Solana Foundation Launches Fall Class Program to Support Developer Growth
The Solana Foundation has opened applications for its Fall Class program, which will run from August 31 to October 16. The program consists of seven weeks of live coding sessions, with each block lasting 90 minutes. This schedule is designed to be demanding but manageable, allowing students to keep pace and build their skills.
The curriculum skips the tutorial stage, diving straight into Solana architecture, program derived addresses, and developer environment setup. Students will then build vaults and escrows using the Anchor framework, and later tackle Token 2022 and transfer hooks, which enable programmable token behavior.
The program also covers native Rust with Pinocchio, a lean framework for writing programs without heavy dependencies. Compute unit optimization is another key topic, as it directly relates to transaction costs on mainnet. Additionally, students will work through Metaplex, Codama client generation, and Geyser indexing, which handles real-time data streams.
The program culminates in Demo Day, where participants will showcase their working programs. This event is deliberately framed as a lead-in to Colosseum, Solana's hackathons and accelerator. The Foundation aims to support the growth of developers through structured education, as evidenced by its funding for various learning initiatives.
Developer numbers explain the investment in structured education. Electric Capital's 2024 report ranked Solana first among all ecosystems for new developers, with 83% annual growth. Momentum continued through 2025, when Solana added 11,534 new developers over nine months.