Making a new programming language easier to learn, teach, and build with.

Stacks needed to make an unfamiliar smart-contract language accessible to a growing developer ecosystem. Curiosity was not the bottleneck. Getting people from “I have heard of Clarity” to “I can write, test, and ship a contract” was.

I helped lead the education initiative that turned that challenge into a repeatable developer-learning system — not a one-off workshop series.

The original residency proposal publicly named me as the initial lead of the Clarity education initiative, with a small teaching team so the program could scale across cohorts and timezones. This was a Stacks residency, not a Foundation staff role.

The residency proposal received explicit endorsement from Stacks governance, citing our prior developer-training experience and readiness to scale Clarity Camp.

Metrics below describe what our Clarity Education initiative delivered over the year. I helped lead, teach, design curriculum, run hackathons, and train instructors — alongside the rest of the Whitelabel team.

The residency delivered six six-week virtual Clarity Camps reaching an estimated 400 developers. That was the core teaching loop.

We built leverage into the program by training 11 Stacks Chapter leaders across two Instructor Camps to run Clarity education locally — train-the-trainer, not only more of my own classroom hours.

In person, the initiative led a Clarity workshop and hackathon in Miami with CityCoins, Miami-Dade College, and Venture Miami, reaching an estimated 50 students; a workshop at EmpireDAO in New York City for 5 students; and an in-person Clarity Camp in Austin for 18 students. We also mentored and delivered a week-long Clarity crash course for the first BTC Startup Lab cohort, reaching 15 participants.

The residency hosted and judged four virtual Clarity hackathons with 315 registrations and 35 submitted projects. Devpost documents Whitelabel-led office hours across those events. Devpost lists Ciara as a judge for the Clarity Universe Camp III Hackathon.

• Clarity Universe Camp III — 33 registrations, 7 submissions. Devpost lists Ciara as a judge.
• Builders Edition Clarity Hackathon — 84 registrations, 9 submissions.
• Clarity Holiday Hackathon — 108 registrations, 7 submissions.
• Building on Bitcoin Hackathon — 90 registrations, 12 submissions.

We expanded Clarity Camp from live instruction into a reusable learning system: more written curriculum, code examples, tutorials, assignments, and a self-paced course designed to continue beyond the residency. The Clarity Camp GitHub organization still holds those assignments and practice projects.

We collaborated with the Stacks Foundation on an on-chain NFT completion credential for Clarity Camp graduates, and worked with Stacks Developer Advocate Kenny Rogers on a comprehensive Clarity skills assessment to validate understanding beyond sitting through a cohort. A Building on Bitcoin self-paced course was initialized with the Developer Advocate and was still in progress at the end of the residency.

The original self-paced course, assessment, and some event pages are no longer at their historic URLs. The residency report and GitHub artifacts are the durable public record.