I'm starting this on August 4, 2022. I have a new probationary apprentice--"probie" as Agent McGee was called in the first few episodes of NCIS.
What name did I have for December, 2021 apprentice? We actually started emailing in 2014 or so, but he didn't really go active until last year. In any event, many of my answers to his questions went in my technical blog. My vision is that this will be more of a task list, so it would clutter the tech blog. Or I should say a possible task list. I suspect doing a fraction of them will be impossible, but it's a list of ideas.
I almost always refer potential apprentices to my "2 paths" page. He's already read it, or at least a large part of it, but this is also a more general document for other potential apprentices.
I thought of a (I hope) relatively easy task that would be helpful. First, go get an Alchemy account. I'm assuming it's (still) free. And / or first install Metamask, but Alchemy will probably refer you there. Then start gathering both Goerli and >Rinkeby test Ether. The Goerli is far more important because it's far more scarce. Also, if you could figure out when Rinkeby will be deprecated, that would be helpful. Weeks versus months is all I care about. You can go to the Alchemy faucet every 24 hours to get more.
My Ether NFT project will probably go active again any day. Everything I've done so far is on the Rinkeby testnet. I hadn't heard of Goerli until a few weeks ago. I should have enough Rinkeby, but Goerli is harder to come by. It would be helpful if you can start accumulating it for when I need it.
Getting test Ether proved mildly annoying, months ago. I briefly read about "How to create [your own] a test ETH faucet," but in hindsight such instructions wouldn't have meant much to me at the time; I would not have understood it well enough. So, on one hand, you might look into the concept. On the other hand, if I wouldn't have understood it a few months ago, you'd have to work that much harder. Perhaps the place to start is with my Ethereum page. In case the context isn't clear, given how annoying it has been to gather test ETH, it would be nice to make my (our) own faucet and make it public. Then again, I don't know what the overall rules are. There is probably a systemic, intentional reason that it's scarce. Maybe reading up on that would be more useful; otherwise we might be banging our heads in a more fundamental sense.
To sketch another idea, I think I still have a Cardano Ada testnet stake pool that is running around like a Frankenstein's Monster. It keeps querying my website after a year. If you create a stake pool and then deregister it, and then motivate me to deregister mine, that will get you work experience for this site or whatever other site you want to create together. You can list it on your resume, and I see absolutely no reason to list it as being on the testnet. I'm your managerial reference. If you did a handful of such tasks and published such a resume to the right places, you'd probably start getting contacts immediately. Heck, just that one task might get you contacts. The instructions are in my tech blog from almost exactly a year ago.
That will do for now.