that the app is capable and improves the UX of dev onboarding for the network. There are still a couple of smaller functions that need to be written and tested, and there are some server settings that I still need to go through. However, this weekend I was able to get the backend server deployed to our staging environment and have been able to connect to the client website and the database to the server, so we‘re looking good
October is coming next week, so the team and I are trying to move quickly to get some time with beta testers before launch. There’s no doubt in my mind that the site has become more ambitious than was initially laid out in our proposal, but the improvements being made are worth it, I think. I’m hoping to still pull through in October and get something of quality shipped for the community.
Some other progress on the web app side of things without going into too much detail:
CCBL bounties have been added to the initial data hierarchy for our backend. (This is so that we can help better advertise the CCBL on the SU site, help with the administrative work around managing those different bounties, and just generally improve the visibility for the CCBL).
A new Dashboard page has been added to the site to help a user manage and get info on the statuses of their contributions to SU. They can also view their bookmarked repos, articles, videos, and pathways on this page. (More on this soon)
Other Progress
Technical writing for pathways is continuing to move forward
New artwork has come in from Julian’s (SecretUnderground) team to improve the look of SU’s home page.
And… the Secret University validator has moved into the active set
That’s all I can share for the moment. Until launch, onward and upward folks!
My efforts with the scrt agency is leading the university outreach team (present scrt to universities worldwide) and event coordination (team of agents completing specific mission at IRL events 1/month)
Each university we present to and event we attend IRL (w/ the scrt service team) we recruit devs through a Google form solely to feed into the SCRT University!
Our first two events we collected 17 hot leads and our university presentations start this month.
We’ll have a good pipeline of very interested devs ready for what you’re building.
Please connect with me or join our working group calls Wednesday 3pm utc if you’d like to work closer
Our team is still working hard to launch the first milestone of Secret University However, there will be a slight delay to initial launch as it’s taken more time than originally expected across the board. We will be extending our original timeline out by 2 weeks, which means our platform will be launching first week of November instead of late October. We will still be onboarding initial beta testers for stakeholders in late October.
What has contributed to our decision for extension:
Scope creep in platform design and development added CCBL dashboard for tracking open bounties setting up website database to be scale in the future
Time spent upgrading Secret Dices contract o cosmwasm v1.0 (we are one of first teams to upgrade a secret contract to cosmwasm v1.0)
Secret pathways tutorials taking longer to write than expected
Exploration of Secret IDE for in-platform code experience
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We appreciate your understanding!
Secret Agents have collected 45 dev contacts for the class of '22 & our wonderful Agent @Natalie_sht is keeping them informed of the latest developments & Secret Workshops in their cities.
We ask everyone who prioritises developer onboarding for Secret Network to share this Agent mission with their teams:
Developer Onboarding Mission Alert
We are planning a series of irl & virtual hackathons in 2023 along with SCRT Labs, and our developer learning portal Secret University is launching in November!
We need your help to collect contacts of Rust & Cosmos SDK devs now, so we can onboard as many as possible for Secret 2.0!
This is the #1 priority of the Secret Agency now.
Your Mission, should you choose to accept is is:
Look for communities of Rust devs in your city using sites like eventbrite & meetup.
Infiltrate those communities and grow your network at their events in Q4.
Join our Hackathons, Events & Universities call after Governance to discuss progress & request merch to take with you.
Carrying on the conversation from this thread, it was mentioned that some of the metrics we have for dev onboarding are:
To me, this doesn’t feel like a good way to measure dev onboarding. I get that secret university isn’t completed yet, but none of those stages mentioned above require any sort of developer skill, so I don’t feel like we’re measuring much. It seems like a way to measure regular secret agent onboarding if anything.
Here’s a proposition:
Stage 1: Form complete (form should request github, years of experience, and skills)
Stage 2: Have them complete a review of the documentation and deploy some basic contracts (Secret University comes in here eventually I guess)
Stage 3: Encourage them to pick up a CCBL item (depending on experience maybe can skip directly to 4)
Stage 4: Connect to existing teams in need, or alternatively fill out a grant request and create their own dapp
The stages should be set up in a way so that the next one is significantly more challenging than the previous, in order to measure level of involvement.
Cheers for the ace feedback, and thanks for taking the time to post it here @mumuse.
We’ll start to track all these metrics just as soon as we can.
I’ve adapted our onboarding form to ask for your suggestions for stage 1, and we’ll refine our follow-up emails to push devs towards the docs as well as Agency, testnets & other opportunities to contribute to the network for your stage 2.
Stage 3 CCBL projects & bounties will be handled by Secret University from what I have seen. And for stage 4 Agents are on hand to deal with any liaison needs when graduates are looking for work.
I think that the issue with this is that none of these metric atm track ‘have the people the Agency brings in actually contributed to the network or written code’
Good proposition. I’ll def be tracking contributions to the university so that the community has some useful data points to look at. This will include tracking things like
N of Technical Articles / Guides contributed
N of Developer Screencasts contributed
N of Secret Boxes (starter projects / templates) contributed
People can also contribute Pathways (Courses), but it (like Secret Boxes) is likely to have fewer contributions overall since they’re more demanding but more rewarding.
Note: these aren’t the only data points I’ll be gathering over time to gauge the usefulness of Secret University.
It clearly shows that developers are interested in building on Secret, & interest in Secret University is growing. We can nitpick on metrics all day pre-launch but as @Alex says post-launch we can measure much much more.
The important thing now is that we get this form into as many capable hands as possible & get recruits for Secret University, and also a list of invitees for the hackathon series we are planning in Q1.
If you want to help with our dev onboarding strategy, and organise Secret hackathons in Q1 then join our Events, Hackathons & Universities call right after Governance each week on the Discord server. 15:00 UTC each Wednesday.
@Alex if you need any demo technical articles/guides or screencasts then our Education group will be happy to help! They meet at 14:30 UTC On Thursdays.
, and 
, and believe we’ll be able to spruce up the site with illustrations that help Secret University match the brand and vibe of the network.
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Developer Onboarding Mission Alert 
