I was interviewed for a blockchain engineering position and given a prompt to write a smart contract that allowed for the staking and equal distribution of rewards pro rata to all stakers. The program followed an algorithm described in two papers that were written for an EVM chain, I was able to convert this algorithm from EVM -> Solana. I ended up turning this program into an intermediate Tutorial on Solana development.
SuperTeam DAO released a bounty around November '22 with a topic of Layer 1 devloper ecosystem deep dive. I decided to participate and put this together over the course of a week or so. I had a lot of fun writing this, and although I did not win the bounty, I learned a lot about the blockchain ecosystems that I wrote about. I'm honestly not a fan of the bounty framework that SuperTeam follows, because you have to put together a finished product and then submit it. You are most likely not going be granted any money for the work that you do. I decided to give this one a try because I thought the topic was very interesting and that I had a good chance of winning, plus the prize money was significantly larger any other bounties I've seen there.
Regardless, I now a very in depth research report on the developer ecosystems of Solana, Avalanche, and Cosmos. The prompt limited us to L1's that have shown significant growth over past year. Otherwise, I would have chosen some other chains that are of more interest to me. Thinking specifically of Aptos, Sui, and Sei. Maybe I'll put something together about those on my own...