EthernautDAO, recently launched from @the_ethernaut, was founded to pair trainees with mentors to bootstrap developers to be blockchain devs. Last night there was an AMA with some of the founding team to discuss a bit of the process and I took a few notes that I thought may be important to us. Understandably, this received a lot of attention and desire from both potential trainees and mentors. They made mention they expected 10 trainees and about 5 mentors, but instead got a couple hundred trainees 
It’s also worth noting that they’re still working out some specifics and tokenomics, but largely they have a plan. Just know that things aren’t yet final, but you can expect it to not change too much.
The intent is to take on senior developers under their wings to teach them Solidity. They made it clear they don’t plan to be teacher to newcomers, but mentors to people that have been in software a while, and only get them onboarded onto higher level Solidity development. They know the mentors are going to have day jobs, etc, and not too many trainees under each. They expect to spend no more than about 3 hours a week talking with trainees. This should give them enough time to answer questions, walk through, counsel, etc etc.
The model will be pretty interesting. It seemed to me like it’s meant to be a bit of an internship for senior devs. The idea would be that, like Rabbithole, EthernautDAO gets some buy in from a protocol [or company, framework, w/e] to train up a senior dev over the course of about 3 months. I’ll use the Coop as an example for simplicity’s sake.
The Coop would give put tokens [Dai, Index, w/e] into a vesting contract for a trainee. The protocol may then also provide a mentor, if they choose to do so. If they don’t provide a mentor, they can freely choose from any that are available and willing.
At this point any potential trainees will apply to a mentor/protocol and then be selected by the mentor. Important: not all trainees will (immediately?) be assigned a mentor or protocol, etc.
The trainee, once selection occurs, etc, will then spend their time doing tasks for the protocol of increasing complexity/context, and the mentor will guide them through and answer any questions they may have. At the end of the 3 or so months when the training has been sufficiently completed, the vesting will occur. Most of the funds put up by the protocol will go to the trainee, and a small amount will go to the mentor.
So a paid internship! Neat!
They’re realizing it’s difficult to find senior solidity devs around, because if anyone has been around long enough to be a senior, they’re usually already rich by now and running their own protocols. They wish to do things similar to how we have discussed in EWG calls, getting a more core contributor and bootstrapping them a bit to get then on their feed in solidity.
Once we’ve leveled up devs that we already have, in a way we have already intended to level them up, this may be a great way to get someone newer on board for the Coop that isn’t already contributing.
They also plan to publish a Medium article soon with some more clarified information from the AMA, and I’ll link that here as soon as I see it. In the meantime, you can read this introduction if you’re interested.
I feel like a lot of what I’ve written here is kind of just word vomit, and it’s too late at night for me to be energetic enough to make this pretty, so feel free to ask me any and all questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out.