Applications Open for Expanded, Paid Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program

The Hyperledger Summer Mentorship program is back with more opportunities than ever for hand-on skills building and experience in developing leading-edge open source blockchain technologies. Applications are now open for the fifth year of the program and, for the first time, mentees from any career stage are invited to apply for any of the 22 planned projects. These paid mentorship opportunities are open to participants from anywhere in the world. 

The Hyperledger Summer Mentorship program is a hands-on, results-oriented program that starts with active developers designing and proposing mentorship projects that have real impact on advancing Hyperledger technologies. This year, the 22 projects cover a range of technologies, challenges and technical difficulty levels. The program offers both part and full-time projects tackling development challenges such as interoperability, security and scalability and addressing a mix of use cases, including in climate change, digital identity and telecom services. 

“Since we kicked this program off five years ago, growing it has been a priority for Hyperledger,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger. “We believe strongly in creating opportunities for a wide spectrum of aspiring open source and blockchain developers, which is why this is a structured, paid and very hand-on program with involvement from mentors from around the world. We hope, by expanding the program to all career stages and adding a larger number of projects, we will bring even more energy to this program and our community and fuel more breakthroughs on the career and technology front.”

The developers who propose the projects serve as the mentors and work closely with their mentees on developing a project plan, setting milestones and solving problems. Mentees can expect regular evaluations and feedback as well as a stipend. For more about the program, including the schedule and stipend details, go here. To learn more about how the Hyperledger Summer Mentorship program has helped shape the career of one recent mentee, read this Developer Showcase profile of Sara Ghaemi, a member of last summer’s cohort. 

All Hyperledger Summer projects must be approved by the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee before becoming official mentorship opportunities. Read on for descriptions of some of the projects planned for this year:

Support Clique for Besu on HL Labs BAF

Hyperledger Labs Blockchain Automation Framework(BAF) is a tool to deploy different DLT platforms automatically on a given Kubernetes cluster. BAF supports multi-cloud and multi-DLT deployments, and already supports HL Fabric, HL Besu, Quorum, R3 Corda. For HL Besu, currently only IBFT2 Consensus is supported by BAF.

With this mentorship program, we want to support the Clique consensus for Besu, so that BAF can be used to deploy and operate a HL Besu network with Clique consensus. This will also include upgrading BAF to support the latest stable Besu version.

The expected outcomes of this project are:

• Documented, ready-to-use Besu Clique consensus on BAF
• Documented upgrade of Besu to latest stable on BAF

Documentation and Use Cases for Climate Action

The Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group is developing an Operating System for Climate Action, which is a set of applications for obtaining and certifying data, creating tradeable tokens for emissions and offsets, and using DAO’s to coordinate collective action.

As part of this project, we’re looking for technical writers who could help both document the technologies and how they could be applied to actual use cases.  We’ve started with a few ideas and would like your help refining them with actual or potential projects.  We’d also like help reaching out to and interviewing potential users of the applications to get their feedback on how they could be used.

The expected outcomes of this project are:

• Improved documentation of the blockchain carbon accounting applications.  
• Tutorials on how to develop and enhance the applications.  
• Use cases for the applications.

HL Iroha and HL Cactus Integration

Hyperledger Cactus is a blockchain decentralised integration tool designed to allow users to securely integrate different blockchains started by Fujitsu and Accenture. Cactus has pluggable architecture that makes it easy to integrate various blockchain by creating plugins (currently plugins for Fabric, Besu, Quorum are implemented). Cactus allows transfer not only of assets but also of data between multiple blockchains. On the other hand Iroha (version 1.x) is great with asset management, and has functionality to store data, which makes those two projects a perfect fit!

With this mentorship program we will not only allow the interoperability between different blockchains but also create a system of Iroha networks that will also demonstrate the integration in examples easy to run by everybody.

The expected outcomes of this project are:

• Documented, ready-to-use integration of Iroha and Cactus
• Documented example of integration between multiple (two and more) iroha’s networks with Cactus
• Documented example of integration between Fabric and Iroha (Fabric plugin for Cactus is already implemented) integration

Check out the full list of mentorship projects and start your application today. The deadline to apply is May 7. The Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program is part of the Linux Foundation’s overall commitment to mentoring. The application process is being managed through LFX Mentorship, a platform created by the Linux Foundations to train future open source leaders. Students from diverse communities are encouraged to apply. All are welcome here!