OSS Developer Opportunity

1

I was looking through ARC-34 and read this:

"* Reserving funds to pay for ad-hoc open-source development (devs can apply directly for an xGov grant)."

I wanted to get some more information here. How can devs apply directly for an xGov grant? How is this different than the xGov Pilot?

Probably the most difficult thing about building on Algorand is the expectation from the Foundation and Inc. that OSS devs work without pay. This makes the developer experience miserable as a whole because while AF and AT employees are well compensated for their time and efforts, OSS devs on the network are not. There are extremely limited opportunities to get funding to build here and they all require heavy political ties and relationships with current AF and AT employees. Moreover, most projects and companies building on Algorand are not well funded and are not hiring.

Is there a good way to get paid to build on Algorand?

2

I wanted to add onto this a little bit. This is a problem because while Algorand advertises Python. It’s actually extremely difficult to build with Python on Algorand. Because of the way the information is structured, such as the YouTube videos, documentation, and GitHub repositories, it actually takes months of work to be able to program even simple logic into Algorand applications. Ultimately, building with Python on Algorand is extremely frustrating and as an OSS developer, you are basically just volunteering to debug code for free to the benefit of AT and AF.

As a solution, there should be simplified mechanisms for building on Algorand. For example, with the Python AlgoKit 2.0 - things just got even more complicated. The parsimony principle should do more to guide development.