I heard some strong feedback when I was at Polkadot Decoded about the PBA. Obviously, everyone loves the program, but they are also concerned we are not focused on the primary problems of Polkadot today.
The feedback I heard from others was:
“If I could wave a magic wand, I would have the PBA focus now on Polkadot application development rather than Polkadot/Parachain core development.”
It seems that Polkadot application development (mobile, web, contracts, etc.) offers greater opportunities for:
- Hiring students into jobs after the academy.
- Students to start new successful teams in the ecosystem.
- Students to get funding from the treasury.
- These kinds of projects are unlikely to get traditional blockchain VC funding because usually there is no token involved, which makes them a better candidate for treasury funding.
When we think about what Polkadot needs the most, it is probably NOT another Parachain. We need way more beautiful end-to-end user experiences and onboarding stories for users into our ecosystem.
When we started the PBA, there was a huge need for Core Developers and Runtime Engineers within Parity and the various Parachain ecosystems.
Over these last 2 years, the PBA successfully taught 400+ students and placed 200+ of those students into roles in our ecosystem. We have likely satisfied the core developer need, but actually created an even bigger need in the next natural step of the product development cycle: Applications.
Fortunately, application development is likely a much easier topic to cover than core development given the vast amount of existing content and experience, but I think it might be a mistake not to treat it as a first-class citizen and high-priority need. I hope we can look at an application development course like we did when we first started the academy.
What we need:
- We need a revamped and high-quality focus on Smart Contracts to bootstrap the Plaza vision.
- We need a similarly in-depth look into mobile development.
- We need a similarly in-depth look into web development, establishing PAPI as the future development library for Polkadot.