Dear Zcash Community,
Looking to become a dev for the Zcash ecosystem. Currently I am a MSc Datascience student but I wish to contribute to Zcash.
Can someone inform me how I can best approach this? Are there set paths for this? Any traineeship or scholarship options?
Cheers
Cool, welcome to the forum!
I guess the best path is to learn and just build something that might be useful for the community. If you’re good with codes, check out open issues on zcash repository like ECC’s or ZF’s, e.g. Issues · zcash/zcash · GitHub, Issues · zcash/secant-android-wallet · GitHub, and Issues · ZcashFoundation/zebra · GitHub
If you’re good with data presentation, there have been interest from the community on a Zcash dashboard. Similar to Zcash Metrics - Electric Coin Company but with live data feed and perhaps even a Zcash transaction visualizer like this one for Bitcoin Blockchain Transaction Visualizer - TxStreet.com 
I remember there was this but I dont like github and I dont know the current status of these https://github.com/zcash/zcash/projects/27
What programming languages are your familiar with?
Python and C++
Most of the new code that is written is in Rust, so you will need to brush up on that. Luckily if you are at medium-to-advanced level on C++ this shouldn’t be too hard. A lot of paradigms that Rust enforces are also considered best practices in C++.
If you are willing to do less sexy jobs - like writing bots that keep scammers away, DM me, Python is ideal there. 