Create SCP_cohort_recap.md

SCP_cohort_recap.md

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+---
+publication_date: 2024-12-04T00:00:00Z
+slug: scp-recap
+tags: [gnoland, students, community]
+authors: [michelleellen]
+---
+
+# Student Contributor Program: Cohort 4 Wrap-up
+
+We’ve recently concluded the fourth cohort of our Student Contributor Program with third-year Epitech POC Innovation students. Over the course of five months, six students dove deep into Gno.land, learning, contributing, and building projects.
+
+The program kicked off with a few weeks of onboarding and discovery, allowing the students to explore Gno.land’s architecture, tooling, and community. From there, they quickly started developing and contributing ideas, fixes, and features.
+
+As part of their experience, the students participated in hands-on workshops with our core team in Paris. Some also joined us at EthCC, gaining exposure to the broader blockchain ecosystem.
+
+Each student began by creating their home realm and documenting their journey in the Hackerspace repo. At the end of the cohort, each student wrote a report to detail the internship experience, the learnings, engineering projects and takeaways. For the Gno engineering team and DevRels these reports are critical to gaining insights into how documentation is applied, challenges, voids and general areas to improve onboarding.
+
+### **Student advice to getting started**
+
+- Always use gnodev: Develop with the same interface end-users will see to catch issues early and save both gas and time.
+- Start small: Build a simple home realm, blog, game, or voting app. Shipping something functional teaches more than passive reading.
+- Keep a HackerSpace diary: Write short daily notes about what you build, learn, or fix. It makes progress tracking easy and helps mentors guide you.
+- Read other realms’ code: The monorepo is full of solid, real-world examples that can accelerate your learning.
+- Ask questions early and often: Use Office Hours, PR comments, or Signal. Small clarifications now prevent big roadblocks later.
+- Expect rough edges: Gno is still evolving, so some issues may be language-level limitations, but a good experience in experimentation.
+- Stick to determinism: Avoid relying on time, randomness, or anything non-deterministic; these won’t work on-chain.
+- Experiment safely: Push the VM to its limits, test edge cases, and learn from breakage. Bugs you find can become your first GitHub issues.
+
+### **Student Contribution Highlights**
+
+The cohort tackled a wide range of technical and creative projects, including applications, tools, and ecosystem enhancements. Here's a highlight of what they accomplished:
+
+Applications & Demos
+
+- Reddit-style r/place on Gno.land
+- Pokémon Fight Simulator
+- Calculator Realm
+- Change.org-style petition realm
+- Friendly Organizer app using the CommonDAO implementation
+
+Core Enhancements & Utilities
+
+- Levenshtein Distance Function
+- Profiling Support for GnoVM (70ipprof + Flamegraph)
+- SVG Extension
+- Improvements to the blog realm
+
+Documentation
+
+- CommonDAO Tutorial
+- Solidity Famous Patterns
+
+### **Student Reflections**
+
+[@louonezime](https://github.com/louonezime) ‘Over the course of this cohort, I had the opportunity to explore and build within the Gno.land ecosystem. I especially enjoyed working on rebuilding the blog package, which gave me the chance to be creative while learning Gno. The open-source environment made the experience smooth and collaborative. All in all, it was a great way to contribute to something meaningful in the blockchain space, especially since it was my first time getting into it.’
+
+[@mounia](https://github.com/moonia) ‘During this cohort, I had the opportunity to get hands-on with the Gno.land ecosystem by working on two technical projects. I explored the idea of a Gno-based EVM interpreter, allowing Solidity bytecode to run in a Gno-native environment. I also led the profiling project for GnoVM, enabling source-level insights via pprof and flamegraph tools. It was a great opportunity to contribute meaningful tools while learning the internals of Gno and I really appreciated how close Gno feels to Go. Overall, it was a great experience that deepened my interest in the blockchain space and made me eager to keep contributing.’
+
+[@Tchips46](https://github.com/Tchips46) (Leo)‘During this cohort, I focused on exploring the EVM on Gno.land, which helped me understand complex blockchain concepts and the inner workings of virtual machines. I learned how to build more advanced dApps and got introduced to Solidity. This allowed me to write documentation about well-known Solidity design patterns, using examples to make them easier to understand. Overall, it was a valuable experience that grew my technical skills and deepened my understanding of blockchain development.’
+
+[@NicolasMelet](https://github.com/NicolasMelet) ‘Working on Gno.land was an amazing opportunity to discover new technologies and work on a blockchain space for the first time. My main area of interest was developing new dApps in Gno while trying to highlight different features everytime. As such I started by creating the Calculator realm, showcasing the use of URL for some tasks; and I worked on the r/place realm. SVGs being a core part of it, working on the place realm led me to contribute to the SVG Markdown extension, allowing me to discover another side of Gno.land and to work with a member of the main team. I really enjoyed being part of the Student Contributor Program and being part of this great team!’
+
+[@paulogarithm](http://paulogarithm/) ‘This cohort was, in my opinion, a fantastic experience that significantly enhanced my skills across multiple areas. When I first joined Gno, I had little to no knowledge of blockchain in general (my expertise was mainly limited to coding in Go). By the end of the cohort, I not only gained a solid understanding of how Gno operates, but I also explored blockchain technology more broadly by studying its underlying principles and working on projects such as the EVM, essentially the Ethereum Virtual Machine bytecode being interpreted within Gno.land. Additionally, I improved my ability to work with decentralized applications (dApps) and deepened my understanding of low-level concepts related to virtual machines.’
+
+[@Chaegnal](https://github.com/Chaegnal) (Eva) ‘During my time in the Epitech x Gno.land cohort I was able to deepen my understanding and improve my skill on blockchains. Using Gno allowed me to use my previous Go coding experience in a different setting. My work was mainly focused on dApps, I first focused on building an app to help groups organize themselves. This dApp used core blockchain principles like DAO, which I integrated by using a new package that acts as a DAO factory. By using this new package, I gained experience that I was able to share by documenting it. This focused on the open source aspect of the project, as the documentation is aimed to help new Gno builders. Overall, I want to thank every member of the Gno ecosystem, for making this experience fulfilling and a great learning experience for all of us. I enjoyed being part of this amazing project, carried out by passionate people!’
+
+### That’s a wrap
+
+This cohort brought energy, creativity, and fresh perspectives to Gno.land. Their contributions ranging from dApp experiments to infrastructure-level improvements, and testing demonstrated the potential and ease Gno enables. Thank you for your contributions and becoming part of the Gno.land community.
+
+If you are interested in joining a [Gno.land](http://Gno.land) student cohort, find out more details [here](https://github.com/gnolang/student-contributors-program).