A developers' journey through the Celo India Fellowship '21
Tags: blockchain, react, webdev, career
Published: 2021-08-24 12:22:49

# What is Celo & what's the fellowship about?
### About Celo
**Celo** is a mobile-first blockchain platform that lets anyone with a smartphone access the world of crypto and decentralized finance. Read more about it here:
[Celo Org](https://celo.org/).

### Celo India Fellowship '21
Celo India Fellowship is an 8 week program conducted by [Devfolio](https://devfolio.co/) wherein the ***fellows*** learn about the Celo blockchain eco-system and the different tools and tech for development. The learning process is usually 4 weeks, where each week the fellows and mentors get together to discuss our progress.

## My Selection Journey
I've been an avid hackathoner since the beginning of the year and regularly participated in hackathons conducted by [Devfolio](https://devfolio.co/), that's when I came across this program.

I submitted my fellowship application and had an interview scheduled a couple weeks later.

In the interview call, I was asked some basic questions regarding Celo's mission, protocol and few basic questions related on blockchain.

I previously had some blockchain development experience on Ethereum & Polygon and full-stack development with React-Typescript, Tailwind & Node. I was asked some questions on these topics and to differentiate between the Celo & Ethereum eco-system.

I answered all the questions with confidence and was really happy with the interview. A few days later I got a selection letter and I consider myself really lucky and blessed to be a part of **10 students from more than 1000 applications** for the first batch of CIF.

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# The Development

## Week 1 & 2 📝
Kicked off the fellowship with learning the basics of Celo protocol, the various tools of the eco-system and taking a deeper dive into blockchain.

## Week 3 📝
For the third week we were tasked with creating a mini-project based on our learnings during the first two weeks of the fellowship. I had decided to create a payments checkout page that could be used for ecommerce stores to accept payments in Celo.

## Week 4 📝
For the final week, all the fellows were given a case study on existing apps in the ecosystem. I was tasked with doing a case study on the [The Graph Protocol](https://thegraph.com/). Link to the case study: [Case Study - The Graph](https://www.canva.com/design/DAEi12UaIxM/F4UJEz85Ouf5B4hYmZiXwA/view?utm_content=DAEi12UaIxM&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton)

## The Final Project 🚀🚀

Based on my project on week 3, I had decided to build a B2B invoicing platform for merchants to accept payments using CeloUSD.

Merchants simply have to enter their email ids to create accounts(no passwords whatsoever) and they'll be taken to a dashboard which allows them to create payment links to accept payments.

The decentralized login is done through **Magic**, frontend was designed through **React Typescript** & **TailwindCSS**, the backend is done through **Express JS** & **Supabase** is the chosen database.

## To Summarize
The 8 week fellowship was instrumental in my learning of blockchain technologies, and elevated my research(read googling skills), programming and development acumen.

As [Devfolio](https://defolio.co) puts it: NEVER STOP BUILDING.