Podcast appearances and mentions of nader dabit

Get ready for the ultimate recap of TOKEN2049! You won't believe what happened when Vitalik Buterin took the stage... Let's just say his singing skills are almost as legendary as his Ethereum empire! In today's episode of The Milk Road Show, we're playing a game of Bullish or Bearish, where Zeneca shares his take on moments from TOKEN2049.

In this episode, Simon interviews Nader Dabit, a developer and expert in AI and Web3. Nader shares his background and explains why he left his job at AWS to focus on Web3. He discusses the current state of Web3 and AI, highlighting the job market and opportunities in the blockchain space. Nader also explains the concept of EigenLayer and its role in providing security for new blockchain networks. He emphasizes the importance of practical use cases in Web3 and discusses the potential for decentralized social networks. In this conversation, Nader Dabit and Simon discuss the intersection of Web3 and React Native, as well as the practical applications of AI in mobile app development. Learn React Native - https://galaxies.devNader DabitNader Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3Nader YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/naderdabitWilliam Github: https://github.com/dabit3LinksEigenlabs: https://www.eigenlabs.org/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/Farcaster: https://www.farcaster.xyz/Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/Lens Protocol: https://www.lens.xyz/React Native AI: https://github.com/dabit3/react-native-aiTakeawaysWeb3 and AI offer different opportunities and challenges, with Web3 currently having a more promising job market.Stablecoins are a powerful use case in Web3, providing a stable currency for international transactions.Decentralized social networks are emerging as a practical use case in Web3, offering public, immutable infrastructure and increased user control.The complexity and terminology of Web3 can be overwhelming, but embracing the chaotic and fast-paced environment can lead to success.Web3 offers exciting possibilities for building decentralized apps and social networks.React Native provides a powerful framework for developing apps on Web3.AI APIs make it easy to incorporate AI capabilities into mobile apps.Differentiation and rapid iteration are key to success in the Web3 space.

Learn about the newest mobile framework, React Native AI, from creator Nader Dabit, and why he's focusing on indie hacking. Links https://nader.codes https://nader.arweave.dev https://www.linkedin.com/in/naderdabit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7mca3O0DmdSG2Cr80sOD7g https://twitter.com/dabit3 https://github.com/dabit3 https://dev.to/dabit3 We want to hear from you! How did you find us? Did you see us on Twitter? In a newsletter? Or maybe we were recommended by a friend? Let us know by sending an email to our producer, Emily, at emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com (mailto:emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com), or tweet at us at PodRocketPod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod). Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Nader Dabit.

Today we are joined by the all-around dev phenomenon Nader Dabit. Nader has become a household name across the developer community with his combination of to-the-point tutorials, live coding demos and interviews focused on modern web development, Web 3, AI, cloud computing and more. He's always learning and experimenting in public. Nader is currently the Director of Dev Relations at Aave/Lens. Today, he'll get to do some details behind his journey into Web 3 starting with The Graph, decentralized social media, the devs building on the Lens Protocol, Lens infrastructure and he'll give us a mini deep dive into gasless transactions via Lens. But first, Nader tells us about what it was like being early to AWS before he made his switch into Web 3 full-time.

Today's episode is a technical deep dive into how Lens Protocol works under the hood.Build with Superfluid: https://www.superfluid.finance/wavepoolBuild on Lens: https://www.lens.xyz/gardenChapters:00:00:00 - Intro00:02:45 - Hackathons and the Superfluid Wave Pool00:05:35 - Understanding Lens: A Developer's Perspective00:08:11 - Lens Infrastructure: What's Happening Under the Hood?00:11:02 - Build a Following That Stays with You Forever00:13:33 - The Challenges of Storing and Retrieving Data in Blockchain Applications00:16:13 - Building the Lens API00:21:30 - Lens Modules00:29:31 - Social Media Monetization and the Scalability of Lens compared to Twitter00:32:05 - Scalability and the Challenges of Building at Twitter Scale and Beyond00:34:52 - A Modular Infrastructure for Increased Transaction Speeds00:37:21 - Building on top of the Lens API: Required Skill Sets00:39:46 - Progressive Decentralization00:44:53 - Building Recommendation Algorithms with AI and Machine Learning Techniques00:49:47 - Exciting Opportunities for Developers on Lens Platform00:52:11 - Building with Lens and Calls to Action for Developers

This blogpost has been updated since original release to add more links and references.The ChatGPT Plugins announcement today could be viewed as the launch of ChatGPT's “App Store”, a moment as significant as when Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone in 2008 or when Facebook let developers loose on its Open Graph in 2010. With a dozen lines of simple JSON and a mostly-english prompt to help ChatGPT understand what the plugin does, developers will be able to add extensions to ChatGPT to get information and trigger actions in the real world. OpenAI itself launched with some killer first party plugins for: * Browsing the web, * writing AND executing Python code (in an effortlessly multimodal way), * retrieving embedded documents from external datastores,* as well as 11 launch partner plugins from Expedia to Milo to Zapier.My recap thread was well received:But the thing that broke my brain was that ChatGPT's Python Interpreter plugin can run nontrivial code - users can upload video files and ask ChatGPT to edit it, meaning it now has gone beyond mere chat to offer a substantial compute platform with storage, memory and file upload/download. I immediately started my first AI Twitter Space to process this historical moment with Alessio and friends of the pod live. OpenAI's Logan (see Episode 1 from *last month*…) suggested that you might be able to link ChatGPT up with Zapier triggers to do arbitrary tasks! and then Flo Crivello, who just launched his AI Assistant startup Lindy, joined us to discuss the builder perspective.Tune in on this EMERGENCY EPISODE of Latent Space to hear developers ask and debate all the issues spilling out from the ChatGPT Plugins launch - and let us know in the comments if you want more/have further questions!SPECIAL NOTE: I was caught up in the hype and was far more negative on Replit than I initially intended as I tried to figure out this new ChatGPT programming paradigm. I regret this. Replit is extremely innovative and well positioned to help you develop and host ChatGPT plugins, and of course Amjad is already on top of it:Mea culpa.Timestamps* [00:00:38] First Reactions to ChatGPT Plugins* [00:07:53] Q&A: Keeping up with AI* [00:10:39] Q&A: ChatGPT Intepreter changes Programming* [00:12:27] Q&A: ChatGPT for Education* [00:15:21] Q&A: GPT4 Sketch to Website Demo* [00:16:32] Q&A: AI Competition and Human Jobs* [00:18:44] ChatGPT Plugins as App Store* [00:34:40] Google vs ChatGPT* [00:36:04] Nader Dabit on Selling His GPT App* [00:43:16] Q&A: ChatGPT Waitlist and Voice* [00:45:26] LangChain with Human in the Loop* [00:46:58] Google vs Microsoft vs Apple* [00:51:43] ChatGPT Plugin Ideas* [00:53:49] Not an app store?* [00:55:24] LangChain and the Future of AI* [01:00:48] Q&A: ChatGPT Bots and Cronjobs* [01:04:43] Logan Joins Us!* [01:07:14] Q&A: Plugins Rollout* [01:08:26] Q&A: Plugins Discovery* [01:10:00] Q&A: OpenAI vs BingChat* [01:11:03] Q&A: App Store Monetization* [01:14:45] Q&A: ChatGPT Plugins API* [01:17:17] Q&A: Python Interpreter* [01:19:58] The History of App Stores and Marketplaces* [01:22:40] LindyAI's Flo Crivello Joins Us* [01:29:42] AI Safety* [01:31:07] Multimodal GPT4* [01:32:10] Designing AI-safe APIs* [01:34:39] Flo's Closing CommentsTranscript[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Latent Space Emergency episode. This is our first ever where chatty PT just dropped a plugin ecosystem today, or at least they demoed their plugins. It's still on the wait list, but it is the app store moment for ai. And we did an emergency two hour space with Logan from OpenAI and Flo Coveo from Lin AI and a bunch of our friends.[00:00:28] And if you ever wanted to listen to what it's like to hear developers process in real time when a new launch happens, this is it. Enjoy,[00:00:38] First Reactions to ChatGPT Plugins[00:00:38] I assume everyone has read the blog post. For me the, the big s**t was do you see Greg Brockman's tweet about FFMPEG? I did not. I should check it out. It is amazing. Okay, so. So ChatGPT can generate Python code. We knew this, this is not new, and they can now run the code that it generates.[00:00:58] This is not new. I mean this is like, this is good. It's not like surprising. It's, it's fine. It can run FFMPEG code. You can upload a file, ask it to edit the video file, and it can process the video file and then it can give you the link to download the video file. So it's a general purpose compute platform.[00:01:22] Wow. Did they show how to do this? Agents? I just, I just, I just pinned it. I just, it did I, did I turn into this space? I dunno how to use it. Yeah, it's, it's showing up there. Okay. It can run like is. Is, is, is my And by, by the way hi to people. I, I don't know how to run spaces. I, I not something I normally do.[00:01:42] But You wanna say something? Please request. But yeah, reactions have a look at this video because it run, it generates and runs video editing code. You can upload any arbitrary file. It seems to have good enough compute and memory and file storage. This is not chat anymore, man. I don't know what the hell this is.[00:02:01] What, what is this?[00:02:02] Well, progress has been all faster than I expected. . That's all I can, I, I, I don't know how to respond. . Yeah. It's pretty wild. I wonder, I wonder, I'm wondering how, how this will affect, like opening up the app store different from, let's say Apple App Store when it opened up. Because there are a lot of, of big companies just building stuff already and how like a small developer will be able to, to build something that's not already there.[00:02:31] I dunno. It will be interesting. So one thing that's really nice, have you seen the installation process for the plugins? It's right at the bottom of the blog post and you have to play the video to kind of see it, but literally anybody can write your own plugin. It's a small little json file. It's, it's literally like 10 lines of code.[00:02:49] It's 10 nights of, you described what your plugin does in English, you given an open API spec. That's it. That, that's, that's the plugin. It's amazing. You can distribute your plugin. This is, this is, this is easier than extensions manifest v3, which nobody knows how to use. This is English.[00:03:15] You write English . So, so, yeah. I mean I think, I think I think there'll be a lot of people trying to develop for this if they can get access, which you know, everybody's on a wait list. I, I've, I've signed up to 200 wait lists this week. . I wonder if, if it'll be different if you, if you sign up as a, as a developer or as the chat user.[00:03:35] Hopefully it doesn't matter, right? Use different emails and sign up to both. Let's, let's just see, in fact, use t to generate like, plausible sounding reasons for why you want to build whatever. Cause they don.[00:03:47] But yeah, I mean, how do you compete? I, I don't know, man. You know, it, it's really OpenAI is definitely a partnership strategy to do what they do here which means they're essentially picking favorites. So if you're a competitor of Expedia Kayak Open Table Wolf from Zapier, you're a s**t out of luck, kind of, you know?[00:04:06] Cause these are presumptive winners of their spaces. Right. And it'll happen in too many industries, probably. Right. I was thinking about maybe summarization or, or I don't know, YouTube video summarization, but there seems to be some application of that already on the examples that you shared. Yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:04:26] They have shared that, but I think there's always room to improve the experience. It's just, you know It's interesting which platform, like sort of platform strategy, right? Like if you write an OpenAI chat plugin, you instantly gain access to a hundred million users, right? All of them can instantly use your thing.[00:04:47] Whereas if you are a standalone app or company, good luck trying to able to use OpenAI through you. There's just no point. So you much rather just be on OpenAI platform and promote there. The the fortunate thing is they don't have some kind of like popularity ranking yet. Actually, someone should go open, someone should do register, like OpenAI plugins list.com or something where like everyone can like submit their own opening app plugins and like upload them, review them cuz this like, this is not a complete app store without reviews and a rating system and a reputation system and probably monetization opening app probably doesn't care about that.[00:05:26] But I mean, I can go start that right now. F**k. I can go start it right now.[00:05:34] Yeah, it'll, it'll take a while, right? Like this is the, like the basic version of the, of the app evolving. But this is a pretty basic version. Yeah. The basic version can browse the web, it can write, write an execute code. It can retrieve you know, we can retrieve data from documents, right? So all the documents search just died.[00:06:02] There's like five of these in Y Combinator right now. Oh.[00:06:08] Examples. Pretty crazy how, how they use the FFMPEG library or, I dunno if I'm saying that correctly, but right in there. You don't need to, to write code to,[00:06:27] it's crazy. Dunno. Yeah. Any reactions? Please, please, you know, open space. Anyone can request a speaker. Oh, Ash, come on in. Ash. I have to add you a speaker. Yeah, we're, we're just reacting here. I just, I, I needed a place to talk and I'm in Japan and I don't have anyone else to talk to, so I need, I, I I just want to share this moment.[00:06:46] I think it's a special moment in history. This is the biggest new app source since ever. Yeah. Hey, Shawn. I think plugin is already taken. . Oh man. Someone, someone bought it already. Yep. , of course. Right? Of course. , what are your reactions? What how are you feeling? What's what are you seeing out there?[00:07:07] Just crowdsource all the tweeting. Yeah, man, it's, it's been wild. I mean, I get out of there to like five minutes and then anything drops, you know, , I think productivity today will be like zero. If I, if I still, like, I quit my job you know, a few weeks ago but I would not be working today. There, there's no point.[00:07:26] There's nothing else. There's nothing else that's important, like, nothing's going on. Like this is the only story. Yep. . I wonder if you have any, any frameworks or anyone that's listening any frameworks on, on how you're handling all of this new, new stuff. Like every single day if something new comes up and, or you can like get the, the wait list invitations to, to use the new products.[00:07:52] Q&A: Keeping up with AI[00:07:52] Like, for example, today I just got the, the one from GIK cli and I was just playing around with that. And then suddenly I started to see all of the, these Twitter threads with announcements. It's getting crazy just to follow up with, with the stuff. And every day something new comes up and started. I was starting to feel a lot of formal, you know, like, h how do you keep up with all of these?[00:08:12] Or how do you focus? Does anyone have any, any good frameworks for that? Well, feel free to respond. Also, we, we have some more room if anyone wants to share your feelings. This is a, this is a safe space to share your feelings because. We all dunno how to react right now. I don't know. I just, I, I, I have a few notifications on for OpenAI employees and people that I do that I think do good recaps.[00:08:37] So in other words, find the people who are high signal and who do a lot of gathering of other people's stuff for, and then just subscribe to those people and trust that that is 90% of it and forget the 10%[00:08:57] Alright. And Sean probably, I have, I have another question. So I can't really figure out like what's left for us to do, you know, without AI tools. Like what, what is we learn next? You know, there's no learning some coding stuff, because you can only do that. You know, we can't do arts, we can't do poetry.[00:09:17] Farming[00:09:17] bakery, probably making things with your hands. Enjoying the sun.[00:09:23] Do you guys think this should be regulated? Like you don't go more than like the speed is going? I don't know. I dunno. There's, there's no point. Like if, like, if you regulate OpenAI, then someone else will come along. The secret is out now that you can't do this, and at most you'll slow things down by 10 years.[00:09:44] You called the secret. This is the end. . Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know. Secret is out. China's trying to do it right, so I don't know if people have seen, but like China was, was fairly strict on crypto, which is probably good for them. And now they're, they're also trying to clamp down on AI stuff, which is funny because oa like they're, you know, the m i t of of China Ihu, I was actually doing like producing like really good bilingual models.[00:10:10] But yeah, they, they seem to be locking this down, so we'll see. We'll see. Right? Like you know, in, in, in sort of the, the free world there, there's open innovation that may be unsafe. OpenAI, try to be safe. You know, there, there's a big part of the blog post that was talk, talking about red team meeting and all that.[00:10:24] I'm sure every one of us skipped it. I skipped it. And then and then we just care about capabilities and now that, you know, every time people have their minds opened, like, I did not know Ron. EG in chat.[00:10:38] Q&A: ChatGPT Intepreter changes Programming[00:10:38] Now that I know my conception of what a REPL is, or literate programming or what a notebook is, is completely blown outta the water, right?[00:10:44] Like there's no like this, this is a new form factor for me. So not now that I know that I won't be innovating on that or trying to, to shape this into something that I can use because I want to use this, and this is, this is clearly better. Does, does this ha have to do with, with the, like AI as backend?[00:11:00] Yeah. Ideas that have been, yeah. You know, GP as backend. So, so apparently I had a few friends reach out to those guys and they're not doing that because it's not mature enough. Like it works for a simple demo. So, so for, for those who don't know ScaleAI did a hackathon I think two months ago just before I did mine.[00:11:18] And the winner on the hackathon was, was something called GPT is all you need for backend. And they actually what in register? DBC is backend.com. But as far as I can tell, they're not gonna start a company based on that because if you even push a little bit, it falls apart, right? So GPT3 wasn't good enough for that.[00:11:36] Maybe GPT4 is maybe GPT5, but then it'll still be super slow and super expensive. Like you don't want to run, you know, a large language model on every API request. So I don't know. I think it'll be good for scaffolding. I think it'll be good for re type use cases. Like, Hey, I need to edit this video on an ad hoc basis.[00:11:53] I don't, I don't want to learn FFMPEG. I don't need to now, because I can just talk to ChatGPT. That makes sense. But if you want a reliable, scalable backend you probably don't want to use it on a large language model, but that's okay because language model can probably help you write it rather than run it.[00:12:13] Hey, Lessio. Hey guys. Oh yeah. Hey guys. What's up? Hey, yeah, we're, we're just, there's no structure. Just drop your reactions. Let's go. Awesome. Awesome, awesome guys.[00:12:26] Q&A: ChatGPT for Education[00:12:26] What do you think what if Shawn, what do you think if you could use you know AI and the education field, like, you know, like personal attribution system for students?[00:12:35] What's the thought automation education or attribution edu edu education. Yeah. That is the holy grail. This is called the Blooms two Sigma problem. Like the, the, the, one of the big issues of education is we have to teach to the slowest person in the class. And, and, you know, I'm a beneficiary of, of a gifted education system where they take out you know, nominally high IQ people and put them in a separate class.[00:12:56] And, and yeah, we did, we did do better. What if we can personalize every student's experience there's, there's some educational theory. This is called Bloom's two Sigma problem. Where the results will be better. I think that we are closer, but like, I still hope that we're pretty far , which sounds like a negative, like why do I want to deny education to students?[00:13:18] Because if we are there, then we will have achieved theory of mind for ai. The AI has a very good model, is able to develop a representation of who you are, is able to develop theories that the test who you are in, in a short amount of time. And I, it's a very dangerous path to, to go down. So I want, I want us to go slowly rather than fast on, on the education front.[00:13:41] Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. It makes a lot sense and yeah, definitely. I think personally the education for each student and making it turn the best way would be great. And what do you think how about like, first of all, I'm, I'm having very curious, curious question, you know, like we are having, this week was full of launches, so how you guys are keeping up with if we're not, this is, I created the space though cuz I cannot handle it.[00:14:05] Today, today was my breaking point. I was like I don't know what's happening anymore. Yeah, like every single day I'm just in constant anxiety that like everything I assumed about the world is gonna be thrown up. Like I don't know how to handle it. This is a therapy session, so feel free to express.[00:14:21] Definitely. It's, it's been a very overwhelming feeling for everyone of us like that. I think, you know, like past two weeks and like the industry was definitely a lot, lot of ones we are definitely open for, you know, to discuss more about it. Thanks a lot for this space. Sean. Yeah. Appreciate. Yeah. Va one more thing.[00:14:39] So I think that the most constrained version of education use cases is language teaching. So there are a few language teachers out there speak I think is one of them that is an OpenAI partner. And they're also part of the chat GPT plugin release. , but there are also other language tutor platforms.[00:14:57] You can certainly have your news. There was one that was released maybe like four or five months ago that you can try to see what the experience is like. And you can, you can tell when the teacher has no idea who you are and it breaks the illusion that you're speaking to another human. So I, I just, you can experience that today and, and decipher yourself if we're ready for that.[00:15:14] I hope that we're not ready and it seems like we're not ready. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Thanks a lot for sharing. And guys, what do you think?[00:15:19] Q&A: GPT4 Sketch to Website Demo[00:15:19] Like I, in the launch of four we have show that we could, you know, generate apps and web apps just from you know, like a single simple sketch, you know different tent.[00:15:30] Just start from sketch. So what do you think like how, how it would be impacting the industry? It's all because it's not just like that, that sketch was very, was a very shitty sketch. Right. It was just like drawn on a piece of paper. But if you combine that with the multimodal, like it was that they had another part of that demo where they had a screenshot of the discord the opening eye discord and you're mm-hmm.[00:15:57] and they put it in and it, it like read the entire screen to you and if you can read the entire screen, you can code the entire . Screen. So it's over like[00:16:12] It's definitely, I think interaction, interaction designers, you know, like people who like, think design function still have some time. Yeah. I, I just, I just, I just tried the same thing, you know on bar today and it was like much more better than GPT3 so definitely it's you know, things are really changing.[00:16:30] Q&A: AI Competition and Human Jobs[00:16:30] Great forward. I'm, I'm really worried what we wanna do, you know? Do you think the competition will like stable everything? Like what competition? Anthropic. Well, like Google, Google won't race, I don't think. Google Race, like Google the fight. The one that, the one that launched the W links list of blog posts.[00:16:50] That, that Google.[00:16:55] Well, no, not, not the list. Not the list. Competitions will come. . I have a question. I mean I mean my fear is many of the jobs that are going away, whether it is developer and designers, because I mean, I think GPT four is very capable. So how to deal with it. I mean, it's going to replace, I mean, many of the jobs, that's for sure.[00:17:16] Yeah. It's okay. We'll find new jobs or we'll, we'll not need jobs anymore. We should, we should also, Start universal basic income. That's, that, that is something I, I do believe, yeah, I think the, the main change is going from the web of like, syntax to like the web of Symantec. So if your job is valuable because, you know, a unique syntax or like, you know, how to transform things from like words to syntax, I think that will be a lot less useful going forward.[00:17:45] But the Symantec piece is still important. So a lot of product work, it's not just writing CSS and HTML and like the backend for it. It's a lot more than that. So I just thinking about how do you change your skills to do that. But yeah, even the sketch, you know, you gotta like, you gotta draw the sketch and to draw the sketch, you gotta know where the button should go.[00:18:06] You know, you have, you know, incorrect with it. Yeah. I'm just processing this as I, I just read the whole thing as well. And Yeah, I mean, it's been a wild wild couple of weeks and it's gotten me thinking that maybe all our role was over the past couple years was we were just middlemen to talk to computers, right?[00:18:27] So we're sitting in between, it's over man PMs or business folks or whoever wanna build a product. And then as a software developer, you're just a middle manish talking to the machine and it seems like. N LP is the way forward and, oh, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been it's been, it's been a while.[00:18:42] ChatGPT Plugins as App Store[00:18:42] Couple of weeks. It's, I feel like we all just have to move either move upstream or, or find other jobs. You just gotta move upstream, either toward product directly. Cuz right now the plugin is yeah, is, is just you know, it's still a very sanitized UI that is controlled by OpenAI. But imagine them opening up the ui portion as well.[00:19:03] So you no longer need to have a siloed product that needs to integrate. ChatGPT instead you can bring your product directly into into ChatGPT, I don't think exactly. I think that would be probably the next next logical move after this, and I'm sure they're already thinking about that.[00:19:22] So that's a great, I don't know if this is, it's wild. What are you guys think? Yeah. Yeah. Like, so before you came up, right, I was, I was talking about this like ChatGPT has at least a hundred million users. Why would you bring people to your platform rather than write a plugin for ChatGPT and use their platform?[00:19:39] It's an open question now. Zapier just launched their integration. OpenAI and OpenAI just launched their integration of Zapier. Which one is gonna be more interesting? Probably OpenAI.[00:19:50] Totally a hundred percent . this is the app store of wow, our century of our decade. Like, I don't know, maybe century. I, I think the thing with ster though, if you think about it, like how many native apps do you download every week, every month versus like how many web things you use. So I think it's all about whether or not long-term opening eyes incentivize to keep broadening the things you can do within the plugin space.[00:20:17] And I think the lab, you know, as this technology gets more widespread, they're gonna have a lot more pressure from regulators, safety, blah, blah, blah. So I'm really curious to see you know, all, all the, all the government stuff that they'll, they'll have a congressional on this in six months and by then it will be completely irrelevant.[00:20:34] It's like that beside that time, they, they, they called it the GameStop guy after he made like 20 million on GameStop. And he just, you know, he was like, yeah, you know, followed the rules, made a bunch of money for those who don't know, unless you're our co-host. On the, we were supposed to drop an episode today, which I was supposed to work on, and then Chatty Phi dropped this thing, and now I, I can't think about anything else.[00:20:59] So this, this is my excuse for not, for for not working on the podcast today. . I know it's funny, we have like three, four recorded ones and spend last week, like GP four came out and we're like, okay, everybody's talking about this is irrelevant. What else? Anything else? Like, but I'm really excited about the, I, I feel like the first, the first use case for this, and I think he tweeted it about it too, is like, before if you had to do like data reformatting and stuff like that, it was really hard to do programmatically.[00:21:32] You know, like you didn't have an natural language interface and now you have it. And before if you had to integrate things together, like you could explain it very easily, but you couldn't like, put the APIs together and now they kind of remove all that part. So I'm excited to see what this looks like.[00:21:48] For commercial use cases, you know, you could see like, is there gonna be like a collaborative ChatGPT where like you're gonna have two, three people in the same conversation working on things. I think there's a lot of ui things that will improve. And so as we have lining from OpenAI for a second, almost pulled them up, but I'm sure you cannot talk about it[00:22:07] But yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Yes, sir. We're extremely excited. Extremely excited. I, I don't, if you, I don't know what else I'm, I'm like, so as far as I can tell there's the, there's hacker and Twitter. I haven't looked at Reddit yet, but I'm sure there's a bunch of reactions on Reddit.[00:22:23] I'm sure there's the OpenAI discord that we can also check out. I got locked out of the discord at some point, but yeah, anyone, anyone else like see news, demos, tweets the whole point of this is that it's live, so please feel free to share on comments or anything like that. But yeah. Yeah, the, the craziest thing I saw was the Mitchell from Hash.[00:22:44] We tweeted about Yes. How the integrations actually work and you just write a open APIs back and then just use natural language to describe what it's supposed to do. And then their model does everything. I wonder if they're using the off-the-shelf model or they have like a fine tune model to actually run integrations.[00:23:02] I wonder, I don't think they'll ever say it. Knowing them, probably they would just use the base one cuz they want, like, I think opening eyes kind of wants a God model, right? There's no point. It's not intellectually interesting to do small models, but like, like it's trivial. Yeah. Yeah. It's, this is a minor optimization problem as far as the, the long arc of history and the, the point is to build a gi safe agi and I, I do think this is kind of safe, right?[00:23:33] Like, . One of the criticisms that people were saying on hacks was that this is very closed. Like it's, it is an app store. At any point opening, I can randomly decide to close this like they did for Codex, and then they change their minds. Whereas if you use something like Alan Chain, it is more open and something that at the same time, like clearly this is a better integration path than long-chain.[00:23:56] Like, I much rather write this kind of plugin than a long-chain plugin. So they, they've managed to, I mean, they know how to ship man, like they're an AI research lab, but they also know how to ship product. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I, I'm curious to see what the pricing models gonna look like. Also, I mean, if I'm writing the plugin, this is great because I don't even have to take care of the compute, you know, like, I just plug it in, then they actually run everything for me.[00:24:26] Yeah, but how, how it'll be monetized. I mean if the is giving their plugin know Expedia, I mean, people will not go to their website. Yeah. I don't, I mean, yeah. I have no idea that they, I don't think they said also don't super care . Yeah. It's because in the, in the app store, it's transaction driven.[00:24:46] But on Channel G, you're just paying a flat fee every month. So like, you can't really do revenue share on a flat fee. And I don't think that we use like, the Spotify model, but it's like a why not the amount of times? No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why not , you have Spotify. I just, Spotify model works. Cause swyx has power, right?[00:25:05] Opening has power. Same thing. They have all the audience. Yeah. But every, every every song is like the same value. Like if you listen to song actor to song y. , like, you're gonna make the same money. Like if I'm calling the API to, for like the meme generator or if I'm calling the API for the, you know, business summary thing, they're probably gonna cost the firm things, you know, so it's kind of hard to model up for OpenAI to say, Hey, okay, we're charging, we're going from 20 to 35 bucks a month.[00:25:36] But then like, how do you actually do royalties on a per model basis? Like how do people decide what royalties to negotiate? This probably needs to be a flat fee, but I dunno. Or put your credit card it OpenAI and then every time you wanna use a plugin, you pay for it separately. Uvp, usage based pricing all the way, and then you just get at the end of every month.[00:25:58] Exactly the, the only question mark is like, how much does OpenAI value the training they on and like how much they wanna subsidize the usage. Canada they have, they have promised to not use any of our usage data for training. So, oh, but the, I think like the plugins, it's a, it's a different thing.[00:26:16] It's like, like how you could, you could easily see how are like requests usually structure for like these things, you know, like, are people searching? So how are people searching for flights and stuff like that. I don't know. I haven't read the terms for like the actual plugin, you know, so. Well if anyone has please come up to speak cuz we're all processing this live.[00:26:37] This is the therapy session. Yeah, go ahead. One thing I see is basically you have to change the plugin I mean, to ask anything or even if you did browsing, right? I mean I see. I mean, they are becoming directly competitor to Microsoft also, I think, because now a user can actually just see, I mean, instead of being chat or Google, I mean they, they just.[00:27:04] Basically select the browsing plugin and basically get all the updated data. And other thing I see is basically you have to change the plugins. Like if you want to use the Expedia data, I don't know how it'll fit with the browsing plugin or you can select multiple plugins. But yeah, it is interesting.[00:27:23] I mean, if we get access, yeah, there is no actual browsing plugin. The browsing is a new model. So just like you can select GT three, GT 3 45, GT four, there's a new model now that says browsing alpha. So you, you can use CHATT in browsing mode and then you can use it in plugins mode, which which is a different model again.[00:27:45] So the, the plug browsing don't cross over.[00:27:51] Oh, that's interesting. And how do you see, I mean, in this whole descending, they are becoming competitive to Microsoft or how they're playing it out. I mean, Bing is just by the way, like, yeah, this, this killed the bing wait list. Cuz you don't need to wait for Bing. You can just use the browser mode open of Chatt.[00:28:11] How does it compete? It competes for sure. I don't think Microsoft cares. I don't think OpenAI cares. This is one of those things where like, you know, they are the two, two friends, you know, and they're clearly winning, so who cares? I don't like, I don't imagine it takes any of their mental bandwidth at all.[00:28:29] Yeah. The main thing is Google is Yeah, the main, like how is Google competing? Well let's see. Right. Bard is out there. I haven't got us yet, but could be interesting. Again, like it doesn't seem like they have the shipping capacity or velocity of Open I Microsoft and. That is probably going to bite them eventually because there's already been a big brain drain.[00:28:53] Something like four researchers, four, the top Google Brain researchers left Google Brain for OpenAI in January. And you know, those are the ones that I know about. And I, I imagine there's, there's quite a bit of brain, brain drain and firing going on at Google, so who knows.[00:29:08] All right, well, any other topics, concerns? Hyperventilation, if you just wanna scream I can turn down the volume and you can just, ah, for like five minutes. , that was literally, I was like, I, I need to like scream and just, ah, because what is going on?[00:29:29] I said that I'm filling out the form right now for the Oh, yeah. Okay. So wait list. So use use chat t to fill out that form. Right. And then, and then use a fake, use a different email and fill out the form a different way. This maximizes . I'm going to ask GT for what plugin do I want to build or, right, right.[00:29:51] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I, we can brainstorm. My plugins can live. Yeah. I think that will be a fun exercise. Like the, the main thing that breaks my brain is just this, this whole ability to run code, right? Like this is a new notebook, a new ripple. Mm-hmm. It, it looks like it has storage and it has memory.[00:30:08] Probably it has GPUs. That, I mean, can we run Lama inside GP?[00:30:19] I don't know if that's a, a model within a model. I think for me, most of the things come to like, you know, if I have my own personal assistant, what I want the assistant to do. I think like travel is like the first thing that comes to mind. Like, if I could use pt Yeah. Expedia, plug in with my calendar.[00:30:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it needs to like know where I, where I'm supposed to be going to, you know, like if I just add a calendar that's like I'm going to, you know, room this week. Yeah. And then like can automatically both send my calendar and say, okay, these are like, or like the times that you like to travel, I know that you don't like ops and yada yada, yada.[00:31:00] That's one thing that I've always, we had this thesis at my peers firm about personalized consumer. There's so many website like, . I go to a lot of basketball games and every time I open Ticketmaster or whatever, it always shows me that she's a seat. And like, I'm not gonna see, that's not what I, that's not the tickets I wanna buy, you know?[00:31:18] But doesn't matter how many tickets I buy, never remembers that. So I think a way to say, to see, take all the information in and suggest, Hey, I saw that there's actually a price drop for the specific seats that you want, not for like any seats. You know, I think that would be a, a very good use case. So I've been a personal entertainment assistant for like, travel like going to shows, going to games.[00:31:41] That would be cool. That's what I'll submit on the wait list. Then we'll see if anybody cares. Right. Did you see get Lindy? Yeah. Yeah. At the, maybe you wanna recap, get Lindy for people. I'm gonna pin it up on the. . Yeah. So basically and this is like the kind of like a assistant lend the ai, right?[00:32:03] Yeah. Lend the ai it's on the board right now. Yeah. For those who can see it through the space. Yeah. Yeah. Actually at the AI Thinkers meet up the, the other day, you can basically like create all kind of like personal workflows and you, it kind of looks like integrations like zier, but it's actually just natural language.[00:32:24] So you can pop this thing up on your desktop and say, trying to hire 10 software engineers. So go on LinkedIn and plan 10 software engineers. The next step, draft a, an email that says, I'm the CEO of this company and I'm trying to hire for my team. If you wanna talk. Then the next step is like, send emails to all these people and it's gonna use people data labs or something else that they use on the backend to get the emails.[00:32:50] Then it actually sends the emails and. This is just gonna run in the background as if it was like you actually doing it. It's pretty neat that you don't have to write the actual integrations. Like it just uses natural language so you're not bound by what they build. Like theoretically anything you wanna integrate with, you can just explain to it how it works and it's gonna figure out how to do it.[00:33:12] So there's a wait list now. Flow didn't give us any papers just because we were at the meetup, so I'm also waiting to get access to it, but it looks really, really good. Yeah, so generative AI's top use case is generating wait lists, right? Like we we're, we are, so we have never had such an easy way to generate a lot of wait lists.[00:33:30] A lot of signup for witness. Oh my God. So much interest. So much product market fit. But also you know, one thing that you, you raising this point? I think, I think, I think by the way, I also pin this up. Mindy can support complex roles like no meetings on Fridays, all one-on-ones on Monday. , I like my meetings back to back within five minutes.[00:33:47] Five minutes in between. So it's just arbitrary rules that you could not program in a normal assistant type environment without a large language model. Which is kind of exactly what you want when you're booking your travel, right? Like, hey, I only like aisle seats unless it's it's a flight that is less than one hour that I don't care, right?[00:34:02] Mm-hmm. . So stuff like that I think is, is super interesting. And but also like not a common use case. Like how many times do you travel a year? Like, you know, five, right? Like more than that, but yes, I think for, yeah, a lot of times it's not a, it's not like a super widespread thing, especially if you don't do it or work.[00:34:21] If it's infrequent, you want high value and then if it's, if it's frequents, you can do low value, right? Like that, that's the sort of binary tradeoff, like the Uber is sort of frequent and low value. Airbnb is high value in frequent there's something of that nature. . So like, you want, you want sort of inspections of that sort.[00:34:37] Google vs ChatGPT[00:34:37] But the other thing that you brought to my attention was, and, and has room for Google to do something is do you notice that OpenAI plugins, none of them are Google because they're not friends. So Open BT will probably never have first party access to Google Calendar, probably never your Gmail and probably whatever, you know, Google copies, OpenAI again.[00:35:04] They will do, Hey, we have all your docs.[00:35:10] Yeah, I, I, I'm interested in that because I don't know if you remember, but like in the first iPhone, like YouTube came, like pre-installed on the homepage and then I forgot when, but one of the early ioss, they removed it. So now obviously Google's not a friend. Who's gonna be a friend in the future, who's not gonna be like, do we all have to hail our AI overlords?[00:35:33] Yeah. To get access to the, the only plugin system. Yeah. The only winners are brown CEOs. Think you're fine. Alright. But yeah, yeah. I just invited nada. C my old boss. Hi. You can't lurk. I, I want, I want to hear from you. And but, but also, you know, yeah, I, I think the Google point is actually novel.[00:35:50] I'll probably write something about that. Yeah. I mean, I'll have to write something about this today. So please feed me things to write.[00:36:01] Nader Dabit on Selling His GPT App[00:36:01] Oh, there we go. Hey, what's up man? What are you think. I know it's like, not entirely your space, but like you're, you're all about the future, right? I mean I did build and sell an AI company about a month ago, . I did the wait, what travel app was built on GP T three Tweeted about You sold it? Yeah.[00:36:21] It was getting like a hundred thousand visitors a day, like 60 to 80,000 unique a day. And then I, whoa. Yeah, I sold it like within about 24 hours. I tweeted out that it was for sale. I had like 30 or 40 people in my inbox. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. I need, so like, but you're right. This isn't my, my man like domain of expertise.[00:36:41] It's fine. You make, you may just a thousand dollars on the side. It's, it's cool. Wait, wait. So I saw you tweet your original thing, which was, Hey you know, GP three can plan your travel. I don't know what happened since then. Can you, can you fill the rest of. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean I was basically, you know, I travel a lot for work.[00:36:55] I, I do travel like once a month and, you know, but I'm also very resource constrained on my time. So I usually like to spend like one day sightseeing. So what I typically do is I go a trip advisor and then I kind of like, you know, Google around and like look at all these things and it usually takes me about an hour to figure out like what I wanna do on my day or two off to go, like sighting.[00:37:14] And then I realized GPT3, you know, you can just literally ask and, and say, okay, within X number of. Like, I'm gonna be in this city, I want to have an iter itinerary. You know, you can give all these different parameters and it gives back a really good response. This was before GPT, even three and a half or four was out.[00:37:30] So I just built like a nice UI on top. Then, like I mapped over the results and, and was linking to, you know, the the Google searches for these different items and, and kind of made it into a nice user interface and, you know, just built it out and tweeted it out. And it, it just got a lot of traction and attention.[00:37:48] Like I said, I had around a hundred thousand visitors a day, like right off the bat, 60,000 uniques like per day. So it was getting a shitload of of traction and. I don't have a lot of free time to kind of like, maintain or build something like that out. So it was costing me money, but I wasn't monetizing it.[00:38:06] So the way that I was thinking to monetize it would be to use affiliate links and stuff like that. So I could either, you know, spend time figuring out a way to monetize it or just try to make, flip it and just make some money. So I decided to sell it and that was kind of it. I just sent a tweet out and kind of said, this is for sale, who wants it?[00:38:25] And I had I had so much inbound from that that I had to delete the tweet within about two hours cuz I was just unable to keep up with all the people that were coming in. And I filled it out a couple of offers and I, I found the person with the most money that could close within the shortest amount of time and just took it.[00:38:44] Well done. Well done. Nice. Awesome. I need a, I need a, I need an applause button right here. . Okay. So with that context your thoughts on today, what you seeing? There's Expedia there, but. Comment on travel or not travel, whatever you want. . Yeah, I'm still reading up on the, the chat plugins actually.[00:39:01] And I was hoping to kind of chime into this to learn a little more about how they work. I'm here on the the page. I've had API access from fairly early on. I signed up and I've been you using it a lot. I'm trying to find some different ways to integrate AI and machine learning into the blockchain space.[00:39:20] There's a lot of stuff around civil resistance that I think are gonna be, you know, pretty interesting use cases for us. It's obviously not like a, a a type of use case that is gonna be useful to, to the general public maybe, but yeah, I'm still, actually still trying to understand how these plugins work.[00:39:35] So what have you seen the developer documentation, which developer documentation at the bottom? Yes. That's where I'm, I'm check, I'm reading through as of now, I see the examples, which are pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my quote the, the quote I put on Hacker News was, this is OpenAI leveraging chat, GPT to write OpenAI op open API to extend OpenAI chat.[00:39:58] GPT. I'm confused, but it sounds sick, but yeah, I mean, so open api, you know, not to be confused is OpenAI is randomly the perfect spec for OpenAI to navigate because it, you know, is somewhat plain English. And then you just supply a description for model. You described a off method. So they actually provided a link to a repo where you can see some examples.[00:40:20] The examples are not very, not very flesh out. But you can do, like, bear off, I assume you can do whatever, whatever kind of off you like then you just provide like logo url, legal info url. It's not, it's not, it's not that much. This is 10 times better than Chrome manifest.[00:40:37] Like manifest v3. Yeah, I mean, I'm reading through some of these examples and a lot of them are in Python. I wish they would've more JavaScript stuff, but I would say 10 times would be kind of an understatement if I'm understanding how some of this stuff is gonna work. English is all you need, man.[00:40:53] English is all you need.[00:40:57] Well, so, so, and then I think in buried in the video is sort of the Ethan experience, right? Which is where you specify. So if you're, if you're first party congrats, you know, you're, you're inside of the the chatt ui, but if you're third party, you can just host your Js o file anywhere. It's literally a JSON file on an API spec, right?[00:41:15] You hosted Jason file anywhere. And then you just like plug it into their their, their text field here and then they, they validate a little bit and it's installed. So there is a third party app store on day one. Yeah, that open table plugin example is pretty sick. Yeah. So like yeah, I I What would you want as a developer that's missing?[00:41:41] I think that we're like in the golden age of of being a developer and I don't know if it's gonna go downhill quickly or if it's gonna go like, get better quickly or this is like the, the end of all of it. like, is OpenAI just gonna be where like we do everything like nothing else is like gonna exist.[00:42:00] I think that Okay. You know what I, I know that's not the answer for sure. I'm just kind of joking, but I think it will, this is obviously shut down a lot of companies. This is the app store moment, right? For like, just like, I mean, you and I remember the iPhone app store moment. Some people dropped everything to write apps and they made it big and some, a lot of people did not.[00:42:20] But the people who were earlier rather than later probably benefited from understanding the platform. Like imagine, imagine you, like, you know, you, you are a big React native person for a long while. Like imagine if you had the chance to drop everything and be one of the first developers on a new app store.[00:42:35] Like that's pretty huge. Yeah, a hundred percent. But I'm wondering like the, the type of mode that you'll be able to build with some of this stuff, because it seems like that OpenAI AI will just continue adding more and more features directly into the platform. But I think like for very like, Proprietary type of stuff.[00:42:54] It might make more sense, but like if you, if you want to build like an app for the general public it just seems like they'll end up integrating something like directly within their platform for a lot of different ideas like, such as this travel app that I sold. I have a feeling like they'll have a way better version of that built directly into their platform sometime soon.[00:43:13] Q&A: ChatGPT Waitlist and Voice[00:43:13] Hey, hey guys. Can I ask just to get a quick update does anyone here have access to it yet? Like is it, is it open? Cause I signed up for the wait list, but I haven't seen anything yet. Yeah, no, it's just, it's just wait list where just like 90% of the stuff that people launch, you know, she has a few, she has a few videos and demos, but yeah, it's just a wait list.[00:43:31] Who knows? I mean, thanks. Opening OpenAI Pretty has been pretty good about getting people off wait list, right? Like a lot of people got off the GT four API wait list, like the day after they launched. Mm-hmm. . This one, I feel like they're quite fully baked, like it's. I wouldn't be surprised if they started dropping tomorrow.[00:43:50] So we'll see. But like you can start developing your, your third party plugins today, because there's examples. The docs are like two paragraphs, but that's all I need really . So, so I've been, I've been working and, and I've been following a lot of projects where people are, the one thing I don't see with ChatGPT is like, why are they have, we have Whisper, we have the APIs for ChatGPT.[00:44:13] It's like, why are we not at the point where we're talking to this thing and it's talking back to us? Like, I don't know how we haven't, nobody's wrapped their head around that yet, but it's like, it seems to me like, don't you wanna be like, Hey computer build me an app that does X and it says okay and builds it for you and talks back to you.[00:44:29] Like, I just, it's like, I don't know. That'll be the first probably plugin that I try to work on, but it's just driving me a little nuts. That's all interesting. I like the voice interfaces because sometimes it gets really long, like some of the prompts get really long. They're like, I don't wanna talk that long.[00:44:46] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was so, so I was doing, I was messing with the system prompt, basically get it to be like, Hey look, I'm gonna be talking to you. So keep it condensed. I think like the ideal interface would be like, for like, talking to, it would be like putting that at like the system level, but also, you know, being able to type as well as speak to it is just something that I'm, I'm trying to work on.[00:45:08] And I think with Plug, you know, if we could do that with plugins, I'd be huge. Cuz I know there's already a, like a Chrome extension that allows you to talk to it. Or, or I guess you could do it natively as well, but, you know, native stuff on like iPhone and Android is not too good.[00:45:24] LangChain with Human in the Loop[00:45:24] Hey, you, you mentioned that. Hi, by the way. You mentioned the hey way of, of talking to or having way the AI talking to you as a user. So just today there was a new release to of LangChain. I know it's kind of, not really the plugin, but this is the closest thing probably. And they edit a Ask Human tool.[00:45:46] So now the model can ask you a question if it's not sure. About something[00:45:55] to share. Share what? Go ahead. So, so the ask you if it's during its chain of thought, when it's not sure. To an example. Right, right. Oh, I would love that. Yeah. Probably not gonna do that. It's too confident. Yeah, I, I've seen a little bit about. LangChain, but I haven't used it yet. Has anyone here it?[00:46:15] Oh, it's all about it.[00:46:19] I did, I did. I built the LangChain on UI too. It's pretty nice. I mean, especially when it first came out, the, the trolling, it was like so rudimentary. But it's nice to be able to change things together. I think the agent part is pretty interesting. I haven't used it myself because I didn't need it.[00:46:34] But yeah, there's a, a very big community. See, see, light chain was very smart, right? Like they picked out the open source angle first, and then the others like dust or did the closed source angle. Now they have indirect competition with ChatGPT, but Langchain still has that. It's open source, extensible, like you own your agent.[00:46:55] Google vs Microsoft vs Apple[00:46:55] Them doing business deals with OpenAI in, in closed doors, right? Like, so pretty smart, like strategic position. All things considered.[00:47:05] It's a little, isn't it? It's like a little funny to me. That, you know, it's like goo because Google just came out with Bard, right. And I don't know if you guys have messed with Bard at all, but it's at least to me another wait list. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, to me it was a little underwhelming. I mean, I'm, I don't know if you've seen like the same, yeah, if you've seen like the screenshots going around, like it seems like, you know, someone tweeted it was like in, in guys in a boardroom or whoever's in a boardroom just being like, s**t.[00:47:30] Like, we need to you know, we lost our first mover advantage here. But it's just kind of funny to me that like, I guess now Microsoft's gonna have like an app store, right? Like just after everything, you know, Microsoft dominated in the nineties and stuff, and then it was Apple, apple, apple. But it's just kind of funny to me that it's gonna be, I guess Microsoft now, right?[00:47:49] Bard feels like Bing does to Google. Totally. Yeah. A hundred percent. I agree with you a hundred percent. All the turntables, right?[00:47:57] Yeah. So for, for those of you who might have missed the earlier discussion the one thing that OpenAI or Microsoft will not do is integrate with your Google calendar. So, the one saving grace that Google probably has it, it probably owns your workspace, right? Like most of us have Google accounts, Gmail accounts.[00:48:14] When we work, we log into Gmail and Google, again, use Google Docs spreadsheets. So if Bard is smart, they will take advantage of that. And then slowly watch as everyone moves to Microsoft Office.[00:48:31] I think Apple should do a partnership with the OpenAI and basically Microsoft. Cause Google has huge advantage of Android. So basically having OpenAI on the, I, I mean, it would I mean having the partnership with OpenAI would make, I mean, very useful on I devices if they, I mean, Siri is really bad and if they integrate with I, I mean they've win the world I think.[00:49:00] So it would be huge, beneficial to Apple and basically the Microsoft also if they integrate together because Microsoft doesn't have any of the devices and most people, I, most ordinary people use the devices iPhone or phone and . So it would be huge advantage. And for the 10, basically Apple I, I'm very curious to see what Apple ships next.[00:49:24] You know, everyone's shipping AI stuff and then Apple was like, Hey, look at our AR glasses. . Yeah, but I mean, ar ar with, with the, with the 3D models that are, that are coming out cuz isn't it mid journeys working on like a three, like their lab, I know is, is building a 3d generative model. And I think that sort of stuff with, with AR is very, oh, is that, is that public?[00:49:45] How did, how did you know that? I don't know if it's public. I, I saw a tweet about it I don't know, like a week ago. It is a semi, semi open secret in San Francisco, but I, I don't know if it's public. Yeah, I think I, I saw them, it was some context of they were talking about text to video and they were like, well we're, we're doing our like 3D modeling first.[00:50:02] So, I mean, my assumption is, and I, I don't work in the space yet, unless anyone's hiring please, I'm looking for work. But it seems to me like Apple. Seems to have their head on straight and like it might be that if they're gonna release these ar like mixed reality ar vr glasses, like, you know, the mo the thing that makes the most sense to me is like getting with generative AI graffiti modeling.[00:50:24] It's like, you know, it would be cool to go to like a coffee house or a bar. And then, you know, when you see like the graffiti in the bathroom when people write sometimes funny stuff, sometimes, like the worst stuff you've ever read in your life and you're like, what is going on when this person's going to the bathroom where they have this much hate?[00:50:38] But it's like, it would be cool to have a component of that, you know, like in the metaverse, so to speak, right? Like, so you put on your AR glasses and it's like, oh cool, I can see like a bulletin board here that exists in the fizzled. But it's also in the, you know, it's like augmented, right? That's just, to me it seems to be like the logical next step.[00:50:57] Interesting. Well, we'll, we'll see that when that happens. I recently got a Quest Pro quest to my, and yeah, my parents love it. And any tech, any type that my parents like, I think has a real crossover appeal. You know, the thing that you, your conversation had gimme an idea for winners of every app store in the early days, like Facebook has an app store, apple had an app store, you know, the winners of an app, store games like what we need Yep.[00:51:24] Is a multi-player. Like everyone logging into chat, BT and then playing a multiplayer game line. Mpc. MPCs are gonna text you on your. , that would be kind of cool.[00:51:40] ChatGPT Plugin Ideas[00:51:40] Actually. I was thinking, I don't, I don't know if it's gonna be game games at first though. Like, it seems like games always push the envelope with tech.[00:51:47] Well, it's like pornography and games, right? But like, I don't know, I was talking to like, you, you mentioned your parents and like you know, I was talking to my mom about this stuff and I was like, you know, I'm seeing stuff that are just demos of just like, Hey, take a picture of your fridge and it'll tell you like, here's what you can make.[00:52:01] Or you know, even like talking to it and just being like, Hey, here's what I ate today. You know, what's my, how many calories I ate today? Or, you know, what's my diet plan? Just things like that. And that's why I brought up the talking to it just with na using natural language and then having it, being able to talk back to you.[00:52:17] I'm surpri I'm like really surprised that they haven't implemented that yet. Cuz it seems to me like that's a use case that a lot of people would use it for, you know? Or if you could just like, you know, call it on a phone if you built like a Twilio back in, into it or something. Like I just don't, it, it boggles my mind why they haven't.[00:52:35] Put that feature in yet? . Yeah. Yeah. I really don't think it's gonna be too long before you're, you're sitting there at work and you get a text or call on your phone from an nbc, Hey, our village is burning down. You need to come over here and help . Do, do you guys think there's gonna be different silos?[00:52:55] Like you know, with Bard coming out and you know, people implementing GP T three and four now, I guess, into all their apps, but do you think they'll be like, chat GP p chat, GP, PT will have their store and then Google will have their store? Do you think it'll be like, there's gonna be a clear Victor here and then, you know, it'll be like, okay, Google's apps or, you know, Google Docs or whatever is like part of chat GP t's plugins, right.[00:53:20] Yeah, it is gonna be like crypto. Everybody's just gonna be fighting for the top. You're gonna have the couple of dominant people, but then you're gonna have all the, the small guys who go up and down and Yeah, I I, I feel like it's gonna be pretty similar to, to how crypto was. So we're gonna have some slur juices is what you're telling me.[00:53:41] Yeah, boy. Nice, nice. I dig it.[00:53:46] Not an app store?[00:53:46] So may maybe we aren't, tell me what you guys think about this, cuz maybe we aren't thinking about this right? Because maybe this is not an app store. Cuz typically in an app store you'll go ahead and choose which plugins you want installed, like on a phone or whatever have you.[00:54:02] But the path forward seems like all the plugins are like omnipresent. I, I don't know why Google isn't shitting their, shitting their pants right now. Cuz basically you check like openly I could just force all. The big companies to write plugins and then just be a single search box for everything. So imagine if you wanna like fly somewhere or you wanna book a hotel you, we have the Expedia and booking.com.[00:54:29] Both of those plugins summoned up and it shows you both the results. And then you can click through on whichever ones you want. And then, yeah, you charge 'em based on click throughs. Like I, I think like we're, maybe we're just getting tripped over by the fact that you have to choose a plugin right now and only interact with that single plugin.[00:54:49] But I think I think the smart move forward would probably be just to have all of them omnipresent and then have this like n l p higher layer up there to summon the right plugin when need be. What, what do you guys think about that? Yeah, so, so that's like the LangChain thing. That's what I haven't used LangChain yet, but it sounds like that's, from what I was reading with LangChain, it sounds like that's kind of is how I thought that worked.[00:55:12] But I don't know, can someone here like enlighten me? I, I don't know if it, how, how LangChain works.[00:55:21] LangChain and the Future of AI[00:55:21] Yeah. I don't know how LangChain works either, but I think it's gonna be a two-way street. Everybody's gonna be making plug-ins with chat GP p t and everybody's gonna be making chat GP plug-ins for other services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole bunch of people about to make a bunch of Jira plugins and stuff like that, so I think it's kind of gonna be a, a two-way street.[00:55:45] I dunno, is anyone else, like, this is super exciting to me. I haven't been this excited about like, the internet since like, probably like the, like the web 1.0 days. Like I, I, I hate, I'm so . Yeah. Like, I hate web two. Like, this is cool. I'm glad that like spaces exist, but I hate Web 2.0, like Web 3.0. I'm about, and like, I, I consider this part of Web 3.0.[00:56:04] But it's exciting, right? Like, this is cool. Like I, I'm really, you know, I'm stoked about, about the progress that's being, like, the joke is like, you know, every day in, in AI is like, it's like way longer, right? It's like we're telescoping very quickly. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, telescope and updating.[00:56:23] Yeah. You know, I, I would say I noticed towards, maybe like three years ago when I was working at aws, it just seemed like for, for about five or or so years, everything was very stagnant and there just wasn't a lot of exciting things that were happening. Everyone was like, if you remember, all the Devrel advocates were like all creating like tutorials around creating your own CMS and your blog, and you saw like that exact same tutorial given by like hundreds of people over the course of a few years because there just wasn't any cool s**t that was happening.[00:56:52] And then I think when crypto and, and blockchain stuff like that kind of caught my attention. Caught my attention, and I'm still excited by that, that stuff. And then this seems to be just almost like when, if you were like around when the iPhone was coming out and actually realized how important it was, I think everyone now is, is seeing this and they're all like realizing how important it is.[00:57:13] And it's cool to be like part of this moment as a software engineer. Yeah, I'm, yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, like, I'm, I'm excited for you, I'm sure you guys saw the alpaca stuff, right? And I know that they're doing D D M C A stuff, but essentially someone's gonna train one of these models and it's gonna, you know, you're gonna be able to run this stuff offline.[00:57:35] And just like the way to, if, if you have access to like I forget which one of the EAC accelerate people was talking about it, but it was like wharf in the flask. It's like you've gotten the machine offline. So if you don't need internet access to access, like, the entirety of human knowledge, whatever's in the data set up until 2021 or whatever, and you don't need internet access, like that's gonna revolutionize everything.[00:57:57] Like, that's insane to think about[00:57:59] Yeah. Oh, well we won't speculating You can run in Inside Chat runs Python. Oh, really? Is that, is that happening? I mean, it has a file system and it has file storage and CPU at memory. Yeah.[00:58:20] is turtles all the way down. Turtles all the way down, man.[00:58:23] The, I, I think the plugin system, if people can get to run their own models like the LAMA ones and the same structure for plugins, you can see like going back to the Metaverse thing like a and snow crash where people built their own like demons. You know, it's like I got the demonn that like kicks people out of the club, the, the black sun.[00:58:43] But you can see in real life it's like I have a bunch of plugins that only I have, you know, and I use them to make myself more productive, use them to make myself, you know, look like I'm working when I'm not working and I'm like responding to my emails and stuff like that. But I think like, The OpenAI releasing this today makes it so much easier to start it because you don't have to worry about any of the infrastructure.[00:59:07] You just build the plugin and then they run everything and you get the best model possible. But I think none line, you know, I would love to walk around with my own, you know, raspberry pie or whatever of my wrist, kind of like I'm fall out and say, Hey, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. I don't know, I don't think we're that far away, so I'm excited to, to keep building.[00:59:28] Shoot, the, the technology exists where you could make that now, but it'd be a little awkward to have

Today's guest is Nader Dabit - the Director of Developer relations at Aave. Nader has had a very positive impact on many, many devs in web3, and in this episode, we tried to get behind the scenes on how Nader approaches creating developer content, building developer communities, and both building & maintaining APIs and developer tooling. If you work in dev real or are building a protocol or product that's meant to be used by developers, I think you'll get a lot out of this episode. If you're a dev listening to this, you should out the Superfluid Wave Pool - a continuous hackathon where you can win prizes and build your portfolio of work: https://superfluid.finance/wavepool3:55 How Nader got into web35:39 Following curiosity9:04 Avoiding distractions11:50 How Nader approaches learning a new protocol or technology16:05 How to decide what to learn in the first place19:03 What problems in the industry is Nader interested in solving?23:02 Giving back via education28:22 Preparing for a dev workshop31:48 Advice for giving talks34:27 Building developer communities39:34 Leveraging bounties and contractors within your dev community47:39 Building SDKs and APIs50:34 UX improvements that web3 needs52:52 What does Nader want people to build?55:35 What's on the Lens developer roadmap?Nader on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3Building Developer Communities Article: https://nader.substack.com/p/building-high-impact-developer-communitiesLens: https://www.lens.xyz/gardenMiguel Piedrafita on Twitter: https://twitter.com/m1guelpf

With Çiğdem Öztabak, at MetaCafe this week with one of the important figures of web3, Lens Protocol, and Aave's developer relations director, Developer DAO founder Nader Dabit (@dabit3). We talked about Nader's past career, how he adapted to web3, the importance of his role as a developer relations manager (DevRel), the intricacies of being a good DevRel, and the projects he managed. We also mentioned PermaWeb, one of the most interesting topics recently. ⭐ Web3 talent marketplace: Talently.app You can instantly view your on-chain verified resume and access global Web3 job postings.

Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Aave and Lens ProtocoI talks with Brian Friel about his journey moving from developing in web2 to web3. From creating educational content and authoring one of the first "Intro to Solana" programming articles, to founding Developer DAO and building the infrastructure for the next generation of web3 social apps. Show Notes:00:49 - Intro02:43 - Origin story / Background  06:13 -  AHA moment in Web 3.0 ?10:49 - Lens and Aave                18:30 - Composability between blockchains  21:45 - Advice to newcomers24:15 - A builder he admires in the Web3 ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian (00:00):Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. And I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Aave & Lens Protocol. Nader, welcome to the show. Nader (00:25):Hey, thank you for having me. Good to be here. Brian (00:27):I'm really excited to talk to you today. A lot of folks may know you from Crypto Twitter. You've been around a lot of different places in the Web3 ecosystem. But for some folks who might not know, you actually wrote one of the earliest intro to Solana programming articles that there were at the time, back in, I believe, summer 2021. And it's special to me, because this is actually the first article that I found on Solana that got me working at Phantom full time. So, before we dive into everything, I want to say thank you and welcome, and it's great to be talking to you today. Nader (00:58):Yeah, I remember very clearly when I wrote that article, because at the time I was trying to learn how to build on Solana. And I had a hard time finding all of the pieces that I needed to build out the types of application that I was used to building, just for a hello world type of thing. And I was actually traveling at the time from Croatia, and also Mexico during that week. And I remember just staying up sometimes all night, just trying to figure out what I thought was some basic stuff. And I was like, I have to document this stuff. It has to be documented somewhere, in a way that I would want it. (01:32):Because it's probably documented in other ways, like bits and pieces. But putting it all together, I was like, okay, this is going to be what I wanted to find. And I remember when I tweeted it out, it was one of the most popular tweets that I maybe have ever had, in the top five. That tutorial, the reception was just enormous. So, there was a lot of interest in Solana for developers, and I think that this was one of the things that enabled a lot of developers at the time to just get up and running, and see how it felt to build a full-stack application on Solana. Brian (02:02):No, I couldn't agree more. It was a time where there was a ton of demand, and just not enough resources or infrastructure. And it's been really cool, to just see all the derivative pieces that have come from that. A ton of folks have taken that article, built their own version, extended it in some ways. And view that and the initial paulx escrow tutorial as the two sparks that kicked off Solana development, and DevRel and all that. But before we get into everything today, you have a really interesting background. You were early to Solana, but then you worked across a number of different protocols already in the Web3 ecosystem. And before that, you were deeply involved in React and Web2 land. Could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your background? Nader (02:43):Yes, so I've been a developer for about 10 years now, a little over 10 years. And I've specialized in, I would say four main areas of specialization during that time. I started off as a front end and single page application developer, I would call it, working with stuff from just plain JavaScript and HTML, to Angular, to React. And then, I moved into mobile development for a little over three years, specializing in cross platform application development with React native. (03:16):One of those years I was running a company called React Native Training, where I would train teams of engineers, where they had these siloed teams that were focused on either iOS or Android, and I would introduce them to React Native. And there was quite a bit of demand for that. So, a lot of the clients that I had, were large companies that had a lot of overhead with their developer budgets, and they were trying to find ways to not only have less resources needed to build out applications, but also to be able to build faster, and also to have a better singular code base, so we don't have to have two separate code bases. (03:54):So yeah, I had clients like Amazon and Teams at Microsoft, or individual engineers from Microsoft that would come to my training. Teams like Warner Brothers, and banks and stuff, were also my clients. So, that was really fun for about a year. And then, the next thing that I did is, I got interested in cloud computing. So, I ended up moving and working at AWS for a little over three years. And during that time I was doing developer relations there, which is what I'm doing now as well. And after a little over three years there, I got interested in the blockchain space. And I thought that while the work that we were doing at AWS was super important and very real world, there was a lot of applications and companies using it. I thought that the blockchain space was a little more exciting, just because it was newer. I thought the opportunities that were available for this technology, once it became mature enough to actually be usable for the ideas that we had, were really powerful and stuff. (04:50):And I felt like it was so early that there was a lot of room for growth, because a lot of these ideas were there and the technology... The primitives were there, but the maturity of those primitives weren't quite there. So, being part of that growth and stuff, to me it seemed really exciting. So yeah, I moved into blockchain space. Brian (05:07):And what year was that, Nader, real quick before you jumped in? Nader (05:11):So, I joined the blockchain world in April of 2021. So, a year and eight months ago, I guess, seven months ago. Brian (05:22):You made a huge impact in just that little time. I would've put you back at least a couple years on that, but that's really cool. Nader (05:28):Yeah, definitely the first time I got into this from the perspective of a developer was then, I had dabbled in crypto as an investor before that, but knew nothing about anything actually until then. And then, in that time, in the last 18 months, I've worked at the graph protocol, I've worked with Celestia, which is the first modular blockchain. And now, I'm working with Aave and Lens Protocol. Brian (05:48):That's great. And was there anything at that time, you had this great job at AWS, you've written a number of books, React Native in Action, all of these great resources that are used across a number of traditional companies. But was there anything about Web3 in particular that was an aha moment for you, or just made you just say, "I have to work in this space"? Or do you think it was more of a culmination of just years of watching it off to the side? Nader (06:13):Yeah, there was a few things. I'll look at this technology as a new way to build certain applications that wasn't possible in the past. I don't look at it as, oh, Web3 is going to replace everything that we had before. Instead, I think I look at it as it's going to probably disrupt certain types of industries, but it also just opens the door for new types of applications that are really exciting to me. And I think the one thing that stood out the most to me, is that we had public immutable and permanent infrastructure that developers could share, and use, and build on top of, almost like the way that we have code that is open source, that everyone can share, and use it, and clone it, and fork it, and do whatever. If we applied those same principles to actual software infrastructure, that was instead of the... We're kind of used to brittle infrastructure. (07:02):Most of the time when you're building on top of someone else's API, you don't know if it's going to be there tomorrow or even later today. You also have no control over the access of that. Someone can shut you off, someone can prevent you from using it at any time. So, you can't really share backend infrastructure. So, everyone's out there building out their own backend infrastructure for their own ideas, which is great if you need something custom. But there's a lot of things, I think, that would be very valuable for other people to share and not have to rebuild themselves. But it's just not possible through the traditional software infrastructure primitives that we have. Because a database can go down, someone can go and delete things from a database. You can't depend on that data being there, but with blockchain infrastructure you actually have those properties. (07:49):And that's really exciting to me, because what we're seeing exactly I think with Lens, is that if you provide a really high quality backend, and you bring a really high quality API that enables developers to build on top of it, you've done away with a large majority of the work that's needed to build an app, building out the backend. Just imagine if you only had to build out the front end, and you didn't have to worry about this, and everyone could share that backend infrastructure. (08:16):And that's what excited me the most. There weren't really a lot of real world implementations of this though at the time. There was NFTs and DeFi stuff, which is great, but I don't think the coming to market use case is going to be that. I think that will be things that are used a lot in the future, but not that. (08:32):And then, the other thing that excited me about this stuff, it's payments. And I think that also stablecoins, this idea of stablecoins, and offering stability to currencies around the world that don't have that, was pretty exciting to me. And also, just being able to permissionlessly access and send payments was revolutionary, as someone who has a lot of family in the Middle East and stuff, and is also familiar with what's going on in different parts of the world. I think one thing that was an aha moment for me, was someone was a cryptocurrency is very volatile. And I realized that some people in parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, they don't realize that everyone else's currencies are also volatile. If they think that everyone's currency is the US dollar, just is always... But they don't realize that the majority of the world lives in places that where their currency is just as volatile as cryptocurrency. (09:20):So, realizing that so many people just don't understand that, and there's so much privilege in the world that there's opportunities to build out these things, that bring equality around the world for stuff, just having stability in their currencies. So, stable coins to me, are really exciting. And that's again, one of the things that excites me actually about working at Aave is, we're going to be launching a stable coin. So, being able to be part of something like that, is pretty cool. Brian (09:44):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And for folks who might be based in the US, or don't have the privilege, not having to worry about their own currency not being stable, even just having to go through the pain of sending a bank wire somewhere across different countries, it's like pulling teeth. And once you send something over crypto rails, and it's near instant, you're paying near nothing, and you realize it's on this public infrastructure that you just talked about. It's like an aha moment, where it's like how could we not use this in some capacity? It's pretty incredible. (10:15):So, you hit on a couple different things there. You hinted at Lens Protocol and Aave, both of which you are the director of DevRel at. Could you talk us through a little bit about what each of those two protocols are? For folks who have been in crypto for a little while, they probably know Aave, it's a household name. Darling of the DeFi Summer days. But it's quite interesting that then Lens is also under the same house as Aave, two very different protocols. Could you walk us through a little bit about what each of those are doing, and maybe why the similar teams are building both of them? Nader (10:50):Yeah, basically I'm working a lot more closely with Lens. Just the first couple of months that I've been here to get a lot of the ideas that I personally had off the ground, as someone who's been building on Lens. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of work in Aave though, starting at the beginning of next year. A lot of work actually is happening right now in Aave, but from the DevRel perspective, we're launching some stuff. So, we're going to use DevRel power to help bring that to market. But yeah, Aave is basically a Defi protocol, and allows people to lend and borrow crypto and real world assets, without having to go through a centralized intermediary. So, that's the main value prop of Aave. And then, Lens is a Web3... Or I wouldn't even bucket in that. It's essentially a social media protocol and social media application API, that allows developers to build social graph applications. (11:41):And with Lens, you can have a lot of this backend infrastructure, like I mentioned, already there, ready for you to use to build out applications. And I think that when we think of the five billion or so people on the internet today, we might say there isn't maybe a single thread that ties everyone online together. But if you do look at the most widely used applications in the world today, you could almost probably assume that a high nineties percent of those five billion people around the world, have used a social application so far. So TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of these applications, are social graph applications. And they have very similar characteristics. You go to the app, and you have to create a profile. So you do that, you have a profile. You then have the opportunity to create content. You then have the opportunity to follow people. You're then given a feed of content based on who you follow, and then people that are following you, your content is put into their feed. (12:39):So, if you think about an application from that perspective, you can actually bucket a large majority of internet traffic into social graph applications. And they all literally copy, and have these exact same characteristics. So, what if we could abstract some of that away, and make it to where people could actually have those features in their application, without having to build all of that from scratch. And that's what Lens is doing. And I think that from the sheer user adoption perspective, it's the first real world use case to me, that actually appeals to people without having to teach them anything off the bat. (13:15):And that's just one thing, but making that accessible, is another story, because historically blockchain applications are very not approachable by the average person. In fact, the UX is terrible for most blockchain applications. And I don't think people understand how much friction is involved in most web three applications, for the average person I know at AWS, we would literally spend weeks and months with customers. Sometimes those customers would spend millions of dollars just to remove a couple of hundred milliseconds of latency from one of their APIs, because that latency was costing them millions of dollars in revenue, because they would drop customers or whatever. (13:56):So, when you think about a few hundred milliseconds of latency being a huge issue for a real world application. Imagine telling a new customer that they have to first download this wallet that's going to give them these private keys and these seed phrases, and they have to understand how that works. Then, they're going to have to go and find this token somewhere on the internet, and they're going to have to find out how to purchase that token. Then they're going to have to learn which network that token is on, and they're going to have to transfer that token from the place that they bought it, into that new wallet, on the right network that they bought. (14:30):Then they're going to have to pay for every transaction that they make on the network. It's crazy to think that the average person is going to be interested in this stuff. And down the road, when people start using DeFi, and stuff like that, they might understand the value that you do probably want to have that security for paying for a transaction, and understanding how all that stuff works. But for onboarding new people, it's just crazy to think that we're going to onboard millions of people this way. (14:54):So, the approach beyond having an actual use case that makes sense for the average person, also lowering the barrier to entry for that UX, is a huge thing that we're trying to solve as well. And we have some stuff rolling out next year, that's going to address that. But we've already done some stuff. Or when I say we, I'm really speaking of the Aave engineering team, and the Lens engineering team, who is just really, really incredible. They've already done a lot of stuff. I think that lowers the barrier to entry for users. Gasless transactions, meaning that the user doesn't have to pay for the transaction on the network. Low cost networks like Solana, like Polygon, others out there, make this possible for the first time where you can actually subsidize transactions the same way you can subsidize software infrastructure like AWS. (15:38):When you use an app by Twitter, you're incurring cost on their backend, but it's so small that the company eats that, and pays for that software infrastructure themselves. You don't expect to pay for a tweet. When you tweet, you don't expect to have to pay them to do that. It's like that would be crazy. So, that's where we're getting, I think, with more scalable blockchain infrastructure. And that's one of the things that they implemented into Lens. And then, the other thing is that they implemented, is a dispatcher that allows you to delegate your signing to an abstraction that allows you to do certain things on chain, but not everything. So, you don't want to be able to send money without having to sign a transaction. That would be a security concern. But posting something to a social network that's delegated without you having to sign, makes a lot of sense. Because you could always go back. (16:24):And obviously, we've never even really, that I know I've had any issues with this, but let's say that you did something wrong and then posted a post that you didn't like. We have a soft delete feature in the API, you can go and delete something. But I guess my general point is that being able to post, and comment, and stuff, you shouldn't have to sign for all of these different interactions. And that's what the delegator allows you to do. You just have the same user experience that you would in a traditional Web2 app. Brian (16:49):Yeah, totally. You touched earlier on just a couple milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds of latency, makes the difference in user attention spans. Imagine having to go find that browser extension pop up. It's going to make you not want to tweet as much, second guess some of your actions. And then I agree as well, even we've seen this from a wallet side, a lot of... I think this is definitely where the space is going. Having some permissioned system right now, if you think of permissions with wallets, pretty much all of them just, it's a connect. And then by default, you could have any permissions, but it requires manual approval. And I think we're almost training users negatively in that sense, when everything's a pop-up action, they start to not take pop-ups as seriously. (17:31):But if we could make a system where we know certain actions are safe, we don't even have to alert you about this. But then, there is a transaction that potentially you'll be exchanging funds in this transaction, you should review this manually before sending it, that's definitely moving in the right direction. So, that's really cool to see that you guys are already building on that front. (17:49):You touched a little bit too about just how these blockchain ecosystems, up until now, have been largely inaccessible. And I would argue, also largely siloed from one another. There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. You've spent time at other projects that touch multiple different blockchains, multiple different layers. You're at the graph, you're at Celestia. Now you're at Aave and Lens, which is all over the EVM ecosystem. Can you speak a little bit to how you see everything that we're building in Web3, all these different blockchains, how some of these might compose over time? What is your worldview when you're working across all these different siloed ecosystems today? Nader (18:31):The thing that really turned me off a little bit when I started really understanding the ecosystem in general, was this Maximalism that you see. And I thought it was really toxic and stuff. And I didn't really like that at all. And so, that was one of the reasons I went to work with Celestia. I really liked their approach to technology, and I like the solution that they're bringing to the table and stuff. But I also really liked the founders, I would say anti-maximalist approach to their communications and stuff like that. And I just think that being so bought into a single idea, prevents you from seeing and understanding everything else that's out there. So, I don't know... Not only think it's just toxic in general, but I also think it's very limiting for your own career and your own understanding of the whole landscape. (19:18):Because if you box yourself in, you're preventing yourself from doing any research or understanding everything else out there in the world. So, my take has always been to really try to do due diligence on all of the different technologies that are out there, and try to truly understand them, and not have any bias to the way I look at something new. And really try to get to the bottom of it. But it's hard, because there's just so many different things that are happening at a given time. And there's also so many people that are shilling their own thing, without being very honest about what are the trade-offs sometimes. So, it is challenging to understand everything that's going out there. But yeah, my take is to always try to say, "Okay, this thing is here. I'm going to do some research." And once I understand it, I want to know the trade-offs, and I want to speak honestly about those trade-offs in the future. (20:10):Because nothing is perfect, and very rarely is something legitimate actually not worth anything at all. You'll see people that try to talk about certain technologies, as if they're completely worthless. When in reality, there's a trade-off there, that's actually being made, and they're just trying to make their thing look better by talking negatively about the other thing. But I think most of the technologies... Not all, but most of the technologies that make it into the mainstream, do have a good value proposition. The question is whether or not that is the right long term trade off to make. Those are the questions that I think that we don't always know the answer to. Brian (20:47):No, couldn't agree more. And I think it times up really well with what we're doing over here at Phantom. I think by the time this episode is live, we'll be taking the first few people off our beta wait list, for a multi chain Phantom, where it's all going to be one aggregated view of switching chains, and we agree that we want to get past the maximalism front. There's a lot of really awesome work being done across the VM ecosystem, across the Solana space, and everything in between. And I think it's a really cool time for the industry to be bringing this all together. I couldn't be more excited. (21:17):So, a few more questions here for you as we wrap up. You've hit on a lot across your journey through Web2 to Web3, everything that's going on now in Web3, across Lens and Aave. If you were a new dev coming in here, let's say you have TypeScript experience, your classic what you would need for some Web3 JS work, how would you point new developers who are interested in the space and coming into the space, and wanting to potentially contribute, and end up working full-time in this industry? Nader (21:46):Yeah, I think front end developers are just very uniquely suited, but also they are in a great position, and huge opportunities lie to them without having to learn a lot of new stuff, which is really cool, and really exciting. At least for me, as someone who is for the most part, just a front end or a mobile developer. I thought that it was very approachable to get into this space, because every application still needs a front end. The only difference is that instead of sending an HTTP or GraphQL request, a traditional HTTP request, you're sending an RPC request for the most part, to transact with these different networks and stuff. And I think that's the main thing that you would have to just try to dive into a little bit, and understand. And then, you probably would be ready to start doing some interviews. (22:29):And I think if you're a good front end engineer, even with the market as it is today, there's still a very good demand for that. I think the challenge has always been for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, unfortunately. I think it is still somewhat of a challenge if you're a junior, to land that first role. But beyond that, I think that if you have some skillset on the front end, you can get started with... Most companies that are hiring will probably give you a shot. If you've done just even the slightest amount of due diligence, to understand what are these client side libraries. So, you have things like Ethers.js, you have things like Solana.js. I believe we have WalletConnect, Rainbow Wallet. And then, I think that you probably know some of the more Solana specific wallet adapters, and stuff for JavaScript. (23:14):Anyway. So experiment, figure out which ecosystem you want to be in. Look at all the different client side libraries and stuff that are there. Just build out a couple of apps over the week, literally just building out two or three apps, and throwing on your GitHub, will probably set you apart from 99% of the people out there. And yeah, it's really not rocket science, I don't think, to get hired in this industry if you're a friend and developer. So, that would be my take, is just to realize that 95% of your skills are transferable. The other 5% is just understanding these blockchain specific interactions with RPCs, and the wallet stuff as well, which is the web3 blockchain version of identity. Brian (23:50):I couldn't agree more. Building in public, building out that resume, is such a stronger signal than anything else in this space. And it can be done. It's just a couple of weeks. If you put the hard work into it, you already have the skillset. It's just about showing your work at that point. Well Nader, this has been awesome. One closing question we ask all our guests, and I'd love to hear this from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web3 ecosystem? Nader (24:16):Wow, that's a good question. I think that there's not just a single one, there's just really so many. I would say that if I had to point out maybe a couple of people, one of them would definitely be the team I have here, that I've met here at Lance and Ave. They're not really that active, or as active on social media, I would say. But I want to give a shout-out to Josh, who is the main backend engineer on Lens. He's just incredible. He'll come up with a solution for what is a problem that maybe has never been solved before, an idea. And then, he'll actually have implemented that in sometimes days or weeks. And just seeing that done on a consistent basis, is just really wild. There's a lot of developers from within developer DAO, that I would shout out. I think that engineers over at Celestia, like Mustafa Al-Bassam, and the rest of the folks over there, are really incredible. There's a lot of high quality people that are building right now. It's hard to say anyone without feeling like I'm leaving a bunch of people out, to be honest. Brian (25:17):That's a good sign though. Nader (25:18):But yeah, but Armani Ferrante. Armani is in this salon ecosystem. He's definitely one of my favorites as well. Brian (25:24):Oh, that's awesome. Well, I couldn't agree more. Lots of great names all through that list. No shortage of folks in this industry, who are working hard every day to push this space forward. Nader, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can folks go to learn more about what you're up to at Lens? Nader (25:39):Yeah, I would just say, you can go to my Lens profile. It's nader.lens, on any of the lens front ends, like Lenster, on Twitter, on DaBa3. And then, I have my personal webpage set up on RWE, that's my links to my YouTube and stuff. And that's on nader.rwe.dev. Brian (25:58):Awesome. Nader Dabit, thanks for coming on the Zeitgeist. Nader (25:59):Thank you for having me. 

To watch the full demo visit https://www.youtube.com/@cryptopackagedgoodsIn this episode, you will learn the following:Explore how Lens Protocol is revolutionizing the idea of a social graph and the implications of a protocol instead of a platform.Discover the advantages of using APIs and smart contracts to build on top of Lens Protocol.Uncover how the concept of gasless and signless transactions are being implemented in Lens Protocol to increase user accessibility.Follow Nader at https://twitter.com/dabit3Follow Club CPG at https://twitter.com/CPGCLUBTo learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/

Listen to our discussion on blockchain modularity with Nader of Celestia (and founder of Developer DAO). Learn more about BAF

In this episode, we talk about how to get into Web3 development, with Nader Dabit, developer relations engineer at Celestia and founder of Developer DAO. Nader talks about how Web3 differs from Web2, when it makes sense to build something as a Web3 app, and what are the tools and concepts a developer needs to know in order to build an app for Web3. Show Links Compiler (sponsor) Stellar (sponsor) imgix (sponsor) Andela (sponsor) Web3 Developer DAO Celestia WordPress PHP HTML CSS AWS Stack Overflow MetaMask SDK Blockchain Ethereum Ethereum Virtual Machine MPM Infura Alchemy QuickNode Anchor Proof of Stake Vs. Proof of Work Solana Avalanche Polygon Ceramic Amazon S3 arweave Node.js Solidity Rust Stablecoin

Web infrastructure has evolved from individual servers to shared hosting services to virtual machines and virtual functions. The future of the internet however is looking toward a much more distributed computation model blockchain technology is central to the future of this modern internet of blockchains are still in their infancy and the most people blockchains The post Modular Blockchain Architecture with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Web infrastructure has evolved from individual servers to shared hosting services to virtual machines and virtual functions. The future of the internet however is looking toward a much more distributed computation model . Blockchain technology is central to the future of this modern internet . Blockchains are still in their infancy.  And the most people The post Modular Blockchain Architecture with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Today, I'm joined by Nader Dabit, founder of DeveloperDAO. DeveloperDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization composed of thousands of Web3 developers. In this episode, author, educator, and developer relations specialist Nader Dabit walks us through discovering his passion for programming in his late 20s, his time at AWS and Edge & Node (creators of The Graph Protocol), and how he created the Devs for Revolution NFT that became the membership token for DeveloperDAO. We're joined by DevDAO Operations Lead Kempsterwho sheds light on the many areas of activity the DAO engages in, and what to look forward to in the upcoming Season 1 launch. DeveloperDAO is an exciting emergent community for experienced and new devs alike. Their expansion into formal education, project incubation and investment is inspiring. I hope you enjoy the show.

Our Twitter space: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRkDjkpNKlComp Report: https://www.commonroom.io/blog/2022-developer-relations-compensation-report/Slido: https://app.sli.do/event/bxvrMv1yBfycLUh7bL3aaGPrevious episodes:https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/weekend-drop-devrel-real-talk-ep-1-ft-justin-garrison-micheal-benedict-zack-hoherchakOur guests: Rebecca https://twitter.com/beccaodelay Nader https://twitter.com/dabit3 Our hosts: https://twitter.com/Chau_codes https://twitter.com/RealChrisSean https://twitter.com/swyx

Our featured guest for this episode is Nadar Dabit. He explains blockchain, decentralization, Web3, its future, volatility, and how you might get started in this space.SponsorsDaily.devdaily.dev is where developers grow together. It provides a community-based feed of the best developer news, helping you stay up-to-date. daily.dev aggregates hundreds of sources every few minutes and creates a personal feed for you according to your interests, whether it's web dev, data science, or Elixir. Anything you might be interested in, it has the content for you.Check out daily.devHashnodeCreating a developer blog is crucial in creating an online presence for yourself. It's proof of work for your future employer. Hashnode makes it easy to start a blog in seconds on your custom domain for free. It's fully optimized for developers and supports writing in Markdown, rich embeds, publishing from GitHub repository, syntax highlighting, and edge caching with Next.js blogs deployed on Vercel. On top of these, Hashnode is free from paywall, ads, and sign-up prompts.Hashnode is a community of developers, engineers, and people in tech. Your article gets instant readership from their growing community.Check out Hashnode, and join the community.Show Notes0:00 Introduction0:31 Nader Dabit Intro and Working in Dev Rel4:19 What is web3 and why the shift to web3?10:12 Sponsor: Hashnode10:58 GraphQL in Web312:23 What Does Decentralized Mean?16:33 The Business Model of Web318:20 What is the Blockchain25:46 Sponsor: Daily.dev26:47 Volatility in Web329:07 The Difficulty of Finding Developers in the Web3 Space30:04 Nader's Thoughts on the Future34:04 How Web3 Affects Content Creators35:14 Wrap Up

Nader joins Adam to discuss how he's managed to avoid career stagnation by going from mobile dev to full-stack web dev to web3.0. He also shares his perspective on web3.0 as a set of new primitives while Adam does his best to represent the side of the skeptic, as much as an Enneagram Type 9 can.

The current blockchain ecosystem has redefined application development but is still considered monolithic when it comes to flexibility. For example, a blockchain cannot be deployed without the overhead of bootstrapping a new consensus network. Celestia is the first modular blockchain network. It is a pluggable consensus and data availability layer that allows anyone to deploy a decentralized blockchain quickly, enabling a deployment process with minimal overhead. Join Celestia Labs' Developer Relations Engineer and Developer DAO's Co-founder, Nader Dabit in a fireside chat hosted by Cardstack's Founding Director Chris Tse on July 27, 2022 at 9:00 am EDT. In this session, they will discuss Celestia Labs and Developer DAO's initiatives for the Web3 ecosystem. Agenda The fireside chat will focus on these central points: About Celestia Labs What is a modular consensus data network, and why does it matter? Challenges in building the first modular consensus network The vision behind Developer DAO Celestia and Developer DAO's vision for the Web3 ecosystem

In this episode I have Nader Dabit who has helped build notable organizations such as Edge & Node the team behind the graph protocol. Nader has a wealth of knowledge and experience along the Web3 development stack and continues to put out educational content to help onboard developers. Our discussion is focused on helping people become Web3 developers.I hope you enjoy the episode, you can subscribe to Web3 Frontier where we release a podcast every week.Contact Info:Host: Igor YuzoSpeakers: Nader Dabit

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the fifth episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs.Today's guest is Cronos, an on-chain task scheduler that allows users to schedule instructions and winner of the recent Riptide Hackathon. 00:38 - Introductions01:25 - How they started                 02:48 - How they met                     04:26  - Who else is in Austin            05:09  -  Cronos backstory                 07:34 - How they started building tasks    09:11 - TLDR: what is Cronos?              13:33  - Winning the Riptide Hackathon               15:40  - How cronos came to life           18:12 - Building on solana and familiarity with other languages20:16  - Learning curve with rust         22:50 -  Nick's  learning curve              25:04 -  Advice on learning curve         27:08 - What's missing in Solana         29:20  - Advice to new developers on Solana DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.  Chase (00:38):Hey everybody. And welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana ecosystem. Today, we have Nick and Elias from Cronos, the recent winners of the Riptide Hackathon. Welcome guys. How's it going?Elias (00:50):It's going well.Nick (00:51):Yeah, great to be here.Chase (00:52):So let's start with you, Nick. What's your history? How'd you get into this whole thing?Nick (00:56):My background is basically, I worked on the payments team at Uber for about four years or so, helping build out the payroll system there. And so, was working on a lot of international banking integrations and just became very aware how broken the current legacy payment system is. Can't really even tell you the number of times I got woken up at 4:00 AM because some system failed somewhere and had to email a CSV file to some banker to push money through the system, it happens all the time.Nick (01:28):And so I heard about Solana and I had a light bulb moment really, where I realized that this thing is cheaper and faster and easier to use than any existing payment rails that I know about and so, I got quite excited about the potential for disruption there and this was all pre Solana Pay stuff. So, yeah, we dove in during the Ignition Hackathon.Chase (01:52):Oh, you did? Cool.Nick (01:53):Yeah.Chase (01:53):Yeah, I didn't realize that. I was actually, when you were talking, I was thinking in my head, I was like payments? I was like, wow, didn't even build anything on Solana Pay. So you guys were already rolling a little bit before that, so that's cool. Yeah. So Elias, how about you?Elias (02:06):I'm pretty fresh as far as experience in industry. I did have an internship in college as a data scientist in Argentina for a bit. I then transitioned into front-end development that following year and had been a front-end developer up until when I got into Solana development. But that's pretty much it.Chase (02:23):Cool. So, with all that said, you guys' backgrounds, how did you guys end up meeting each other? What's the story? Are you in the same place? You guys are in the same city? How did that work?Nick (02:34):We're both in Austin. Elias is a few minutes north of Austin. I'm kind of downtown and we meet up down here a few days a week. We basically met on Twitter last summer.Elias (02:45):Yeah. I was at Samsung before I met Nick. I was basically a site reliability engineer for this semiconductor facility here in Austin. I didn't love it. I absolutely hated it. So I was creating toy projects on GitHub just for front-end development purposes, just to better my skills, because I wasn't really progressing that well at Samsung. I was then tweeting about it and my philosophy was, well, what's the worst that could happen? Someone's going to see this and maybe look at my repo, who knows?Elias (03:13):Randomly I get a DM from this guy named Nick. He was like, "Hey, I like what you're doing. I looked at your GitHub. We're looking for front-end developers at this product studio that we have in Austin. I would love to grab a beer." And that's really where it started.Chase (03:25):Oh wow. That's awesome. I thought that stuff only happened in Web 3, but I guess it's happening outside of that too. So how did you find that tweet, Nick, in the first place?Nick (03:36):I don't remember, honestly. It's like scrolling the timeline, don't really remember what you saw 10 minutes ago. But, I think I saw Elias tweeting, maybe a GitHub link or something, saw he was a dev and I was just looking through his projects on GitHub. And, I found his resume actually and everything there was kind of focused around like Next.js and React, which we were doing a lot with at the time. And so, I figured sending a DM couldn't hurt and just kind of realized that he was based in Austin. I had just moved here, I think a week or so prior and we met up and grabbed a beer and just hit it off from there and have been working together since.Chase (04:18):Very cool. I think there's a couple other people in Austin. I believe Castle Finance is there. There's actually a pretty decent Solana builder presence at University of Texas at Austin.Nick (04:30):The [inaudible 00:04:30] team is here as well.Chase (04:31):Oh nice.Elias (04:32):I think BuffaLou is also here.Chase (04:34):BuffaLou? The famous BuffaLou is in Austin. Are we doxxing him over here?Elias (04:37):No, he's tweeted about it.Chase (04:39):I'm just kidding. So, that's pretty cool to hear the story about how you guys met. Now, let's dive into a little bit, go a little bit further. Where did this idea get birthed or what were you building? And start at Ignition and lead up to how the idea of Cronos came about.Nick (04:55):As we were saying before, we were looking at Solana initially from that perspective of payments and coming from the payments industry. And so we started in the Ignition Hackathon building an on-chain Venmo where users could send and receive invoices and pay those back on-chain. And then that kind of rolled into a token streaming service. And-Chase (05:16):Was that called Cronos or did it have a name at the point in time?Nick (05:20):Yeah, that was called Factor at the time. What we were specializing on was the use cases of subscription payments and payroll. And specifically we were trying to figure out how to schedule token transfers because it's kind of these inefficiencies in the vesting contract model where the sender has to lock up future payments up front into investing contract. So there's some inefficiency there. And the receiver has to go out of the way to claim from the vesting contract. So we thought if we could schedule token transfers, maybe that would be a better user experience.Nick (05:52):And we were working on that for a few months, got the whole system up and running. And then around February 1st, 2022, when mtnDAO was taking off, we realized that we could generalize that protocol from only supporting token transfers to being able to automate any arbitrary instruction. And from there it just took on a life of its own.Chase (06:14):So you guys were at mtnDAO?Nick (06:16):Yeah, I was at mtnDAO before it was mtnDAO. There was a version of it in 2021 called Mountain Compound. It was way smaller, but it was 14 of us, or so, just locked down in a house, trying to escape COVID, in Salt Lake City. And that was where I first met Edgar and Barrett. Barrett, at the time, was already working on Solana and Edgar and I were working on separate startups, but I think we both got the Solana pill during that time.Chase (06:47):Man. Wasn't expecting that one. That's a really cool story, actually. Those guys are involved in red-pilling a lot of people on to Solana, so I'm always happy to hear these stories. They just keep coming up randomly wherever I go.Nick (06:58):Yeah.Chase (07:00):Yeah, so that's awesome. So when you were building this payment stuff, the idea came around at mtnDAO, and that was, or right at the beginning-ish, I think, of Riptide. TJ was just on the show. That's when he started to talk about building out mtnPay. So you guys were like, "okay, we were doing payments, we just came up with this thing. We think we have solved a really big problem and we're going to build this out." Tell me a little bit more about that.Nick (07:25):Yeah, it started with just a proof of concept. So we just had this basic question of, can you even schedule arbitrary instructions on-chain? And how do you do that? So we started by building a basic Anchor program where users could create tasks and each task is a different account. And inside those accounts we would store serialized instruction data with a schedule.Nick (07:50):We basically had set up a separate off-chain bot process, also written in Rust, but using the RPC client. Which basically watched for task accounts and then would trigger transactions whenever the tasks came due. And we found that we could invoke those inner instructions as CPIs and that then unlocked this whole like, okay, we can schedule any arbitrary instruction.Elias (08:15):Yeah. I remember whenever he called me on our sync, I think it was on Monday because he built the proof of concept during the weekend. He told me, "you know, we have Factor and it's really cool, but imagine if we just generalized it to allow for any arbitrary instruction." And I was like, "Oh. Yeah, let's do that. That's a good idea."Chase (08:33):Yeah, I was really stoked. I remember seeing it the first time and I saw what it was and I was like, "Wow, people are really going to like this." By the way you guys are both technical founders. You both built out Cronos, correct?Nick (08:45):Yeah, correct.Nick (08:46):Mostly Nick, let me just... Mostly Nick.Chase (08:49):Actually, this is probably a good point to talk about what Cronos actually is officially. Like a TLDR for everybody watching. What you guys built and how it actually works at a high level?Nick (09:01):The basic concept is, it's just a keeper network for Solana. Every blockchain, at least that we're aware of right now, has this fundamental limitation and that's, you can't schedule transactions with a validator network and there's a few different reasons why that's the case. But it creates challenges for teams that have background jobs or tasks that they need to run just to make their programs work. And so, what Cronos is, is a keeper network to be able to facilitate that and service that. But the main difference is that we're kind of turning the Solana validators into the keepers for the system rather than relying on some external, off-chain, opaque bot network. And so that's required a lot of deep integration with the validator codebase in order to enable that.Chase (09:48):That is actually very, very cool. I wasn't officially, 100% certain how it worked. So you're using the validators as the keeper network to run these jobs on the network?Nick (09:58):Yeah, exactly. Our v1, proof of concept version was not integrated into the validator network. Hadn't even had that idea at the time, really.Elias (10:08):I didn't even know we could do that, knowing that we can just build a plugin for validators. Pretty cool.Nick (10:13):Yeah, it was around the same time we were building that initial bot that we started seeing some tweets about the account's DB plugin framework. And that has since been renamed to Geyser plugin framework and we just realized that there was all these scaling problems when you rely on these off-chain bots and that they have to submit transactions through the RPC network. And that can take up a whole bunch of bandwidth and you have to compete with other traffic to get those transactions through. And we realized there was this interface that Solana was providing, and the Geyser plugin framework, that we could actually spawn transactions from there. And it was much more efficient and made the system a lot more reliable. And so we basically copy pasted our bot code into the Geyser plugin framework and it mostly just worked out of the box.Chase (11:01):Oh wow. And that's quite unusual. For things that just work. So did you guys actually have to work with the validator community or did you guys have ever set up or run a validator? What's your knowledge there?Nick (11:12):Yeah, we have a few nodes that we got through the Solana server program, which that is a very useful program, if there's anyone that's looking to set up a node on Solana. And we have some servers running on DevNet and Testnet right now, that we're using to stress test the system. But yeah, we've been reaching out to all the node operators we can to talk with them and we're looking to get this thing rolled out on DevNet and Testnet quite soon. And actually, by the time this is published, it should be out on DevNet and Testnet, and we'll have quite a few integrations going on those networks.Chase (11:49):Yeah. I'm not going to lie. So like just leading in the sense, congratulations, you guys won the Riptide Hackathon. This was super incredible. And for me personally, I was so insanely excited to see some tooling win because this is just... developers need this tooling and to see that people watching a hackathon and a lot of these other, in the past, DeFi protocols, which are amazing out there, winning, but to see developer tooling take the grand prize, says a lot about what you guys had built and what the judges thought of it. So, that's quite amazing. So congratulations. But tell me, what was that like? Were you guys, have any idea, any expectations? Like what was your thoughts going through all that?Nick (12:33):Man. Yeah, there was a lot going on at the time, even, even outside the Riptide Hackathon. It was quite a journey, I think, to get here. Cronos was what we wish we had when we were building Factor. We came upon the idea for Cronos because we were trying to build Factor, this scheduled token transfer service. And we're like, "how do you schedule a timer on-chain?" And then we found out you couldn't schedule a timer on-chain, there just isn't a way. So we were talking to some other teams and I think it was, he goes by DoctorBlocks, at Switchboard. He described for us what a Crank function was and how they were running their automations. And from there we just started pulling on that thread and realized that here was all this dev tooling that was missing that we could build out and just started running with it.Chase (13:22):Were you expecting to win the grand prize of the hackathon? How did you react whenever you actually found out that you guys had won that thing? Was there-Nick (13:30):I didn't know we were going to win. We had been getting tips from a few people that we were on these ever shorter shortlists, but we didn't know until the moment of, that the blog post went out, someone sent it to me and then a moment later, Twitter started blowing up. And from there it was just a flood of inbound messages coming in from all directions. And last few weeks have been a lot of dealing with that.Elias (13:57):Yeah. A lot of dealing about knowing what is spam and what isn't from people it's pretty difficult to do.Chase (14:03):So did you guys celebrate, did you guys go out for beers? Like you did the first time you met? Did you do anything?Elias (14:08):Sure did.Nick (14:09):Yeah.Chase (14:11):That's awesome, man. Like I said, it's really great to see some developer tooling win and that value in that. Whenever I started at Solana Labs, like a year ago, there was no developer tooling out there. This was like... Then comes Armani and then here's Anchor. And then now we have all these indexers and then now we have Cronos and they just keep piling on. And eventually we're going to reach a place where every little narrow gap is covered and developers are going to be able to just jump in and do all the things that they could do in Web 2, in Web 3 and it's going to be a huge game changer for everybody. Not quite there, or we're pretty far off from there, I would say. Every tool like this really, really matters.Elias (14:51):To piggyback off that, the most exciting part about this job is not only building it and dealing with really interesting engineering problems, but knowing the impact that it will have to developers and how empowering it is to allow them to automate things on-chain. That's a pretty wild idea. So I'm really excited for that.Chase (15:09):Yeah and I think that's why a lot of engineers get into building out developer tooling instead of products because they're engineers themselves. And they're like, "man, if I was like on the other end of this and somebody built this tool, I'd be so stoked." And how many people that outwardly impacts is probably just a really incredible feeling. And it's just really awesome. So sorry, Factor, but I'm glad that Cronos ended up winning. By the way, is Factor just kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere right now, never to be reopened again?Nick (15:38):Yeah. We, we kind of just rolled Factor into Cronos. Actually the Twitter account is the same Twitter. We just changed the name now.Chase (15:46):Nice. Okay. So it's dead.Nick (15:48):Yeah.Elias (15:49):Dead, but very much alive.Nick (15:51):Yeah.Chase (15:52):Yeah. If Cronos would've never came alive, you would've been sitting at the mtnDAO with TJ, directly competing against each other. So, that's awesome. So basically two of these projects were the winning of the payments track and then the grand champion of Riptide. They both came out of mtnDAO. Every time I hear about mtnDAO and we talk about this, it's one more reason why understanding how incredible it was out there and how many builders were out there building really cool stuff.Elias (16:20):Yeah, the community in Salt Lake was amazing just knowing that you were in the same boat with all these developers. Either just getting into Solana or being in it just recently. Learning Rust and learning the runtime environment and what is possible on Solana is really crazy. And everyone was trying to help each other and answered questions. And if you didn't know the answer, they would direct you to somebody else. And everyone's just like, "yeah, let me help you with this," which is my favorite part about that.Nick (16:48):Yeah, it's been really cool to see communities pop up. Also happening right now is like AthensDAO in Greece. And unfortunately we weren't able to make it there, but I think we'll see, over the coming months, a few more of these communities start to pop up that are a bit more like longer running than just the kind of week long hacker house format.Chase (17:06):Yeah. I'm a big fan of the community run hacker houses and all these sorts of things like mtnDAO, just because whenever it's built out with the community like that, it just forms this other type of bond with everybody and it's just really exciting to see all that happen.Chase (17:23):This is the point in the show where we shift gears a little bit. We talked about that excitement, how Cronos came alive, you guys winning Riptide and now I want to talk about what that experience was like for you guys. Because this is the very important part of this show where we talk about what sucked and what was good and what could be better. So, I want to start with Elias this time. You came from a front-end engineering background? What's actually the languages that you had touched before you came to start building on Solana?Elias (17:58):Even before I was a front-end developer, I was dabbling in data science for a bit. It was a lot of fun, but a bit too meticulous for my taste. So I was dealing with a lot of Python. Fast forward to when I graduate, I was really interested in front-end development, got pretty good at helping with some friends and building toy applications and TypeScript React, some toy web apps with Next.js. And then that's whenever, like I said, met Nick, joined the team and I was building front-end applications for a while at, like, six months. And then I found, like a lot of people who started their Web 3 journey, Nader Dabit's Ethereum article on how to... It was like a super simple... I forget exactly the context of what the project was, but it was on dev.to. And read through it and tried to understand what is this environment? What is this dev environment? What's going on? Not too long after I found Solana and Nick also brought it up, was like, "Hey, we should maybe look into this." And then-Chase (18:53):Did you do Dabit's tutorial on Solana too?Elias (18:55):I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah.Chase (18:56):Yeah.Elias (18:57):It was a lot simpler. I don't know. But also more difficult in some ways. When we were working on Factor, Nick gave me the talk like, "Hey, we may not need front-end developers. So there's a chance that I need you to flex over to becoming a Rust engineer, which is, you know-Chase (19:13):So he didn't fire you?Elias (19:15):No, no he did not. Luckily. Yeah. So fast forward to like mtnDAO when we know finally realize Cronos has a lot of potential. I buy the book that a lot of people seem to have and I have it on my desk right here, the programming Rust book. And it's been my north star, I would say, as far as growing my skills as a Rust engineer, as well as living in the Solana repo and Anchor repos.Chase (19:39):So you guys are building this in straight Rust? Are you guys also using Anchor?Elias (19:44):Yeah. So in the core of Cronos, it's a lot of Anchor. A lot of what I deal with, I'm building and optimizing the Geyser plugin that we have to listen to Cronos accounts and execute tasks when needed. That's just built in Rust and other like asynchronous libraries and things like that, but not Anchor specifically.Chase (20:03):This is the part, the glass chewing, what was your learning curve during that process of learning Rust coming from front-end? Was it as painful as everybody says? Everybody's different on this front, so what was that like to learn Rust?Elias (20:16):A big mistake that I would advise people attempting to get into the space would be first of all, just learn Rust by itself first. At least start there and understand that it is different from Anchor. And it's just a framework that lives with Rust. And then try to understand the Solana runtime just a little bit. And those are three separate entities, but they all coexist and you need the three in order to make a simple to do app in Rust on-chain. So differentiating between those three different entities is really important. And if you just jump straight into a Solana Anchor project, not knowing Rush, you're going to get really confused and pretty frustrated.Chase (20:52):So for you, was it hard or was it just time consuming? You just had to grind it out and you learned along the way?Elias (20:58):Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things that you just have to do every day. You have to, you know, for me every morning before we would go to the mtnDAO-Chase (21:06):Glass for breakfast.Elias (21:07):Yeah, I would literally just sit on the couch and wait for Nick to finish showering before we drove to the office. And I would just read a chapter of the programming Rush book and it would just go over super simple things like structs and basic functions. And if you're a software engineer, it's not too difficult to transition into Rust, it's just another programming language just in the different context. And it looks a little weird with two semicolons next to each other or whatever, syntax. But it's not too bad. One of those things you just got to do every day. And then before you know it, you'll just hit the road running. It's pretty nice.Chase (21:39):I think a lot of people talk about chewing glass, like it's actually Solana, that's the real glass chewing, about learning the native concepts, like using PDAs and these things. And there are people out there who just don't ever end up learning Rust and they never actually tried it. They never just sat down and did it. You could get a little bit resistant to it just because it looks so foreign.Chase (22:00):And then the other part is, I've done a couple of Twitter Spaces around this exact same thing about you saying start with Rust. That's my recommendation always start with the base layer before you're using any sort of framework or anything that's intertwined in it, but there are people out there on the other side of the camp that say, just start with Anchor. I obviously disagree, because I think learning that first base language is always going to be the best. And it's going to save you down the road when you're running into issues.Chase (22:27):I'm going to go ahead and ask you Nick, kind of the same question, what your experience was like? What did you do to learn it? Was it similar to Elias? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it just time consuming? What would that look like?Nick (22:39):I had some background working in back-end systems. Yeah, for my time out in California, I had worked mostly with Go prior and actually first tried picking up Rust in 2020, because I'd seen it was the most popular language on GitHub and it was just like, what is this? And I actually hated it the first time I looked at it because I was coming from that Go world. And Go is designed to be super ergonomic and easy to read and talk about and communicate and Rust is more optimized for performance,Chase (23:13):Performance and pain.Nick (23:16):Yeah. And so I hated Rust when I first looked at it, and I pushed it off to the side and didn't actually look at it again until we dove into Solana. I've since come to love it. It is a little bit steeper of a learning curve and there are some extra pieces to the mental model that you need, in terms of understanding memory and ownership of variables and how all that stuff works, lifetimes, for example, that other languages don't have. So that makes it a little more complicated or harder to learn. But it's not anything that can't be overcome, I think. It's just another programming language.Nick (23:50):But yeah, definitely breaking apart, as Elias said, the difference between Rust problems, Anchor problems and Solana problems and understanding that these are all like three different systems is probably the hardest thing when you're first diving into Solana because it all looks the same and all the error messages are cryptic and if you don't have a whole lot of debugging experience, it can be hard to pull that thread because all this stuff is quite new and a lot of devs, I think have the pattern of, you get an error message you don't understand, copy it in a Google and see what Stack Overflow results come up. Usually we're running into problems that no other devs have run into yet. And it's just like-Chase (24:28):It's actually pretty cool though. Like to be one of the first group of people on the planet. You guys are going to be the ones who answer these Stack Overflow questions in the future because that always starts somewhere. The first guy had to just figure it out.Elias (24:40):It's cool, but you're like, "I don't know what to do now." I guess we're just going to have to figure it out. So that's where I would just go to the Solana codebase and Nick has recommended multiple times. Just go live in there, you'll understand the runtime environment better, your errors will be easier to debug. It's a lot. The Solana codebase is a lot, but there are parts of it that really help you understand what is going on underneath.Chase (25:03):A lot of people come from Web 2, and again, I'm one of those people. We're used to having our hands held. We're used to being able to find the answers we want. We're used to all these pretty, amazing tutorials and all these different things. And when that's not the case, it makes it a lot harder. Sadly enough, not everybody's this reverse engineering code diver that's going to go do that sort of thing. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and sometimes, at the end of the day, there might not be considered the greatest payoff for all that work. But the true engineers, the ones who just like to figure shit out, are going to go do that and then they're going to figure it out and then they're going to build Cronos. So it's awesome.Nick (25:43):It's definitely how you know you're on the bleeding edge, is when Google doesn't come up with any results for your error message.Chase (25:49):Zero results.Nick (25:51):Yeah.Elias (25:52):The beautiful, no search results for that Google search and like, well, okay cool. Like whatever.Nick (25:57):Yeah. I Would say to any devs that find themselves in this situation, the Anchor discord in particular is my new Google for trying to find solutions to these problems. And usually, 70% of the time, someone has asked about some of the error problems like we're running into in the Anchor discord somewhere. And there's been someone that is able to chime in and help and Armani and the team that's there is extremely helpful in terms of answering questions and generous with their time.Chase (26:27):And Alan and everybody that's out there and Jacob who's on our DevRel team and Donny. There's so many people and these are guys that are actually working on like Serum and Anchor and Solana Labs and all that stuff. But outside of that, the community of people just helping each other solve these problems, it's amazing to watch it happen in real life.Chase (26:48):We've been going on for a while now and I want both of you, if you can, to tell me what is missing from Solana right now, like in tooling? You guys just created one that was missing, where you were seeing a lot of tooling come out.Elias (26:59):I have one.Chase (27:00):Okay. All right, we'll start with you Elias. What are we missing right now?Elias (27:04):I'm probably stealing this from Matt because he's probably thinking about it, but one thing we've ran into recently is DevOps pipelining. It's pretty difficult to handle versioning from so many different projects. And when we're developing, we're having to stay ahead of Mainnet and work on Testnet and it's a very complicated, and different projects do it differently, but right now in our repo, we have a forked version of Anchor just so that we have up-to-date versions of Anchor, but using some different-Nick (27:32):The latest Solana dependency versions.Elias (27:34):Yes. So that right now is something that we have to build, but if there's a way to do that at scale for a lot of other teams, that'd be great.Chase (27:41):Yeah, that's not the first time I've heard that one, but that's a good one. I hear it just because I'm always paying attention to a lot of different places, but I don't know if everybody, except the ones who are coming into this problem actually know that this is something that's kind of necessary. It's not one of the ones that people are most vocal about. It's usually error codes and indexers and all these things. So Nick, did Elias steal yours or do you got something else for us?Nick (28:05):No, I think that's a great one. There's, at least for what we're doing, where we have both on-chain programs and a plugin, that we're trying to ship DevOps challenges around keeping the versions in sync between those two pieces can be challenging. And then, I guess something that's been on my mind a little bit is how there was a DeGit project in the Riptide Hackathon, decentralized Git, which I think, stuff in that space like decentralized DevOps processes and how does a decentralized global team of engineers contribute to a protocol and how do you keep the community open, but also secure, is, I think, an unsolved problem at this point.Chase (28:50):Well, I look forward to the Cronos team actually building out this suite of tools, all of it.Nick (28:56):A few pieces, but yeah.Chase (28:58):Yeah. So I usually wrap these shows up just asking what advice would you give to somebody who's thinking, on the other side, "Hmm, maybe I'm about to jump into Solana. I'm not sure if I want to put in the effort to build something." What general advice would you give somebody who was going to build or is building on Solana right now?Elias (29:17):If you're frustrated with learning Rust, but you're really wanting to build on Solana, then you're doing it right. You're not doing it right if you're not frustrated, that's the chewing glass part.Chase (29:27):Yeah.Elias (29:27):Just keep going. Because at some point you'll be able to look at other projects and their smart contracts and go, "oh, I see what they're doing." Like right now I'm looking at the Holaplex, that's called RabbitMQ plugin or Geyser plugin, shout out to the Holaplex team, and trying to understand why they made certain engineering designs with their plugin and see what we can take from. And that's just the beauty of open source of course. But yeah, if I wasn't chewing glass consistently and I wasn't looking at code and other repos, then I wouldn't be able to do that.Chase (29:58):Yeah. That's awesome. And like it is, I wish everybody would start open sourcing their code out there, but we'll get there eventually. How about you Nick, what kind of advice do you have? And again, we've kind of talked about a few good ideas for the community, so what do you think?Nick (30:13):Yeah, I think probably two things, as Elias mentioned, spending time in the Solana repo, it's helped a lot. There's a lot of patterns in there that, if you're trying to get familiar with Rust, it's a great resource to learn from. And the second thing is to actually read the error messages that you get back, because when you actually pull on that thread, they are very cryptic error messages a lot of times, but they do have information that leads you to the bug and the problem or points you in the right direction, maybe is the best way to put it. I find that skill, that debugging skill is like a muscle that needs to be trained and learned and doesn't always come supernaturally, because it's just hard. But yeah, reading error messages and trying to decipher what they're telling you is a fundamental exercise to dealing with large complex systems.Chase (31:10):Yeah, and it's also just a really cool skillset to have, to be able to just do these manual debugging stuff. Yeah. Like you said it becomes like a natural kind of mental muscle that all of a sudden, now it just happens quite naturally, once you get to a certain point.Elias (31:23):Yeah. One thing for those interested in just in general, distributed systems, trying to understand Solana a little bit better from a higher level, there's a great YouTube course from MIT. If you just search "distributed systems MIT", it's an OpenCourseWare, like 12 lecture series, just to understand like RPCs, multi-threading, concurrency, consensus and things like that. It's really beneficial to understanding distributed systems, blockchains, well, not necessarily blockchains, but at least for Solana distributed systems.Chase (31:55):Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot of people that come into blockchain and they don't even really know what a distributed system is. And then a lot of the times it's like, hey, go actually read about like what this thing is before diving into this.Chase (32:07):All right guys. Well really, really, thanks for coming on the show. I'm glad that we got to catch up. Congratulations winning Riptide. I'll talk to you later.Nick (32:16):Yeah. Well see you in Austin.Elias (32:17):Sounds good. Yeah, see you in Austin.Chase (32:19):All right. Cheers.

Today I'm speaking with Cami Ramos Garzon. As you may already know, Cami recently joined Edge & Node, a Core Dev team working on The Graph, where she'll be working alongside Nader Dabit, a former guest of the podcast, in the important role of developer relations. If you're active on Twitter or TikTok, then you likely already follow Cami and know about her move to Edge & Node. Cami is widely respected in the developer community and she also gained some early notice in The Graph ecosystem when she published a blog titled “The Complete Guide to Getting Started with The Graph” back in February. During our discussion, Cami talked about her journey into tech, which included some time at PayPal and an incredible story of how she became one of the first dev rels there.  We also talk about her role at Edge & Node, her vision for The Graph and Web3, and her inspiring non-profit work at STEMTank. Show NotesThe GRTiQ Podcast takes listeners inside The Graph (GRT) by interviewing members of The Graph's community and ecosystem.  Please help support this project and build the community by subscribing and leaving a review.Twitter: GRT_iQwww.GRTiQ.com

Nader is a developer advocate working to help build the decentralized future at Edge and Node. He began his journey when the technology lured him from his web2 roots. Nader discusses his fascination with decentralized infrastructure and the impact it will have on society. He also offers his advice on people wanting to develop the Web3 environment. Ron challenges Chris to do the impossible: explaining web3 in an elevator pitch.   Follow Nader on Twitter Check out Nader's YouTube Channel Visit the Edge & Node website Stay in touch with Hacker Valley Media on LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram |  Website Check out Metaversable on  Website | LinkedIn | Twitter   Continue the conversation by joining our Hacker Valley Discord

In this episode, Dave chats with Nader Dabit, Developer Relations Engineer at Edge & Node. In his career, Nader has worn the hats of a web developer, mobile developer, AWS cloud developer, and now Web3 developer. Nader is the author behind many of the popular, free, developer guides for the Web3 space including: The Complete Guide to Full Stack Web3 Development, The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development, and The Complete Guide to Full Stack Solana Development. In part two of this two-part conversation, Nader explains the developer lessons he has learned moving from Web2 vs Web3, some of the misconceptions about Web3, and what Web3 can bring to people around the world. Note: This episode is an attempt to cover the developer benefits of Web3. It does not represent financial advice, or any specific Amazon endorsement of Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies. Nader on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3 Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Nader's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naderdabit/ Nader's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/naderdabit Nader on Dev.to: https://dev.to/dabit3 Nader's Git: https://github.com/dabit3 Developer DAO on Twitter: https://twitter.com/developer_dao The Complete Guide to Full Stack Web3 Development: https://dev.to/dabit3/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-web3-development-4g74 The Complete Guide to Full Stack Solana Development with React, Anchor, Rust, and Phantom: https://dev.to/edge-and-node/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-solana-development-with-react-anchor-rust-and-phantom-3291 The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development: https://dev.to/dabit3/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-ethereum-development-3j13 Building GraphQL APIs on Ethereum: https://dev.to/edge-and-node/building-graphql-apis-on-ethereum-4poa Subscribe: Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

In this episode, Dave chats with Nader Dabit, Developer Relations Engineer at Edge & Node. In his career, Nader has worn the hats of a web developer, mobile developer, AWS cloud developer, and now Web3 developer. Nader is the author behind many of the popular, free, developer guides for the Web3 space including: The Complete Guide to Full Stack Web3 Development, The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development, and The Complete Guide to Full Stack Solana Development. In part one of this two-part conversation, Nader shares getting started with a full-time career as a developer coming from almost no technical background. He then covers the vision of what Web3 is, and regardless of your exposure to blockchain, how Web3 will ultimately benefit everyone. Note: This episode is an attempt to cover the developer benefits of Web3. It does not represent financial advice, or any specific Amazon endorsement of Bitcoin and Crypto Currencies. Nader on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3 Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Nader's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naderdabit/ Nader's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/naderdabit Nader on Dev.to: https://dev.to/dabit3 Nader's Git: https://github.com/dabit3 Developer DAO on Twitter: https://twitter.com/developer_dao The Complete Guide to Full Stack Web3 Development: https://dev.to/dabit3/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-web3-development-4g74 The Complete Guide to Full Stack Solana Development: https://dev.to/edge-and-node/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-solana-development-with-react-anchor-rust-and-phantom-3291 The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development: https://dev.to/dabit3/the-complete-guide-to-full-stack-ethereum-development-3j13 Building GraphQL APIs on Ethereum: https://dev.to/edge-and-node/building-graphql-apis-on-ethereum-4poa Graph Day Keynote by Yaniv Tal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZcbWkrTMtg ------------------ Subscribe: Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

Today on the Ether we have the building web3 space focused on stablecoins with Terra Money and MakerDAO, hosted by Nader Dabit with Zion, Hexonaut, Nadia, Larry Florio, and more! Recorded on March 10th 2022. Make sure to check out our sponsors, Orbital Command, Luart, Talis, WeFund, and Glow Yield! We appreciate their support.

You can follow Nader on twitter as @dabit3Links from the episode:Nader's youtube channelThe Complete Guide to Full Stack Web3 DevelopmentSolidify by ExampleEthereum Dev Speed RunThe Developer DAO twitter profileThe Developer DAO hackathonFor more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.To learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, check out my upcoming workshops.Opening theme song:Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-mondayLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the third episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs.Todays guest is Brian Friel, a Solana dev and regular contributor to the Solana Cookbook who recently joined Phantom as Developer Relations Evangelist.01:18 - Intro / Phantom04:04- Brian's background05:10 - His experience before working in Solana06:42 - How did he start working in Solana08:06 - When did he start looking into Solana09:41 - First project on Solana11:36 - What are the challenges working in Solana13:14 - Anchor vs. Solana native15:31 - The Solana cookbook18:09 - Contributing to the space21:01 - Solana Native Programs23:01 - Any advice?DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Chase (00:39):Hey, everybody. Welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana ecosystem. My name is Chase Barker, developer relations at Solana Labs. Today, we have with us, Brian Friel. Brian is actually a heavy contributor to the Solana ecosystem. I spoke with Brian, probably, a few months ago. I started noticing that he was writing some really great articles about Solana. I always have my eye out to kind of find people who are just altruistically contributing in the ecosystem. Brian was one of those guys, and here he is today. Brian, how's it going, man?Brian (01:13):Hey, Chase. Good to be here. Big fan of the show.Chase (01:16):Super excited to have you. You have done so many contributions to the ecosystem, everything from your own personal articles about PDAs with Anchor. You've contributed heavily to the Solana Cookbook. Actually, many people probably don't know because you never really spoke about it, there is some great news today. Brian, I actually heard from a little birdie that you just got hired at Phantom.Brian (01:50):That's correct. This is a Solana podcast exclusive. I'm joining Phantom, and I'll be their first developer relations hire there. Super stoked to build out the best wallet on Solana.Chase (02:02):Yeah, that's awesome. I haven't fully grasped what... I know that there's a use for that on a wallet. Every company's completely different whenever it comes to developer relations. You've been hanging out with the Solana Labs devrel team. I'm sure you'll jump in there, and you probably have already started to try to figure out what you're going to do on day one, I'm sure.Brian (02:24):It's a green-field kind of space here. There's a lot to do. I think you're right. One of the best things about this space, too, is that so many people are just building in public that we get a lot of feedback of what developers building on Solana want to see out of us at Phantom. My job is really to kind of get in touch with everyone who's building and start triaging what the biggest priorities are to make this the best experience.Chase (02:46):That's awesome. I'm sure you're going to do great. Also, another one of our wonderful part-time dev advocates, Loris just got hired by Metaplex. But, at the end of the day, we love this. This is exactly what we want. All the better and congrats on that.Brian (03:00):Yeah. Shout out, Loris. He's awesome. Metaplex got a huge win there, getting him.Chase (03:05):For sure. I guess, I usually start these out with some more of the boring things for most people. Everybody wants to hear about the development stuff. Number one, when you did start working with us, had I reached out to you or did you reach out to me? I've been thinking about this today, and I cannot actually remember how that unfolded.Brian (03:25):I think, way back, I actually reached out to you once. At the time, I might have not even been on Twitter under my real name. I just started a Twitter account just to check out a couple different things. I was interested in crypto. I saw your presence pretty early on and messaged you, but I'm pretty sure, at that time, you were just drowning in DMs. I went all out my way starting to build stuff, and then starting to just share stuff publicly, which we can talk about. But, I think, through that, then you had circled back, and then we reconnected.Chase (03:55):Yeah, exactly. If you're listening, that's how you do it. If I don't respond to you, do something cool, and we'll eventually connect. Anyways, definitely, generally curious on your background, whether it's tech related or not, just whatever you are comfortable with sharing and what you were doing before you were involved in any of this crazy thing that we call crypto.Brian (04:16):It feels like a lifetime ago. I, actually, didn't study computer science unlike a lot of people, but, over time, I did make my way into the tech world. Then, quickly after graduating, I got pretty lucky, and I got a job as a front end engineer at a small crypto hedge fund here in the Bay Area. It's called Castle. Was with those guys for about four years. Absolute, awesome experience. It was really interesting to see the whole trading side of the industry, which, obviously, is kind of how this all got its legs. People want to speculate on this. Over time, my role there really evolved from just the pure dev to somebody who was really kind of boots on the ground trying to figure out what's new in the space.Through that, I came across Solana pretty early on. Obviously, seeing Sam Fried throw his weight behind it, but then some other stuff that came along like Mango. I'm seeing the possibilities there. In my free time, I really started just digging to it outside of work. Work was the catalyst for finding it. But, that's really how I got my start, just looking into the developer side of things on Solana.Chase (05:18):What was your experience level directly before Solana?Brian (05:22):I was a React front end engineer, was really my specialty. I, specifically, was tasked with building interfaces for our trading systems. We had a whole proprietary tech trading system, and I was the front end guy, so I would say pretty proficient with React and Node JS and TypeScript. But, I really wasn't a back end guy. I'd never done anything with Rust, and I actually hadn't really done too much on Solidity at the time yet. I had kicked around a few side projects, but nothing really ever got past just a couple weeks, side hobby sort of deal.Chase (05:54):What I definitely am seeing in this ecosystem, and I think Armani's talked about it a handful of times is that a lot of engineers in Solana are actually Solana natives that have never touched Solidity. They've never owned a MetaMask wallet. Obviously, a lot of these guys are probably some of the more younger guns, even some of the older ones as well, probably for a variety of reasons. But, it's interesting to see technologies that have been around for a while that newer technologies are actually being used and developed on first. It's never really been a thing before. There was always a learning path that was you find out about Bitcoin. You find out about Ethereum. You build on Solidity. Then, you find some other things, and you might jump ship. We're seeing a lot of people that are really just going straight to Solana. You were involved in that space, tasked with finding out what's hot, what's going on, and you saw SBF was building a central limit order book on Solana, and, then, that's kind of what set you in that direction?Brian (06:54):Yeah. I was pretty aware of the Ethereum ecosystem before. We actually were running our own validators for Eth 2 and doing a couple other things as it relates to trading, actually, on Ethereum Mainnet today. For me, personally, I think it was just really an interesting time to dedicate my free time in learning Solana because it felt like there was this new paradigm of blockchain development. A lot of the stuff that was coming out with other earlier ones felt a little bit derivative of Eth, but Solana really felt like it was carving its own path out, and I thought that was worth exploring.At the same time, I could see there was people who had serious credibility in the space who were dedicating their time to it. Then, combined with that, they're just wasn't any resources or really any subject matter experts on it yet. That, to me, was the signal that it is a really good time. I still think it is a fantastic time to just dig my heels in and learn about this. I haven't really looked back since.Chase (07:52):The first time we kind of talked, it was probably early on, and I was really just trying to get a feel for everything. There probably wasn't a ton of information or content. I feel like there was some. You made a note to Mango Markets. What timeframe did you really start paying attention to Solana, not necessarily about what's going on in the ecosystem, but rather start looking at the documentation? Was this super early 2021?Brian (08:18):I had kicked the tires on things at the end of 2020 when Sollet was the only wallet, and there really wasn't anything. But, I think Break Solana was out there, and I think Raydium was out there.Chase (08:29):Serum DEX was also there around that time as well, I believe.Brian (08:32):Yeah, Serum. I had just kind of made a mental note around that time. Things were pretty crazy in the space, too, just everything was going on.Chase (08:40):The market, yeah-Brian (08:41):I was pretty busy at work, but, I would say, when the market kind of cooled off in the summertime is when I, personally, started to dig into the development side a lot more. Mango and Phantom, well, trying that out was definitely just the light bulb moment for me when I saw just how insane that user experience was. What really got me down the rabbit hole of development was following Armani on Twitter. Shout out, Armani's the man, and seeing what he was doing with Anchor, specifically.I had stayed away from the development side of Solana purely because I had told myself, oh, I'm a front end guy. I would have to learn Rust first. Then, I would have to learn all the intricacies of Solana. It's just not worth my time. But, Anchor signaled to me that I could start a side project, and I could get up and running with something quickly. Then, if that was interesting to me, then I could dig in further. That's what I did. I think that's actually a pretty good path for people who are just kicking the tires on Solana development.Chase (09:39):I guess that means that you're pretty much intro journey into development. You went straight for Anchor before you-Brian (09:46):Yep, a hundred percent.Chase (09:48):... because I remember... Was the PDA article you wrote the first article that you had written?Brian (09:52):My first thing I did, I think this was either late August or early September, I just said, I'm going to make a really basic app, like a voting app on Solana, something that everyone's made before, but I'm going to use Anchor to do it. I think, at the time, Nader Dabit had just published his first article, so I was kind of using that as a reference. But, there really wasn't a whole lot about the intricacies of how Anchor related to Solana development, in particular. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the account model, which I think is the biggest thing for most people coming into the space, especially if they're familiar with Ethereum. I had just done a very basic, put a key pair on a node server, spin that up, something you would never want to do in a production app. It worked until the Herokuv server crashed, and then it just was a joke of an app.I couldn't really sleep well. I had written up my experience, but I couldn't really sleep well knowing that that's as far as I got. That's when I dug into PDAs. I really started to understand the account model better on Solana, what that was. I just wrote about that experience, really, selfishly for me just to have a memo on that. Then, I just put it out there, but I found out that a lot of other people were simultaneously going around the same sort of journey. I think that was the article that I really started to get connected with a lot of people in the space.Chase (11:09):I mean, it's pretty typical for a lot of these guys to be documenting their journey. A lot of times that really sparks a revelation for people that I've noticed. It's like, wow, this is super valuable. Then, I want to do it again. It's like, if this is helping people, I'm going to keep deep diving these things. But, it all started with Armani being like, hey, I'm going to make this easier for everybody, and he did. Now, he has a massive community of supporters that are just building on top of Anchor. Was the accounts model in the PDAs... Typically, it is, but, for you, is that specifically was, until you got past that, Solana was pretty hard?Brian (11:47):Yeah. In my mind, I thought it was going to be Rust, especially being a front end dev. It's just the total different world, but-Chase (11:54):The syntax is disgusting when you first look at it, at least in my personal opinion.Brian (11:58):Yeah, you can kind of understand. But, I mean, it really is. If you've never touched Rust, it's not bad. It was nothing that, really, three or four hours worth of just looking over stuff. You can understand the gist of things, which is as much as you really need to get your first app up, which I think is the best way to learn, just by doing. For me, it really was the mental shift of just how does Solana work in the account model because I think everyone's so used to... I have Ethereum address. It has all these coins directly related to it. Then, there's this Ethereum smart contract, and it has its state. It has a counter, and it can do these things. It's really weird to, one, you're already saying, I'm going to go away from this ecosystem. I'm going to look at Solana.But, then, two, a lot of what I have in my head as a mental map doesn't carry over. That seemed like a scary drum. That probably was the hardest thing, but, it's really that account model. I think that once you have a pretty good understanding of that, that's 80% of the work. The rest of the 20% of the work, you'll get over time.Chase (12:58):I mean, if we're talking about Rust Native, and then we're talking about Anchor, Anchor also hides a lot of these issues. You don't have to really worry so much about the serialization piece. Honestly, I don't know very many people that actually even know how to really do that efficiently and effectively in Rust. It's a huge pain in the ass to make that work. Have you done any of the serialization in Rust Native?Brian (13:26):Yeah. I've played around with Borscht a little bit now. I think as far as the whole Anchor versus Solana Native debate, speaking anecdotally, I definitely thought it was easier just to go with Anchor. It lets you focus on what you're building. You don't have to worry about all this stuff like serialization. But, then, I think once you do build something to actually really understand how it works, and if you ever were to actually put any money, your own, let alone other people's money in it, you absolutely should understand how Anchor relates to Solana Native, and why it's doing the things it's doing, what each trait and macro is actually doing under the hood. Then, that just makes you really understand, I think, Solana, all the better.Chase (14:03):There's a couple types of people there. There are the type of person out there that's like, no, I want to start with a base, and then I'm going to work my way up. Those people tend to be the more thorough, take their time, whatever. But, then a lot of others are like, I want to push out an MVP because I want to write code right this second, and then they do it. Then, just general curiosity over time when you feel like you understand a language like Anchor, and you're like, okay, I got this. This is great. Now, I'm actually curious how this works under the hood, so you just go in the reverse direction.Brian (14:38):This is, again, anecdotal, but for people like me, and probably if you're a front end dev, actually, it's really nice to have something tangible where it's like you built this. You can show it to a friend, and they can connect the Devnet Wallet to it, and they can use it. Then, you kind of really understand the tangible value of this new platform that Solana is. Now, you're innately curious of, okay, well how does this actually work? I saw that Anchor does this in less than 50 lines of Rust, but half these lines are macros that I'm not quite sure what they do under the hood. It's very natural, your learning path from there, if you can just get the first project done.Chase (15:15):Have you, to this day, written anything in Rust Native. Have you written any programs?Brian (15:21):No. I've transitioned over more to the web3.js side of things because that's what I'm more comfortable with.Chase (15:28):Okay.Brian (15:29):As you know, recently, I've been spending most of my time on more conceptual stuff like the Solana Cookbook, and I dug in some stuff as well about retrying transactions during network congestion and all that. That's a little bit more, conceptually, how the Solana blockchain works as a whole.Chase (15:42):If you guys didn't know, Brian just released a PDA section to the Solana Cookbook, so check it out. Also, the retry portion. That was actually requested by the Solana core engineer team. They were like, there's a lot of people that don't understand how to manage failed transactions and how to retry them properly.Brian (16:04):Yeah, totally. That's kind of what drew me in to this space is that I had seen people like the core engineering team there, Trent and what Anatoly's built, obviously. But, there's all this amazing tech that these guys have built and they've been so focused on building that no one's really there to tell the story and to help make it more relatable to devs, maybe Web 2.0 devs who are coming in. I've seen a lot of people, and I have friends who maybe aren't full-time crypto who are just like Solana just doesn't work, unplug it and plug it back in kind of a deal, like what's going on there because it's very different from Ethereum.But, in my mind, it's an incredible piece of technology that's been built, and there's reasons why certain things have hiccups at certain times, but it doesn't mean it's a bad design. It just means that we're testing in prod. We're moving this thing pretty fast. What I wanted to do is help shed light what is actually happening because as I learned about it, it gave me more confidence in Solana as a whole, the platform, understanding what the growing pains actually were under the hood.Chase (17:02):Whether people like to admit it or not, every blockchain, in its infancy, has suffered very, very similar problems. They're continuously working to improve this with QUICK and other different options that are going just make this more sustainable. The best thing we can do is be honest about it. We have Solana Docs. They're highly technical documentation. They're not necessarily developer experience friendly unless you're a very specific type of learner with a very large brain. The first time I read it, I probably absorbed 10%. The next time I got another 25%. Then, it took me five or six or seven times before I grasped everything that was happening in there. It serves a very specific purpose. Most of that documentation, the brunt of it, was written years ago by the co-founders. It can use some improvement, but, at the time, we're like let's move fast. Let's get the community contributing and kind of get the Cookbook built out.It turned out really great. It has a half a million page views, just short of half a million, which is insane since that just goes to show you how valuable it is, and how valuable your contributions are. The same reason why we have these little developer advocacy teams that join weekly meetings with us, so they can know what's going on and just help. The goal is to get some experience, and then eventually get hired by whoever you want to get hired by. Luckily for you, that seems to have worked out and that's amazing.Brian (18:25):No, the Cookbook's been an awesome experience, and, definitely, shout out Jacob Creech and Leesam [inaudible 00:18:31] and Loris and Colin and all those people who are working hard on it. It's been very organic, and I think that's kind of true of the whole Solana developer ecosystem as a whole is that it's an aptly named podcast, Chewing Glass. But, there's a reason why people are dedicating their free time outside of work to this because it's really awesome. The Cookbook, in my mind, is the best way if you're sort of on the sidelines, or you've maybe built a small project, and you don't really know how to go from here, getting involved with that is definitely the best move I think you can make. Contributing to the space, as a whole, helping other people learn. The best way I've ever learned is writing for other people. Then, once you do do that, it's really easy to connect with others who are building in the space. There's so much to do that you'll get picked up by somebody, for sure.Chase (19:12):It's kind of crazy. When that Cookbook just exploded, also, shout out the SuperteamDAO for actually helping solve [crosstalk 00:19:20].Brian (19:19):Yeah, totally there.Chase (19:20):They really crushed it. Watching that organic just inflow of people that are like, hey, I'll do this thing. I'll do that thing, and they just did it. For a ghost chain, we actually seem to have a lot of developers in the ecosystem.Brian (19:32):Anecdotally, I've seen just an explosion of people who've reached out to me saying, hey, I read your stuff and I want to learn more. What's the best way to get involved? I think that gut feel of the developer buzz and people who are spending their nights and weekends trying to wrap their head around this. I think that's the best kind of indicator you can really have because, at the end of the day, there's a lot out there. But, if you can get people who are actually interested in putting in the sweat to actually learn about this thing that's not always easy right off the bat, but even if they're just interested in it's going to take mind sharing. That's how we can better.Chase (20:08):Yeah. Every day, I'm blown away, but I don't have to reach out to anybody. It's just all people reaching out. Obviously, I love to hear that they're reaching out to you and everybody in the ecosystem has their DMs open. If you write an article, expect for people to come and ask you for advice, and that tone has been set. It started with Anatoly with this whole openness thing, and him and Raj with their DMs open, went down to me, and then to the community. Then, it just keeps spreading and spreading, and everybody's really just trying, out there, to help each other. Without that sort of kind of vibe, you and I wouldn't have met. We wouldn't have worked together. None of these things would've happened.Brian (20:45):I think that's definitely the most important thing is keeping that vibe set because I could have just as easily gone away, but I hopped in an Anchor discord right when it was just getting started. There's people like Armani, but then others like CQFD and Don Diablo and other people who are in those channels taking time out of their day to help me out. Once I learned it, I felt like I had to pay it forward or wanted to pay it forward really and connect with more people. I think as long as we can keep that momentum going, that's a good thing.Chase (21:18):For sure. You talked about, you were doing some Web 3.0 stuff. You saw that the token program was completely rewritten in TypeScript.Brian (21:25):Yeah. Pretty cool.Chase (21:27):Have you touched that yet? Have you played around with it.Brian (21:28):I played around with it a little bit. Haven't done a whole lot there, but I definitely plan to. I think one of the things that I was most interested in when I came here was Web 3.0, web3.js because it's just so simple. It's like an NPM package or a yarn install. You can get up and running with that. I had an idea of making a little site that was a little bit interactive where you could have a snippet of code, say how to send a SOL to somebody, and then you click that. Then, on the right, it's actually rendering and showing what that actually looks like. But, I think the Cookbook has done a pretty good job. My idea kind of started right around when the Cookbook launched, so I've focused my efforts there, on the Cookbook, but I would say that should be a focus of mine and a bunch of other people who are interested in contributing. It's just improving the developer experience on Web 3.0 right now. There's a lot documentation-wise that I think we could improve.Chase (22:22):Even some of the Solana Program Library, for instance, the Solana Token Program JS library, which they dot bindings in the documentation, that doesn't exist for every program. You would, literally, just have to write your own custom transactions and instructions to be able to use it. We are adding that to our little roadmap. I'm sure there's additional components and extensions we can add to these things. We're working on it.Brian (22:51):I think it's the right time to be contributing towards that kind of shared resource like that. Another one that I found that isn't Solana Native programs, but the Saber team has done a great job with their Saber common repos. I think they've set a really great example for other projects that if they want to win, they got to have the whole ecosystem win. They got to grow the pie, open sourcing code and sharing what you know with people. Everyone I've interacted with across all projects has just been awesome so far. I would really love to see that continue.Chase (23:20):I do this every episode. I'm going to put you on the spot and just kind of ask you, give some advice.Brian (23:27):I thought about this. I'd seen your two other episodes, so I pulled a tweet from Armani, which if I can read here because this is what had actually, finally got me kind of off the couch and contributing. This is September 2021. He says, "For every new technology, the pace of innovation exceeds the pace of education. If there's tons of examples to copy and paste, you're late. If you're confused because there's no docs, good. You've discovered a secret that is yet to be revealed to the rest of the world."I saw that right when I was kicking around the idea of maybe I should make an Anchor thing. Ah, I'm busy. I got all this other stuff. If I got a puppy, all this kind of stuff to take care of. But, I would a hundred percent agree with what he tweeted there. I think that's a legendary tweet. If it's confusing, good. Just keep at it. Then, I would say make a really simple project about as simple as you can. For me, it was an app that basically said, do you like crunchy peanut butter or do you like smooth peanut butter? You connect your Phantom wallet, and you vote for an option. The program records it. It's still live to this day. You can check it out, PBvote.com.Chase (24:32):Nice plug.Brian (24:33):Nice plug for the peanut butter there. I'm not sponsored by any peanut butter companies. But, that, for me, was really what got me going. I had set a deadline. I'd said, okay, I have to have this live in two weeks. I think giving yourself that deadline is actually the most important thing because so many people come in. They say, hey, Solana is cool, but then they get distracted by something else because there's something new happening in this space every day. It's easier to watch the price of things, but sticking to a deadline, and even if you fail, but knowing why you failed.If you're under pressure, and you can get something out in two weeks or less, just write about your journey. Just say this is what I built. It's simple, but it's live. Here's the source code. Here's the link, and this is what worked for me. This is what didn't work for me. This thing sucked. This thing was great. Just create a Twitter and tweet about it. I guarantee if you do that, people will reach out because you've probably touched some piece of code that someone else has written and they want to hear feedback on how that was. Then, you have your own experience you can write about, and maybe you can share something that helps other people build in the space. It's all about contributing really. Once you contribute, other people really want to reach out.Chase (25:39):It really just becomes this perpetual cycle of contributing, sharing. Somebody else uses it, and feels the same way, and it just keeps going you going. That's all we want. I'm just there screaming on Twitter to fuel the fire. You made a great point. Nobody's made that one yet. Bravo to you, not about the peanut butter, but about the fact that set a plan because all of us as engineers, in our past, have been like, I'm going to do this thing. You set no timeframe. You start on it, and then you never get back to it. Then, you have about 500 things that you've started, and then you never touch any of them, so really writing that down, setting that timeframe, setting that goal. You got to find a way to hold yourself accountable.Things I've done in the past, starting Chewing Glass, about starting this show. I didn't ask anybody at the company. I just tweeted, "I'm going to start a podcast." If I didn't, people would start asking me about it later, and then I would look like a liar. I had to do it, so accountability can really come from just tweeting because if people follow you, they're going to throw it in your face one day, and nobody likes that.Brian (26:43):I'd say if you're still listening this podcast, if you've made it this far in Solana, you're interested enough to build something. Build it, and then tweet about it. You probably are interested in following people like Armani, people like Chase, people like Anatoly, and share it. If you build something, people will see it, and then you'll have kind of innate sense of accountability because you'll be connected those people, and you won't want to let them down. It'll just totally consume your life. But, it's awesome.Chase (27:07):By the way, if you build something really cool, or you write something really cool, tag me in it. I'll share it so other people can find it, and then you can inspire other people to-Brian (27:18):Join a hackathon. Win some money.Chase (27:20):Exactly. Anyways, Brian, this was awesome. I'm so glad we got to have this call. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for talking to me. Any last words?Brian (27:31):Thank you, Chase. I mean, this whole past couple months has totally exceeded my expectations, and there's real opportunity in this space. I think if you're listening to this, reach out to Chase, build something. He's a man who knows everybody. He can connect you to the right people, and he can teach you a lot. I'm super thankful for knowing him, and I'm super thankful for this space.Chase (27:51):All right, man. Have a good one. Cheers.

Next in our Web3 series, we have Nader Dabit, a Developer Relations Engineer at The Graph and Edge & Node. Having spent 10 years in the traditional tech world, Nader brings the developers' perspective of building in Web3 versus Web2. We discuss the “Web3-ification” of Web2 apps, identity management solutions, and much more!  Show Notes:  (00:00:00) – Introduction and Nader's background. (00:05:56) – Will Web2 embrace Web3? (00:10:44) – Development in Web2 vs. Web3.  (00:17:30) – Most significant user experiences in Web3.  (00:21:43) – The development process in Web3.  (00:35:56) – The Graph. (00:38:02) – Dealing with Identity / Misconceptions about Web3.  (00:42:51) – Maximalism in crypto.  (00:46:38) – The future of wallets / Web3-ification and new paradigms.  (00:54:07) – Closing. Resources:  Nader's Twitter Edge & Node Twitter Edge & Node Website The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development Delphi Podcast Summaries More

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the second episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs. Todays guest is pencilflip, a Solana dev who joined the Solana ecosystem just a few months ago, and in addition to contributing tools, guides and twitter threads for fellow developers, he recently founded Formfunction, a marketplace for 1/1 NFTs. 00:39 - Intro01:51 - pencilflip's background03:30 - Working at facebook vs. web 3.007:31 - How pencilflip got into crypto08:52 - Views on NFTs10:45 - Getting into Solana15:29 - Experience working in lower level17:56 - What was his method to learn Solana?21:01 - What's the hardest concept on Solana?23:53 - How fast did he move from Rust to Anchor?27:35 - Building on Solana33:24 - Advice to people moving to Web 3.0 Intro Voice Overs: (00:00)If we can't talk to each other, we're not going to make it. Sometimes I feel like I've been a lot full more than I can chew. Most of the time I work in a glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. Face full of glass hurts like hell, when you're in it. That's weird that glass looks half full to me. Eating glass, eating glass is staring at the abyss. Gosh who gives a shit about glass. It's part of our culture to eat glass. Hey get some safety goggles next time.Chase: (00:38)Hey everybody. And welcome to Chewing Glass the show where we talk to Solana developers building in the Solana ecosystem. Today, we have Matthew Lim, aka pencilflip. Matthew is actually one of the young bloods in the Solana ecosystem. I think I met him maybe two or three months ago. He was doing some really cool threads on Solana. So I reached out, we set up a call. He really dove into everything that has been going on in Solana and produced some really cool content. Everybody's been watching and just really interested in what he has to say. So with all that, Matt welcome. And how's it going?pencilflip: (01:21)It's good. Thanks for having me on here, Chase.Chase: (01:23)No, this is great. I know you and I have been trying to plan this conversation for quite a while. We just kept pushing it back. Things happen. Crypto happens fast. So it's great to have you today. I guess we'll just go ahead and jump right in. One of the first things that I think probably really cool especially somebody coming from Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 is really just, what's your background really interested to hear?pencilflip: (01:51)Yeah, so I guess before I dove fully into Web 3.0, I majored in computer science at Caltech. And then I went to go work at Facebook for a few years or Meta now, I guess. And so there I was working on a few different teams. First, I worked on integrity building out Facebook's content moderation platform, which is the biggest in the world. We have like tens of thousands of content moderators, so building out the tools and services for them. After that, I switched over to AR VR, whereas helping build Ray band stories, like three band glasses with a camera and a voice assistant. And that was a lot more like a lower level protocol work, basically working on the communications protocol between the glasses in your phone. And then finally I was at Facebook NPE. It's like an incubator inside Facebook, a bunch of smaller teams working on more zero to one projects outside of Facebook's main family of apps. And for that, I was doing more full stack web development.Chase: (02:43)I mean, that's pretty amazing. What languages are you actually working in when you're working on this project at Facebook?pencilflip: (02:51)Yeah, so I guess it varied from team. When I was doing more web stuff, the backend is in Hack, which is like Facebook's typed version of PHP. Front end is JavaScript or like Flow typed with flow. And then when I was working at AR VR, it was basically just all C++.Chase: (03:11)So C++, is that the only low level language you would work in at the time?pencilflip: (03:16)Yeah, at Facebook, it's the only low level language I worked with.Chase: (03:20)Obviously Facebook Metaverse lots of things going on there, crypto. So how was that? How was your experience working at Facebook and then to follow up, how was your experience working on Facebook compared to what you're doing right now in Web 3.0?pencilflip: (03:38)Yeah, that's a good question, I think. To just in general, how I liked working at Facebook, I think it is like in the beginning, when I first came into the company, I was learning a ton, basically experiencing for the first time building products that people are using at scale. And then I think over time, my learning curve got flatter or I start learning things as quickly and then stop learning as much, which is a big part of the reason why I eventually chose to leave. And that was like, even though I was switching teams pretty frequently and switching to different text stacks. At the end of the day, you're still working at this really big company. And back when I was at Facebook, there wasn't as big of a focus on the metaverse and all that.Although AR VR was a pretty big focus and in general I'm pretty bullish on AV VR. So it was really fun to work on that stuff there. And I'd say in terms of the differences between working there versus now doing some of my own stuff in Web 3.0, I think now I'm just moving a lot faster. Web 3.0 in general moves so fast. There's new stuff happening every day. Huge things happening every day. Obviously on the regulatory side, things move a little more quickly too, because Facebook is bogged down by all these laws and GDPR and the FTC consent order. And in Web 3.0, most people, I think we're ahead of the regulation and the regulation needs to catch up to crypto. So yeah, just like the speed at which things happen, I think is a big difference.Chase: (05:06)That's actually... I don't know. I was a little more surprised whenever I heard you say that Facebook is slowed down by regulatory things. And I guess it took me back a little bit for a second. I was like, wait, crypto, there's lots of... Wait a second. People just ignore those for now until there's actually something going on. So it was pretty funny to hear that. Yeah. So, I mean, that's really cool in general, did you enjoyed working at Facebook up until the point where you ended up, I guess plateauing, as you say, like technologically?pencilflip: (05:38)Yeah. I think there's a lot of pros and cons of working there. It is really cool to see how one of the biggest companies in the world runs thing. Just to give you an understanding of what the infrastructure looks like at that level, how things are organized. And also when you build stuff, you're shipping it to build millions, if not billions of people, which is just a really cool thing. But on the other hand, right, you're at a big company so the overall impact you have is a lot smaller. And also as you go into a big... Working at a big company, there's a lot more processes in place too. So it's a little harder to get things done, because you have to go through maybe multiple layers of people or multiple layers of processes. So yeah, overall I'd say there's definitely good and bad parts, but I did enjoy working there. And I learned a lot of stuff.Chase: (06:26)The layers involved in the middle management and above middle management, below... All the different levels of management in this corporate... I mean, I came from the corporate world. I'm so glad I found crypto because that was somewhat the vein of my existence, to be honest. And I did a tweet the other day, just really thinking about that. And I was saying if somebody tried to sit me down and show me their spring NBC app, I literally might just die by having to deal with it. So it's the experience going from that world has been really, and coming to Web 3.0 has been incredibly great for me personally. And it sounds like it's the same for a lot of other people, but to your point about seeing how an organization like Facebook operates and being able to execute at scale like that, is pretty incredible.And having people from that industry come here, hopefully what they learn is how to leave the bad and bring the good into crypto because there's probably tons of lessons learned from Facebook, how things could be done better in crypto, but also how to keep the things that were not super efficient out of there, but it's all very interesting stuff to me. So moving on, I would say the next thing is how did you get started in crypto in general? Like whether it was... You could start with how you got found out about crypto when you found out about it and then like how you actually ended up starting to get involved more on the development side of things.pencilflip: (08:09)Obviously the first thing I heard about was Bitcoin back in college and I read about it and I was like, "Oh, this is cool," but I didn't like pursue it that much. And then maybe fast forward to 2017 when CryptoKitties was a thing again, I was like, "Oh, this is cool." And I got a CryptoKitties or two. And then I got-Chase: (08:26)Well, that nostalgia right there, man, CryptoKitty's holy cow.pencilflip: (08:30)And then at the beginning of this year, one of my best friends was basically telling me about NFTs. And then I started looking into it more also based on all the activity that was happening. I actually did try to find my CryptoKitties, but I forgot my C phrase. So it's gone forever.Chase: (08:47)Well, at least you didn't give it away to somebody else who ended up stealing them. So I mean, maybe that's a little bit better.pencilflip: (08:52)Yeah. That's true. That's gone forever. I've never getting that back. But anyways, yeah so at the beginning of the year I started looking more into NFTs and following things more closely. And then it was only really until a few months ago though maybe September, I think around September where I really started going in really deep and learning and reading and also building things and trying to figure out what is web 3.0 and how does crypto work and what stuff could be built on it?Chase: (09:23)What did you think about NFTs? Did you actually see value? And then when you started diving in, how did that change your mind?pencilflip: (09:29)A lot of people immediately get it. And then a lot of people are like, "Well, it's weird." And I was actually more on the latter side. I was like, "Huh." I mean, I got the fact that, okay, it's like people collect stuff and now you can collect digital stuff. I think that's the most straightforward explanation for me, but I was still confused about like, okay, why are people paying all this money for it? In general, it was a little confusing, but I was kind of like dove into it more and both started using the products and like talking to different artists and creators and developers in this space, it started to become more clear what the utility was and why it's actually a really awesome technology for both artists and collectors. So yeah. That's how, and as far as like NFTs go.Chase: (10:16)Yeah, for me, I was never actually really skeptical. I just wasn't completely sold on them as what they were. The art thing was great. But then as time went on, I'm like there's communities forming around this. You now have this visual identifier on social media platforms. It's where before maybe it was a sports team, you see this guy with his shirt and he likes the Chicago bulls, just like you do, so now you connect. Now you, simply scrolling through your feed on social media, like Twitter, you see an SMB or you see a thug birds and you're like, "Oh, we're friends now."It's the community building aspect that's has been pretty incredible to me. And then now beyond that, we've starting to see things with utility, like Genesis Go and different things like that that are trying to take it to a different level on how these things can be used. But it's been really cool to see. So when you got into this NFTs, what was your next step in terms... You dove into... I'm pretty sure when we spoke about this prior a couple months ago, you didn't go directly into Solana. Obviously, you started playing around elsewhere.pencilflip: (11:32)Yeah. And I guess just your point about the whole community thing. I think one thing I forget who said this, but so someone is talking about people have really expensive paintings in their house and the point is just people can look at it, but you know, realistically you probably only have 10 or 20 people over to your house, or I don't know 50 people over to your house every year, as opposed to having a Twitter avatar and like literally thousands of people can see that. And so that's like, well, actually these NFTs... More people are... They're much more visible to many more people than traditional art just hanging in your house.And yeah, as far as getting into Solana, I first started on Ethereum because that's the biggest one. It's the most resources, is it's like the one that the people I knew were working on. And so I did crypto zombies and I started learning solidity. And then I eventually ended up building this pixel art marketplace on polygon, like a layer two for Ethereum, where you can draw and mint pixelar on the website. And so I was doing all that before I got into Solana.Chase: (12:38)Now that you've gone through all the experiences of Ethereum, at what point in time did you actually find out about Solana?pencilflip: (12:46)Yeah, I think I had heard of it when I was exploring Ethereum. I knew what it was, it was another L1, but I hadn't really dove too deep into it. And the point at which I started looking more into it is when my partner and I, Catherine, we wanted to do an NFT collection and we were exploring which blockchain to do it on. And so that's when I started looking into Solana more seriously because we didn't want to do it on Ethereum. It's too expensive. We didn't really want to do it on polygon either because there's not a great community on polygon as far as NFTs use this art collections. It's more about gaming. And so even though it's fast and cheap, we felt like Solan would be better because Solana's also fast. It's also cheap. And it also has this really thriving NFT community.Chase: (13:34)Yeah. You're an Ethereum developer. Then the next thing is you're like, okay, Solana's the one. It's cheap, it's fast. It's what we want to do. You started diving in and then where did you start and what was that experience like?pencilflip: (13:49)I think for me, my approach was, and this may be different for a lot of people, but basically I was like, okay, if I want to build on Solana and really dedicate a lot of time to it, I want to understand it pretty well. And actually have justification for me spending all this time on it as opposed to just relying maybe on like, "Oh, it's market cap is going up." Like coin price is really high. I want to know the tech behind it and know why it's supposed to be better.And so at the beginning I spent a lot of time just reading through the white paper, which actually is not that detailed. Reading through the medium articles about all of Solana's different technologies and how it makes sense.Chase: (14:30)The core innovations.pencilflip: (14:31)Yeah. The core innovations exactly. Also, reading through Shinobi Systems, which is a validator on Solana, has a really good reference on proof of history and how it ties together with Solana's proof of stake. And so really just trying to understand how the blockchain actually works, how it's different than Ethereum and why the architecture allows for higher throughput, cheaper transactions. And that was really important because I wanted to understand that if I was going to spend all this time actually building on top of the blockchain.Chase: (15:07)Yeah. So you've you really deep dove into this, just to give a quick TLDR on the things that you were doing. You did some diagramming around accounts, you wrote some threads on PDAs, program derived addresses. You've done tons of deep dives into a lot of things like these exist and the documentation, but they hadn't really been broken down into these bite size, digestible chunks that are easy to understand for newer developers or web 2.0 developers or people who really haven't taken a dive into blockchain or an Ethereum developer, because lots of people try to do these one-to-one comparisons for accounts in the programming model.And there really just aren't that many. So it's really important. And everybody that's probably watching this, that knows who pencilflip is super appreciative of that. But through that process, you have a lot of experience with lower level languages. What was that experience like for you? I'm assuming you enjoy doing this or sorts of things. So maybe would you call that eating glass for yourself or do you just enjoy this so much that it's not really that for you, this was just a fun little project to understand how Solana works.pencilflip: (16:24)Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think, and I think PaulX was talking about this too on the podcast you do with him. But I think the hard part is not really learning REST. I mean, I think it can definitely be maybe more difficult, especially if maybe you've never programmed before then you're probably going to have a hard time learning REST. But as like if you do know other languages then picking up another language, at least enough to write some basic programs and not too hard especially because... And Paul X also mentioned this, there's no multi-threading in these programs, you don't have to deal with race conditions.Most of it is serial logic. You read some data, you write some data, you do some business logic. So the rest part is not super complicated, especially because Anchor provides you this very nice framework within to operate. Yeah. Like the C++ stuff I was doing at Facebook was way more painful because we were doing a lot of multi threading. You have to do all this address sanitization, thread sanitization to catch all these weird racing editions, which I haven't done in Solana yet.Chase: (17:28)So working at Facebook is also chewing glass as well.pencilflip: (17:33)Yeah. They are definitely some engineers there that are... They're chewing a lot of glass. So yeah, basically I was just going to say, I think just understanding Solana's programming model and the way accounts work and the way that programs are structured was a little more difficult than the language part.Chase: (17:51)How did you work your way through that whenever you were trying to understand these things? Did you just take a one step at a time? Did you have a game plan or did you just dive in randomly all over the place? Because one of the biggest challenges right now, currently with Solana is we're starting to have a lot more content, thanks to people like you and Paul X and many others who are creating, creating lots of content, but there's no clear path to understanding those things.And we're doing something at Solana labs. And my dev team's been working on structuring the actual path for understanding things and the order of operations in which to learn them, because that's the biggest challenge. The information's out there, but people have to cherry pick when and where, but it's a lot easier if somebody says, this is the order that you learn things. It's a lot more helpful, but then there's some engineers who were open to just straight up diving code, but like, what was your method for really understanding these things? Or you just went along with whatever happened on the day.pencilflip: (18:56)Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a good question. And I think there's like a lot of valid approaches. So mine isn't like the right one, but basically the way I usually like to do things is, I read enough to get a basic understanding and then I'll try actually building something. And then I can just reference things that I don't understand or things that I need more information on as I build the thing. And so specifically I think Nader Dabit tutorial was really helpful. I followed that to get some basic scaffolding and a basic app up.Also, Brian Friel wrote a bunch of really good guys and writing the front end and writing the Solana program. And so I followed those, built something on my own. And then as I'm building stuff, I would like maybe modify it or maybe I ran into something that I didn't understand. So then I would look at the documentation and I think, one note too, is that for Solana, it's really important to be able to actually understand the source code and look at the program library or look at Metaplex' code because yeah, things are so early, it's not really well documented. So I think that is just something you'll have to do if you want to build in the space is get used to reading the source code. Yeah.Chase: (20:04)I, 100% agree, but there are definitely different types of learners out there. And I think we can still make that a little bit easier by going to that source and pulling out some of these smaller little snippets of code and walking through it, instead of just saying, "Hey, here's a massive program. You can just walk through this yourself." Not everybody's used to learning that. Web 2.0, especially in the younger generations, like we're in snippet heaven here. Like if it's snippet, then I don't want to touch the thing sort of, which is why we started to create the Solana cookbook.It's never going to solve all of your problems, but what it will do is give you some really good references to find it. Maybe it's not because you're finding out how to do it for the first time, but because you don't want to have to dive that code again. And here's a reference to something very normal that you would have to do on Solana and have to go back. So that's what we're trying to solve, but it's always interesting for me to just ask these questions because parts of my job is developer relations is to just ask developers what sucks and what's good and do more of the things that are good and do less of the things that suck and try to just continuously iterate and improving on this.pencilflip: (21:19)I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't think the status quo should be like, "Oh, everyone has to look at this source code." And I think the cookbook is really helping with that. Obviously it would be preferable, if you could just look at some docs, the interfaces are clearly documented. Like, "Oh, here are the accounts that get passed in. Here's the instruction data." We're just not at that state yet. But yeah, I do agree with you. It can definitely be improved and I think you, and all the stuff you're doing and everyone else is doing with the Solana cookbook is a big step towards making it easier to onboard.Chase: (21:50)We've already discussed, what were some of the challenges, but if you had to pick the most challenging thing through your experience, which one of those would it have been? Which concept on Solana was the hardest to just fully wrap your mind around and be like, "Okay, I get it. But it took me two weeks." Or however long it took you to figure it out.pencilflip: (22:09)Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know if this was maybe the most... Actually yeah, I think this was probably the most difficult and also the most important was just understanding how the account model works because after you understand that everything follows after. Like PDAs, it's the same thing, except it's derived from some seeds. So understanding how the cap model works and basically how the program state is separated from the program execution, which coming from Ethereum was a little confusing, I think just understanding that was the most difficult, but also the most important be because yeah, it's underlying the entire programming model. The way accounts work.Chase: (22:53)I think in software in general and I'm guilty of this as well, is that a lot of people actually come just really looking for shortcuts. And it's always important to know which pieces are the most... Which pieces are the hardest. Once the hardest stuff is understood, the accounts model, the PDA and the CPIs. Once you just can grasp these concepts, then your life gets exponentially easier because everything else is easy if you just buckle down and make your way through that.pencilflip: (23:24)And I think another key thing is, you don't necessarily have to do the rest part of things in order to get as in the Solana. You can be writing front end code and just interacting with existing programs. Although you still probably have to understand a little bit about how it works, but the build space course, a lot of it is just interacting with existing programs and writing JavaScript or type script. And that can also be a very, or at least a little bit easier of a way maybe to get started initially.Chase: (23:51)Yeah. I think that it highlights a point that I've been trying to reiterate for a long time, is that you don't need to know Rust to build on Solana. There's so many projects out there or even if you just want to play around, but there are projects that are just hiring specifically for the front end Dapp side of things, where it's just very similar to talking to a centralized API, as long as you know how to use Web 3.0.JS or any of these other front end clients. You don't need to know Rust to build on Solana, because the thing is, you start on the front end building in talking to a blockchain or a centralized database. It's very, very similar.Then once you understand how it works and communicating using the RPC client that defines all of the methods that used to talk to those blockchains after you get that, then you're like, "Okay, now I want to write my own program." At least that's the hope and buildspace has done an amazing job. They've had... I know at least over 10,000 people have done that getting started and they love it. And you mentioned Nader and he also has done an incredible job with his tutorial. That's one of the most popular for sure. How quickly did you jump from doing the Rust bit moving to Anchor or did you just do that almost immediately?pencilflip: (25:12)Yeah. I think when I was getting into things, Anchor was already pretty popular and so I started out by writing Anchor programs, like toy Anchor programs. Yeah, this was actually a big question for me when I was starting out. I was like, "Should I learn Anchor first? Should I learn how to write programs with add Anchor? And I remember asking some people in the discord and getting their opinion and looking back at it I think, I mean, either one is fine to be honest, I think it's easier to start with Anchor obviously, but I do think it's super important to be able to understand programs written without Anchor just because so many programs are written like that.Like the Solana program library programs, a lot of them aren't written with Anchor, although they're Anchor rappers or the Metaplex programs, a lot of them are not written with Anchor. So if you need to like... you basically need to be able to understand those programs if you're doing coding on Solana. And so you need to be able to understand programs that aren't written with Anchor as far as writing programs though, I think just default to Anchor.Chase: (26:13)Yeah, for sure. And I think as Anchor matures, I know the Anchor book is now out and Paul X has been working on that, which is going to be incredibly valuable to that. There was mostly minimal examples in the past and just like Solana has been working on... Solana labs has been working on all things like Anchor has been really cranking up the heat with getting out content and making it easier to onboard to there.I think this year is going to be huge. I said it the other day on Twitter that I think that in one year, probably less than that, Armani says two weeks, whatever that means, but that the developer experience on Solana is going to be completely unrecognizable as it is today. People are not going to have to really ask much questions. We'll get to a... We're probably going to be at a place where you would have to be at least a junior developer who understands programming concepts could come in and within a certain amount of time, maybe two weeks, maybe a month, be able to self onboard to Solana without having to just constantly ask questions.Chase: (27:19)That's the ultimate goal. My ultimate job is to put myself out of a job by making the developer experience good that there's no need for Chase anymore.pencilflip: (27:29)I think that's a very hard job to accomplish. So I think your job security is still is fine.Chase: (27:36)No, I agree. I always make that joke, but the reality is like it's somewhat of an unachievable goal to an extent and I'll never achieve it, but we just keep striving to get there, but yeah, I'm super excited for this year and to look back on this year, next year, to see this conversation, the last conversation, all the things that have happened and how easy it is for some new developer to basically onboard to Solana. So, and again, this is thanks to people like you and Brian and Colin, all these different guys who are just altruistically contributing to the cookbook, writing their own content. I could not have scaled myself and developer relations without that. It would be 100% impossible because by the time that me as one person writes a piece of content, it's outdated in like a week.So that's how fast things are moving. Yeah. Just to move on, this whole series of Chewing Glass is really to have the conversations we've been having. Like what was your experience like and how you got into it? But what I understand is, even though you started out as just a noob engineer on Solana, you actually have recently formed your own company on the Solana blockchain. And definitely, we're not going to talk about it too much, but I will definitely let you talk about what you're building.pencilflip: (29:08)Catherine and I... Catherine used to be a designer at Instagram. We are starting this product and this company called Form Function. And basically it's the best way for independent creators and artists to make a living off of NFTs. That's the longer term vision. The shorter term, we're just building the best marketplace for high quality, one of ones, high quality, one of one art, and for these independent artists and creators on Solana.And so you can think about other marketplaces like Magic Eden and Solana as more catered towards collections. The things most people are buying on there is collections like DJ AVEs or Solana monkey business, or et cetera, et cetera. And it's not so much focused on these more independent artists or photographers who do their own art. They don't really have basically a class seat at those platforms. And so we really want to build a place where those independent creators can be really showcased and their high quality art can be displayed and featured on our platform.Chase: (30:12)Like you said, the Magic Edens and the Solana arts and all the other ones out there they're... I don't think their platforms specifically is for collections, but that is where the world is. And there's Holaplex and Metaplex's spin up auction platforms are doing that. But to have a marketplace, that's almost who knows? This is like an art gallery kind of of 101 creators who can come in here and create their own art. And it doesn't have to be this big marketed thing. People can just... Those collections are not.. They're community builders and some of them have utility, but this is like just shining a spotlight on these creators that have been gate keeped out of being able to get involved because of lack of technical knowledge and that's how it's been. And I think this is going to... I've seen a couple people talk about it on the Twitter sphere lately about like 2022 being the year of creator NFTs, or like one of one NFTs for creators, and it's super exciting. I've seen some really awesome art out there that I have really been eyeing. And there's so many ways to do it. I've seen augmented reality pieces of NFTs. I've seen people doing paintings or photography and it's happening more and more because tools like, it sounds like what you're building are going to enable that to be a lot easier to happen.pencilflip: (31:42)Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Really excited for all the one of one stuff that's been happening on Solana. I think it's been growing, it's going to continue to grow and really a big part of what we want to do is just improve Solana's maybe culture or almost reputation, because I think sometimes people look at Solana and the NFT ecosystem and they see these board app derivative, where they see these soul planks.And it's just like, well, is everyone on Solana just copying the popular projects in Ethereum, and that's definitely not true. There are a lot of awesome collections that are Solana native, but we also want to make it like a blockchain that's known as well for this really high quality art like Ethereum has become and have it be associated with that because that's good for artists. It's good for collectors. It's good for the entire Solana ecosystem. And it also gives these artists who maybe they don't want to list on Ethereum for environmental worries, or maybe the gas fees are too high for them. It gives them a really good place to go and sell their art that otherwise, maybe they wouldn't list at all.Chase: (32:45)Yeah. The, I do have some opinions on that and it's definitely the case that there were some collections that are just straight up clones and a lot of people outside of the Solana ecosystem that don't... They aren't really following it. They look in there and they're like, "Hey, why you guys just keep copying everything?" But if they actually were in the circles or bubbles that a lot of us are in, they would realize that the majority of these communities are also on the same page as them. They hate it as well.There's actually campaigns that campaign around these collections that are just straight up clones telling people, "Please don't buy them. Please don't buy them." The reality is I have, maybe it's a conspiracy theory, but I feel like people who are doing these sorts of clone things, they're not necessarily Solana natives. And there's no way to actually verify that. But these are grifters. They are traveling around seeing where the money's flowing into and they're doing whatever they can as quickly as possible to hopefully capture some money. And then they disappear.It's happening on Near as well. And I also spoke about this. I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for Near because it's happening there. Those clones are moving to them. It's going to happen. People are going to end up losing money. And the best thing that Near and or Solana still can do is to educate your community as quickly as possible, because otherwise lots of money is going to be stolen from people when these rugs are happening and a lot of them are. And if you see a project that's a direct clone of something and you think, oh, this is going to be great because I can get it for cheaper. It's not going to be great. I can promise you that. It's going to be the opposite of great. It's going to be very, very bad for you. So if you're listening, don't buy clones on any blockchain because it's not going to work out. So that's my little-pencilflip: (34:42)Totally agree with everything you just said.Chase: (34:44)That's my little feel.pencilflip: (34:46)It was a great feel.Chase: (34:47)Exactly. So this was a great conversation and to hold round the whole thing off, what would be your advice to people to future builders on Solana, whether it be how they learn or what they should do, or where they focus their time? What would be the one thing that comes to mind to you right now that would be your greatest advice to people looking to get into Web 3.0 blockchain and Solana?pencilflip: (35:11)Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I love what Paul X said here was basically like, "Get started, dive in, build something, read something, try something, how just like gets started. I think that's super important. And I'd add on that, get involved in the community. The Solana community is really welcoming and everyone's like... I think everyone I've met is super nice and friendly and like wants to help. And that's one of the best things you can do, both for the community, like give back to the community.And also the community will get back to you. You can ask for help in these discords. If you DM them, people will probably help you out. And then it obviously helps when you're building your own things because then you have a network of people to ask questions, to bounce ideas off of et cetera.So yeah, I think it's a great time to do it too, because Solana's still relatively small. It almost feels like a family where a lot of the people who are really into it know each other. Yeah. It's a really awesome place to be. So that would be one of my key pieces of advice, is just get involved in the community, make some friends and build some cool stuff.Chase: (36:16)Yeah. That's amazing advice and it's always just go build something and share it with people and just have a good conversation and send DMs to whoever you can find because they're going to answer. This is a very strange time where you can DM a CEO of a protocol or whatever and they're going to probably respond if it's somewhat reasonable and to have that accessibility is a pretty powerful and don't just sit back and submit resumes everywhere and think that's going to be the best choice.Because I get a lot of messages to myself saying like, "Hey, nobody's responding." I'm get involved. DM people. Strike conversations. People are literally getting hired to really amazing companies simply just by being consistent, persistent building things, being involved in a discord. And just, if anything, just start answering questions and helping people. Somebody's going to pay attention to you and it could change your life in a very short amount of time so.pencilflip: (37:18)Yep. Totally agree with everything you just said.Chase: (37:21)Well, Matt, AKA pencil flip. It has been great. It's been about a month and a half since we've been talking about this. It finally happened and I think the listeners are really going to love it. So thanks for joining man. It's been a pleasure.pencilflip: (37:37)Yeah. Thanks for having me on Chase. It was great coming on and chatting with you. Always enjoy talking Solana and everything with you it's always a ton of fun.Chase: (37:44)All right, everybody. Thanks for listening.

Nader Dabit, DevRel at Edge and Node, joins us to talk about crypto, Web3, the Developer DAO, and The Graph - an indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS. Links https://twitter.com/dabit3 https://www.youtube.com/NaderDabit https://thegraph.com (https://thegraph.com/en) https://solana.com https://hadriencroubois.com https://twitter.com/developer_dao https://twitter.com/saniyamore https://confirmsubscription.com/h/j/54CBD26EB3AE7C4B https://twitter.com/futurealisha https://www.youtube.com/FutureAlisha https://twitter.com/Amxx Review us https://ratethispodcast.com/podrocket Contact us https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us @PodRocketpod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod) What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup?pdr) Special Guest: Nader Dabit.

Nader Dabit shares his motivation and experience on recently transitioning to focus on technologies and communities that support the decentralized internet. In this hot topics discussion, we cover all the buzz words you've likely heard over the past year. We have honest and nuanced conversations about the world of Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3. Hype or hit? You'll have to tune in to find out.

Nader Dabit shares his motivation and experience on recently transitioning to focus on technologies and communities that support the decentralized internet. In this hot topics discussion, we cover all the buzz words you've likely heard over the past year. We have honest and nuanced conversations about the world of Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3. Hype or hit? You'll have to tune in to find out.

In this episode, Tracy Lee (@ladyleet (she/her) and Nacho Vazquez (@nacho_vazquez14) speak with Nader Dabit (@dabit3) of Edge and Node about web3 and how to get started! We touch on topics that are hot in the blockchain ecosystem that you definitely want to be aware of if you're blockchain-curious.   Topics covered: What does the next few years of blockchain development look like and why you should start looking at layer 2 blockchains The future of Eth 2 - proof of stake vs proof of work Why you should watch out for the Solana blockchain What is Gitpod and why should you care? Lowering the barrier to entry to new developers exploring blockchain development Learning about The Graph and Edge and Node   Guest: Nader Dabit (@dabit3) - Developer Relations, Edge and Node    Hosts: Tracy Lee (@ladyleet (she/her) -  CEO, This Dot Labs  Nacho Vazquez (@nacho_vazquez14) - Software Engineer, This Dot Labs    This episode is sponsored by This Dot Labs. 

Google uses automated programs called spiders, or crawlers, to index and rank web pages. Then, when a user searches for something, it uses a special algorithm to determine the order of results to display (howstuffworks). This process, of course, applies to web pages on the internet. There are 2 major projects, worked on by the

Google uses automated programs called spiders, or crawlers, to index and rank web pages. Then, when a user searches for something, it uses a special algorithm to determine the order of results to display (howstuffworks). This process, of course, applies to web pages on the internet. There are 2 major projects, worked on by the The post Cloud Blockchains: The Google of Blockchain with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google uses automated programs called spiders, or crawlers, to index and rank web pages. Then, when a user searches for something, it uses a special algorithm to determine the order of results to display (howstuffworks). This process, of course, applies to web pages on the internet. There are 2 major projects, worked on by the The post Cloud Blockchains: The Google of Blockchain with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google uses automated programs called spiders, or crawlers, to index and rank web pages. Then, when a user searches for something, it uses a special algorithm to determine the order of results to display (howstuffworks). This process, of course, applies to web pages on the internet. There are 2 major projects, worked on by the The post Cloud Blockchains: The Google of Blockchain with Nader Dabit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

About Nader Currently working to help build the decentralized future at Edge and Node. Previously led Developer Advocacy for Front End Web and Mobile at Amazon Web Services. Specializing in GraphQL, cross platform, & cloud enabled web & mobile application development Developing applications & reference architectures using a combination of GraphQL & serverless technologies built on AWS 4 years experience training fortune 500 companies on web & mobile application development, with the last two focused on React and React Native Training (clients include Microsoft, Amazon, US Army Corps of Engineers, Visa, ClassPass, American Express, Indeed, & Warner Bros). Mobile consultant specializing in cross platform web & mobile application development Author of React Native in Action (Manning Publications) Author of Full Stack Serverless (O'Reilly Publications) International speaker Creator of React Native Elements Creator of JAMstack CMS & JAMStack ECommerce Links: Edge & Node: https://edgeandnode.com Js.la: https://js.la Twitter: https://twitter.com/dabit3 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/naderdabit

On our 40th episode, Nader Dabit returns for another talk with our host Ryan Jones. In his own words, Nader is: “Currently working to help build the decentralized future at Edge and Node.” Nader specializes in many serverless technologies, and brings a great deal of knowledge and skill to his new position-- he was previously employed as a Developer Advocate for Front End Web and Mobile at AWS. Now at Edge and Node, he helps with projects focused on organizing blockchain data and making it easily accessible with products like "The Graph". A believer in the power of web 3.0, Nader shares his feelings on the future of the internet, and how to best succeed in it. In this episode hear: -An overview of blockchain, decentralized apps, and graph protocol -The accessibility and functionality of web 3.0 -Skills that translate well to starting to Ethereum/blockchain development -And much more! Find Nader on Twitter @dabit3 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/talking-serverless/message

* This episode was recorded before the announcements made by The Graph on July 8, 2021. In this episode, we spoke to Nader Dabit, Developer Relations Engineer at Edge & Node. Nader is an incredibly accomplished and well-respected voice in the developer world – with an impressive professional pedigree. Prior to joining Edge & Node, Nader was a Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. He's also worked as a trainer and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, including the likes of Microsoft, Visa, Warner Brothers, and American Express.Nader is very active in the developer community, and has a large following on social media, with nearly 65,000 Twitter followers and tens of thousands of views on his YouTube channel.Our conversation was very broad, ranging from how he got his start as a developer, his departure from Web 2 to join Edge & Node, the publication of his recent book, and his vision for Web 3 and where The Graph fits into it all.Show NotesThe GRTiQ Podcast takes listeners inside The Graph (GRT) by interviewing members of The Graph's community and ecosystem.  Please help support this project and build the community by subscribing and leaving a review.Twitter: GRT_iQwww.GRTiQ.co

In this episode we talk about the giant umbrella that is developer relations with Nader Dabit, developer relations engineer at Edge & Node, and Pachi Carlson, developer relations engineer at New Relic. Show Notes DevNews (sponsor) CodeNewbie (sponsor) RudderStack (sponsor) Cockroach Labs (sponsor) Cloudways (sponsor) Scout APM (DevDiscuss) (sponsor) Edge & Node New Relic CodeLand The Complete Guide to Full Stack Ethereum Development Why I switched from Atom to Visual Studio Code

About Nader DabitNader Dabit is a web and mobile developer, author, and Developer Relations Engineer building the decentralized future at Edge and Node. Previously, he worked as a Developer Advocate at AWS Mobile working with projects like AWS AppSync and AWS Amplify. He is also the author and editor of React Native in Action and OpenGraphQL.Nader Dabit Twitter: @dabit3Edge and Node Twitter: @edgeandnodeGraph protocol Twitter: @graphprotocolEdge and Node: edgeandnode.com Everest: everest.link YouTube: YouTube.com/naderdabitWhat is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future ExplainedWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pSv_cCQyCPQ This episode is sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Fauna. TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I am joined again by Nader Dabit. Hey Nader, thanks for joining me.Nader: Hey Jeremy. Thanks for having me.Jeremy: You are now a developer relations engineer at Edge & Node. I would love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself. I think a lot of people probably know you already, but a little bit about your background and then what Edge & Node is.Nader: Yeah, totally. My name is Nader Dabit like you mentioned, and I've been a developer for about, I guess, nine or ten years now. A lot of people might know me from my work with AWS, where I worked with the Amplify team with the front end web and mobile team, doing a lot of full stack stuff there as well as serverless. I've been working as a developer relations person, developer advocate, actually, leading the front end web and mobile team at AWS for a little over three years I was there. I was a manager for the last year and I became really, really interested in serverless while I was there. It led to me writing a book, which is Full Stack Serverless. It also just led me down the rabbit hole of managed services and philosophy and all this stuff.It's been really, really cool to learn about everything in the space. Edge & Node is my next step, I would say, in doing work and what I consider maybe a serverless area, but it's an area that a lot of people might not associate with the traditional, I would say definition of serverless or the types of companies they often associate with serverless. But Edge & Node is a company that was spun off from a team that created a decentralized API protocol, which is called the Graph protocol. And the Graph protocol started being built in 2017. It was officially launched in a decentralized way at the end of 2020. Now we are currently finalizing that migration from a hosted service to a decentralized service actually this month.A lot of really exciting things going on. We'll talk a lot about that and what all that means. But Edge & Node itself, we do support the Graph protocol, that's part of what we do, but we also build out decentralized applications ourselves. We have a couple of applications that we're building as engineers. We're also doing a lot of work within the Web3 ecosystem, which is known as the decentralized web ecosystem by investing in different people and companies and supporting different things and spreading awareness around some of the things that are going on here because it does have a lot to do with maybe the work that people are doing in the Web2 space, which would be the traditional webspace, the space that I was in before.Jeremy: Right, right. Here I am. I follow you on Twitter. Love the videos that you do on your YouTube channel. You're like a shining example of what a really good developer relations dev advocate is. You just produce so much content, things like that, and you're doing all this stuff on serverless and I'm loving it. And then all of a sudden, I see you post this thing saying, hey, I'm leaving AWS Amplify. And you mentioned something about blockchain and I'm like, okay, wait a minute. What is this that Nader is now doing? Explain to me this, or maybe explain to me and hopefully the audience as well. What is the blockchain have to do with this decentralized applications or decentralized, I guess Web3?Nader: Web3 as defined by definition, what you might see if you do some research, would be what a lot of people are talking about as the next evolution of the web as we know it. In a lot of these articles and stuff that people are trying to formalize ideas and stuff, the original web was the read-only web where we were not creators, the only creators were maybe the developers themselves. Early on, I might've gone and read a website and been able to only interact with the website by reading information. The current version that we're currently experiencing might be considered as Web2 where everyone's a creator. All of the interfaces, all of the applications that we interact with are built specifically for input. I can actually create a comment, I can upload a video, I can share stuff, and I can write to the web. And I can read.And then the next evolution, a lot of people are categorizing, yes, is Web3. It's like taking a lot of the great things that we have today and maybe improving upon those. A lot of people and everyone kind of, this is just a really, a very old discussion around some of the trade-offs that we currently make in today's web around our data, around advertising, around the way a lot of business models are created for monetization. Essentially, they all come down to the manipulation of user data and different tricks and ways to steal people's data and use that essentially to create targeted advertising. Not only does this lead to a lot of times a negative experience. I just saw a tweet yesterday that resonated a lot with me that said, "YouTube is no longer a video platform, it's now an ad platform with videos in between." And that's the way I feel about YouTube. My kids ...Jeremy: Totally.Nader: ... I have kids that use YouTube and it's interesting to watch them because they know exactly what to do when the ads come up and exactly how to time it because they're used to, ads are just part of their experience. That's just what they're used to. And it's not just YouTube, it's every site that's out there, that's a social site, Instagram, LinkedIn. I think that that's not the original vision that people had, right, for the web. I don't think this was part of it. There have been a lot of people proposing solutions, but the core fundamental problem is how these applications are engineered, but also how the applications are paid for. How do these companies pay for developers to build. It's a really complex problem that, the simplest solution is just sell ads or maybe create something like a developer platform where you're charging a weekly or monthly or yearly or something like that.I would say a lot of the ideas around Web3 are aiming to solve this exact problem. In order to do that you have to rethink how we build applications. You have to rethink how we store data. You have to rethink about how we think about identity as well, because again, how do you build an application that deals with user data without making it public in some way? Right? How do we deal with that? A lot of those problems are the things that people are thinking about and building ways to address those in this decentralized Web3 world. It became really fascinating to me when I started looking into it because I'm very passionate about what I'm doing. I really enjoy being a developer and going out and helping other people, but I always felt there was something missing because I'm sitting here and I love AWS still.In fact, I would 100% go back and work there or any of these big companies, right? Because you can't really look at a company as, in my opinion, a black or white, good or bad thing, there's companies are doing good things and bad things at the same time. For instance, at AWS, I would meet a developer, teach them something at a workshop, a year later they would contact me and be like, hey, I got my first job or I created a business, or I landed my first client. So you're actually helping improve people's lives, at the same time you're reading these articles about Amazon in the news with some of the negative stuff going on. The way that I look at it is, I can't sit there and say any company is good or bad, but I felt a lot of the applications that people were building were also, at the end goal when you hear some of these VC discussions or people raising money, a lot of the end goal for some of the people I was working with were just selling advertising.And I'm like, is this really what we're here to do? It doesn't feel fulfilling anymore when you start seeing that over and over and over. I think the really thing that fascinated me was that people are actually building applications that are monetized in a different way. And then I started diving into the infrastructure that enabled this and realized that there was a lot of similarities between serverless and how developers would deploy and build applications in this way. And it was the entry point to my rabbit hole.Jeremy: I talked to you about this and I've been reading some of the stuff that you've been putting out and trying to educate myself on some of this. It seems very much so that show Silicon Valley on HBO, right? This decentralized web and things like that, but there's kind of, and totally correct me if I'm wrong here, but I feel there's two sides of this. You've got one side that is the blockchain, that I think some people are familiar with in the, I guess in the context of cryptocurrency, right? This is a very popular use of the blockchain because you have that redundancy and you have the agreement amongst multiple places, it's decentralized. And so you have that security there around that. But there's other uses for the blockchain as well.Especially things like banking and real estate and some of those other use cases that I'd like to talk about. And then there's another side of it that is this decentralized piece. Is the decentralized piece of it like building apps? How is that related to the blockchain or are those two separate things?Nader: Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big fan of Silicon Valley. Working in tech, it's almost like every single episode resonates with you if you've been in here long enough because you've been in one of those situations. The blockchain is part of the discussion. Crypto is part of the discussion, and those things never really interested me, to be honest. I was a speculator in crypto from 2015 until now. It's been fun, but I never really looked at crypto in any other way other than that. Blockchain had a really negative, I would say, association in my mind for a long time, I just never really saw any good things that people were doing with it. I just didn't do any research, maybe didn't understand what was going on.When I started diving into it originally what really got me interested is the Graph protocol, which is one of the things that we work on at Edge & Node. I started actually understanding, why does this thing exist? Why is it there? That led me to understanding why it was there and the fact that 90% of dApps, decentralized apps in the Ethereum ecosystem are using it. And billions of queries, companies with billions of dollars in transactions are all using this stuff. I'm like, okay, this whole world exists, but why does it exist? I guess to give you an example, I guess we can talk about the Graph protocol. And there are a lot of other web, I would say Web3 or decentralized infrastructure protocols that are out there that are similar, but they all are doing similar things in the sense of how they're actually built and how they allow participation and stuff like that.When you think of something like AWS, you think of, AWS has all of these different services. I want to build an app, I need storage. I need some type of authentication layer, maybe with Cognito, and then maybe I need someplace to execute some business logic. So maybe I'll spin up some serverless functions or create an EC2 instance, whatever. You have all these building blocks. Essentially what a lot of these decentralized protocols like the Graph are doing, are building out the same types of web infrastructure, but doing so in a decentralized way. Why does that even matter? Why is that important? Well, for instance, when you live, let's say for example in another country, I don't know, in South America and outside the United States, or even in the United States in the future, you never know. Let's say that you have some application and you've said something rude about maybe the president or something like that.Let's say that for whatever reason, somebody hacks the server that you're dealing with or whatever, at the end of the day, there is a single point of failure, right? You have your data that's controlled by the cloud provider or the government can come in and they can have control over that. The idea around some of, pretty much all of the decentralized protocols is that they are built and distributed in a way that there is no single point of failure, but there's also no single point of control. That's important when you're living in areas that have to even worry about stuff like that. So maybe we don't have to worry about that as much here, but in other countries, they might.Building something like a server is not a big deal, right? With AWS, but how would you build a server and make it available for anyone in the world to basically deploy and do so in a decentralized way? I think that's the problem that a lot of these protocols are trying to solve. For the Graph in particular, if you want to build an application using data that's stored on a blockchain. There's a lot of applications out there that are basically using the blockchain for mainly, right now it's for financial, transactional reasons because a lot of the transactions actually cost a lot of money. For instance, Uniswap is one of these applications. If you want to basically query data from a blockchain, it's not as easy as querying data from a traditional server or database.For us we are used to using something like DynamoDB, or some type of SQL database, that's very optimized for queries. But on the blockchain, you're basically having these blocks that add up every time. You create a transaction, you save it. And then someone comes behind them and they save another transaction. Over time you build up this data that's aggregated over time. But let's say you want to hit that database with the, quote-unquote, database with a query and you want to retrieve data over time, or you want to have some type of filtering mechanism. You can't do that. You can't just query blockchains the way you can from a regular database. Similar to how a database basically indexes data and stores it and makes it efficient for retrieval, the Graph protocol basically does that, but for blockchain data.Anyone that wants to build an application, one of these decentralized apps on top of blockchain data has a couple of options. They can either build their own indexing server and deploy it to somewhere like AWS. That takes away the whole idea of decentralization because then you have a single point of failure again. You can query data directly from the blockchain, from your client application, which takes a very long time. Both of those are not, I would say the most optimal way to build. But also if you're building your own indexing server, every time you want to come up with a new idea also, you have to think about the resources and time that go into it. Basically, I want to come up with a new idea and test it out, I have to basically build a server index, all this data, create APIs around it. It's time-intensive.What the Graph protocol allows you to do is, as a developer you can basically define a subgraph using YAML, similar to something like cloud formation or a very condensed version of that maybe more Serverless Framework where you're defining, I want to query data from this data source, and I want to save these entities and you deploy that to the network. And that subgraph will basically then go and look into that blockchain. And will look for all the transactions that have happened, and it will go ahead and save those and make those available for public retrieval. And also, again, one of the things that you might think of is, all of this data is public. All of the data that's on the blockchain is public.Jeremy: Right. Right. All right. Let me see if I could repeat what you said and you tell me if I'm right about this. Because this was one of those things where blockchain ... you're right. To me, it had a negative connotation. Why would you use the blockchain, unless you were building your own cryptocurrency? Right. That just seemed like that's what it was for. Then when AWS comes out with QLDB or they announced that or whatever it was. I'm like, okay, so this is interesting, but why would you use it, again, unless you're building your own cryptocurrency or something because that's the only thing I could think of you would use the blockchain for.But as you said, with these blockchains now, you have highly sensitive transactions that can be public, but a real estate transaction, for example, is something really interesting, where like, we still live in a world where if Bank of America or one of these other giant banks, JPMorgan Chase or something like that gets hacked, they could wipe out financial data. Right? And I know that's backed up in multiple regions and so forth, but this is the thing where if you're doing some transaction, that you want to make sure that transaction lives forever and isn't manipulated, then the blockchain is a good place to do that. But like you said, it's expensive to write there. But it's even harder to read off the blockchain because it's that ledger, right? It's just information coming in and coming in.So event storming or if you were doing event sourcing or something that, it's that idea. The idea with these indexers are these basically separate apps that run, and again, I'm assuming that these protocols, their software, and things that you don't have to build this yourself, essentially you can just deploy these things. Right? But this will read off of the blockchain and do that aggregation for you and then make that. Basically, it caches the blockchain. Right? And makes that available to you. And that you could deploy that to multiple indexers if you wanted to. Right? And then you would have access to that data across multiple providers.Nader: Right. No single point of failure. That's exactly right. You basically deploy a very concise configuration file that defines how you want your data stored and made available. And then it goes, and it just starts at the very beginning and it queries all those blocks or reads all those blocks, saves the data in a database, and then it keeps up with additional new updates. If someone writes a new transaction after that, it also saves that and makes it available for efficient retrieval. This is just for blockchain data. This is the data layer for, but it's not just a blockchain data in the future. You can also query from IPFS, which is a file storage layer, somewhat S3. You can query from other chains other than Ethereum, which is kind of like the main chamber.In the future really what we're hoping to have is a complete API on top of all public data. Anybody that wants to have some data set available can basically deploy a subgraph and index it and then anyone can then essentially query for it. It's like when you think of public data, we're not really used to thinking of data in this way. And also I think a good thing to talk about in a moment is the types of apps that you can build because you wouldn't want to store private messages on a blockchain or something like that. Right? The types of apps that people are building right now at least are not 100% in line with everything. You can't do everything I would say right now in Web3 that you can do in Web2.There are only certain types of applications, but those applications that are successful seem to be wildly successful and have a lot of people interested in them and using them. That's the general idea, is like you have this way to basically deploy APIs and the technology that we use to query is GraphQL. That was one of the reasons that I became interested as well. Right now the main data sources are blockchains like Ethereum, but in the future, we would like to make that available to other data sources as well.Jeremy: Right. You mentioned earlier too because there are apps obviously being built on this that you said are successful. And the problem though, I think right now, because I remember I speculated a little bit with Bitcoin and I bought a whole bunch of Ripple, so I'm still hanging on to it. Ripple XPR whatever, let's go. Anyways, but it was expensive to make a transaction. Right? Reading off of the blockchain itself, I think just connecting generally doesn't cost money, but if you're, and I know there's some costs with indexers and that's how that works. But in terms of the real cost, it's writing to the blockchain. I remember moving some Bitcoin at one point, I think cost me $30 to make one transaction, to move something like that.I can see if you're writing a $300,000 real estate transaction, or maybe some really large wire transfer or something that you want to record, something that makes sense where you could charge a fee of $30 or $40 in order to do that. I can't see you doing that for ... certainly not for web streaming or click tracking or something like that. That wouldn't make sense. But even for smaller things there might be writing more to it, $30 or whatever that would be ... seems quite expensive. What's the hope around that?Nader: That was one of the biggest challenges and that was one of the reasons that when I first, I would say maybe even considered this as a technology back in the day, that I would be considering as something that would possibly be usable for the types of applications I'm used to seeing. It just was like a no-brainer, like, no. I think right now, and that's one of the things that attracted me right now to some of the things that are happening, is a lot of those solutions are finally coming to fruition for fixing those sorts of things. There's two things that are happening right now that solve that problem. One of them is, they are merging in a couple of updates to the base layer, layer one, which would be considered something like Ethereum or Bitcoin. But Ethereum is the main one that a lot of the financial stuff that I see is happening.Basically, there are two different updates that are happening, I think the main one that will make this fee transactional price go down a little bit is sharding. Sharding is basically going to increase the number of, I believe nodes that are basically able to process the transactions by some number. Basically, that will reduce the cost somewhat, but I don't think it's ever going to get it down to a usable level. Instead what the solutions seem to be right now and one of the solutions that seems to actually be working, people are using it in production really recently, this really just started happening in the last couple of months, is these layer 2 solutions. There are a couple of different layer 2 solutions that are basically layers that run on top of the layer one, which would be something like Ethereum.And they treat Ethereum as the settlement layer. It's almost like when you interact with the bank and you're running your debit card. You're probably not talking to the bank directly and they are doing that. Instead, you have something like Visa who has this layer 2 on top of the banks that are managing thousands of transactions per second. And then they take all of those transactions and they settle those in an underlying layer. There's a couple different layer 2s that seem to be really working well right now in the Ethereum ecosystem. One of those is Arbitrum and then the other is I think Matic, but I think they have a different name now. Both of those seem to be working and they bring the cost of a transaction down to a fraction of a penny.You have, instead of paying $20 or $30 for a transaction, you're now paying almost nothing. But now that's still not cheap enough to probably treat a blockchain as a traditional database, a high throughput database, but it does open the door for a lot of other types of applications. The applications that you see building on layer one where the transactions really are $5 to $20 or $30 or typically higher value transactions. Things like governance, things like financial transactions, you've heard of NFTs. And that might make sense because if someone's going to spend a thousand bucks or 500 bucks, whatever ...Jeremy: NFTs don't make sense to me.Nader: They're not my thing either, the way they're being, I would say, talked about today especially, but I think in the future, the idea behind NFTs is interesting, but yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. But still to those people, if you're paying a thousand dollars for something then that 5 or 10 or 20 bucks might make sense, but it's not going to make sense if I just want to go to an e-commerce store and pay $5 for something. Right? I think that these layer 2s are starting to unlock those potential opportunities where people can start building these true financial applications that allow these transactions to happen at the same cost or actually a lot cheaper maybe than what you're paying for a credit card transaction, or even what those vendors, right? If you're running a store, you're paying percentages to those companies.The idea around decentralization comes back to this discussion of getting rid of the middleman, and a lot of times that means getting rid of the inefficiencies. If you can offload this business logic to some type of computer, then you've basically abstracted away a lot of inefficiencies. How many billions of dollars are spent every year by banks flying their people around the world and private jets and these skyscrapers and stuff. Now, where does that money come from? It comes from the consumer and them basically taking fees. They're taking money here and there. Right? That's the idea behind technology in general. They're like whenever something new and groundbreaking comes in, it's often unforeseen, but then you look back five years later and you're like, this is a no-brainer. Right?For instance Blockbuster and Netflix, there's a million of them. I don't have to go into that. I feel this is what that is for maybe the financial institutions and how we think about finance, especially in a global world. I think this was maybe even accelerated by COVID and stuff. If you want to build an application today, imagine limiting yourself to developers in your city. Unless you're maybe in San Francisco or New York, where that might still work. If I'm here in Mississippi and I want to build an application, I'm not going to just look for developers in a 30-mile radius. That is just insane. And I don't use that word mildly, it's just wild to think about that. You wouldn't do that.Instead, you want to look in your nation, but really you might want to look around the world because you now have things like Slack and Discord and all these asynchronous ways of doing work. And you might be able to find the best developer in the world for 25% or 50% of what you would typically find locally and an easy way to pay them might just be to just send them some crypto. Right? You don't have to go find out all their banking information and do all the wiring and all this other stuff. You just open your wallet, you send them the money and that's it. It's a done deal. But that's just one thing to think about. To me when I think about building apps in Web2 versus Web3, I don't think you're going to see the Facebook or Instagram use case anytime in the next year or two. I think the killer app for right now, it's going to be financial and e-commerce stuff.But I do think in maybe five years you will see someone crack that application for, something like a social media app where we're basically building something that we use today, but maybe in a better way. And that will be done using some off-chain storage solution. You're not going to be writing all these transactions again to a blockchain. You're going to have maybe a protocol like Graph that allows you to have a distributed database that is managed by one of these networks that you can write to. I think the ideas that we're talking about now are the things that really excite me anyway.Jeremy: Let's go back to GraphQL for a second, though. If you were going to build an app on top of this, and again, that's super exciting getting those transaction fees down, because I do feel every time you try to move money between banks or it's the $3 fee, if you go to a foreign ATM and you take money out of an ATM, they charge you. Everybody wants to take a cut somewhere along, and there's probably reasons for it, but also corporate jets cost money. So that makes sense as well. But in terms of the GraphQL protocol here, so if I wanted to build an application on top of it, and maybe my application doesn't write to the blockchain, it just reads from it, with one of these indexers, because maybe I'm summing up some financial transactions or something, or I've got an app we can look things up or whatever, I'm building something.I'm querying using the GraphQL, this makes sense. I have to use one of these indexers that's aggregating that data for me. But what if I did want to write to the blockchain, can I use GraphQL to do a mutation and actually write something to the blockchain? Or do I have to write to it directly?Nader: Yeah, that's actually a really, really good question. And that's one of the things that we are currently working on with the Graph. Right now if you want to write a transaction, you typically are going to be using one of these JSON RPC wallets and using some type of client library that interacts with the wallet and signs the transaction with the private key. And then that sends the transaction to the blockchain directly. And you're talking to the blockchain and you're just using something like the Graph to query. But I think what would be ideal and what we think would be ideal, is if someone could use a single technology, a single language, and a single abstraction to do everything, not only with reading and writing but also with subscriptions for real-time updates.That's where we think the whole idea for this will ultimately be, and that's what we're working on now. Right now you can only query. And if you want to write a transaction, you basically are still going to be using something like ethers.js or Web3 or one of these other libraries that allows you to sign a transaction using your wallet. But in the future and in fact, we're already building this right now as having an end-to-end GraphQL library that allows you to write transactions as well as read. That way someone just learns a single API and it's a lot easier. It would also make it easier for developers that are coming from a traditional web background to come in because there's a little bit of learning curve for understanding how to create one of these signed providers and write the transaction. It's not that much code, but it is a new way of thinking about things.Jeremy: Well I think both of us coming from the serverless space, we know that new way of thinking about things certainly can throw a wrench in the system when a new developer is trying to pick that stuff up.Nader: Yeah.Jeremy: All right. So that's the blockchain side of things with the data piece of it. I think people could wrap their head around that. I think it makes a lot of sense. But I'm still, the decentralized, the other things that you talked about. You mentioned an S3, something that's sort of an S3 type protocol that you can use. And what are some of the other ones? I think I've written some of them down here. Acash was one, Filecoin, Livepeer. These are all different protocols or services that are hosted by the indexers, or is this a different thing than the indexers? How does that work? And then how would you use that to save data, maybe save some blob, a blob storage or something like that?Nader: Let's talk about the tokenomics idea around how crypto fits into this and how it actually powers a protocol like this. And then we'll talk about some of those other protocols. How do people actually build all this stuff and do it for, are they getting paid for it? Is it free? How does that work and how does this network actually stay up? Because everything costs money, developers' time costs money, and so on and so forth. For something like the Graph, basically during the building phase of this protocol, basically, there was white papers and there was blog posts, and there was people in Discords talking about the ideas that were here. They basically had this idea to build this protocol. And this is a very typical life cycle, I would say.You have someone that comes up with an idea, they document some of it, they start building it. And the people that start building it are going to be basically part of essentially the founding team you could think of, in the sense of they're going to be having equity. Because at the end of the day, to actually launch one of these decentralized protocols, the way that crypto comes into it, there's typically some type of a token offering. The tokens need to be for a network like this, some type of utility token to keep the network running in the future. You're not just going to create some crypto and that's it like, right? I think that's the whole idea that I thought was going on when in reality, these tokens are typically used for powering the protocol.But let's say early on you have let's say 20 developers and they all build 5% of the system, whatever percentage that you want to talk about, whatever. Let's say you have these people helping out and then you actually build the thing and you want to go ahead and launch it and you have something that's working. A lot of times what people will do is they'll basically have a token offering, where they'll basically say, okay, let's go ahead and we're going to mint X number of tokens, and we're going to put these on the market and we're going to also pay these people that helped build this system, X number of tokens, and that's going to be their payment. And then they can go and sell those or keep those or trade those or whatever they would like to do.And then you have the tokens that are then put on the public market essentially. Once you've launched the protocol, you have to have tokens to basically continue to power the protocol and fund it. There are different people that interact with the protocol in different ways. You have the indexers themselves, which are basically software engineers that are deploying whatever infrastructure to something like AWS or GCP. These people are still using these cloud providers or they're maybe doing it at their house, whatever. All you basically need is a server and you want to basically run this indexer node, which is software that is open source, and you run this node. Basically, you can go ahead and say, okay, I want to start being an indexer and I want to be one of the different nodes on the network.To do that you basically buy some GRT, Graph Token, and in our case you stake it, meaning you are putting this money up to basically affirm that you are an indexer on the protocol and you are going to be accepting subgraph developers to deploy their subgraphs to your indexer. You stake that money and then when people use the API, they're basically paying money just like they might pay money to somewhere like API gateway or AppSync. Instead, they're paying money for their subgraph and that money is paid in GRT and it's distributed to the people in the ecosystem. Like me as a developer, I'm deploying the subgraph, and then if I have a million people using it, then I make some money. That's one way to use tokens in the system.Another way is basically to, as an outside person looking in, I can say, this indexer is really, really good. They know what they're doing. They're a very strong engineer. I'm going to basically put some money into their indexer and I'm basically backing them as an indexer. And then I will also share the money that comes in from the query fees. And then there are also people that are subgraph developers, which is the stuff that I've been working with mainly, where I can basically come up with a new API. I can be like, it'd be cool if I took data from this blockchain and this file system and merged it together, and I made this really cool API that people can use to build their apps with. I can deploy that. And basically, people can signal to this subgraph using tokens. And when people do that, they can say that they believe that this is a good subgraph to use.And then when people use that, I can also make money in that way. Basically, people are using tokens to be part of the system itself, but also to use that. If I'm a front end application like Uniswap and I want to basically use the Graph, I can basically say, okay, I'm going to put a thousand dollars in GRT tokens and I'm going to be using this API endpoint, which is a subgraph. And then all of the money that I have put up as someone that's using this, is going to be taken as the people start using it. Let's say I have a million queries and each query is one, 1000th of a cent, then after those million queries are up, I've spent $100 or something like that. Kind of similar to how you might pay AWS, you're now paying, you know, subgraph developers and indexers.Jeremy: Right. Okay. That makes sense. So then that's the payment method of that. So then these other protocols that get built on top of it, the Acash and Filecoin and Livepeer. So those ...Nader: They're all operating in a very similar fashion.Jeremy: Okay. All right. And so it's ...Nader: They have some type of node software that's run and people can basically run this node on some server somewhere and make it available as part of the network. And then they can use the tokens to participate. There's Filecoin for file storage. There's also IPFS, which is actually more of, it's a completely free service, but it's also not something that's as reliable as something like S3 or Filecoin. And then you have, like you mentioned, I believe Acash, which is a way to execute arbitrary code, business logic, and stuff like that. You have Ceramic Network, which is something that you can use for authentication. You have Livepeer which is something you use for live streaming. So you have all these ideas, these decentralized services fitting in these different niches.Jeremy: Right, right. Okay. So then now you've got a bunch of people. Now you mentioned this idea of, you could say, this is a good indexer. What about bad indexers? Right?Nader: That's a really good question.Jeremy: Yeah. You're relying on people to take data off of a public blockchain, and then you're relying on them to process it correctly and give you back good data. I'm assuming they could manipulate that data if they wanted to. I don't know why, but let's say they did. Is there a way to guarantee that you're getting the correct data?Nader: Yeah. That's a whole part of how the system works. There's this whole idea and this whole, really, really deep rabbit hole of crypto-economics and how these protocols are structured to incentivize and also disincentivize. In our protocol, basically, you have this idea of slashing and this is also a fairly known and used thing in the ecosystem and in the space. It's this idea of slashing. Basically, you incentivize people to go out and find people that are serving incorrect data. And if that person finds someone that's serving incorrect data, then the person that's serving the incorrect data is, quote-unquote, slashed. And that basically means that they're not only not going to receive the money from the queries that they were serving, but they also might lose the money that they put up to be a part of the network.I mentioned you have to actually put up money to deploy an indexer to the network, that money could also be at risk. You're very, very, very much so financially disincentivized to do that. And there's actually, again, incentives in the network for people to go and find those people. It's all-around incentives, game theory, and things like that.Jeremy: Which makes a ton of sense. That's good to know. You mentioned, you threw out the number, five years from now, somebody might build the killer app or whatever, they'll figure out some of these things. Where are we with this though? Because this sounds really early, right? There's still things that need to be figured out. Again, it's public data on the blockchain. How do you see this evolving? When do you think Web3 will be more accessible to the masses?Nader: Today people are actually building really, really interesting applications that are fitting the current technology stack, what are the things that you can build? People are already building those. But when you think about the current state of the web, where you have something like Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, where I would say, especially maybe something like Facebook, that's extremely, extremely complex with a lot of UI interaction, a lot of private data, messages and stuff. I think to build something like that, yeah, it's going to be a couple of years. And then you might not even see certain types of applications being built. I don't think there is going to be this thing where there is no longer these types of applications. There are only these new types. I think it's more of a new type of application that people are going to be building, and it's not going to be a winner takes all just like in all tech in my opinion.I wouldn't say all but in many areas of tech where you're thinking of something as a zero-sum game where I don't think this is. But I do think that the most interesting stuff is around how Web3 essentially enables native payments and how people are going to use these native payments in interesting ways that maybe we haven't thought of yet. One of the ways that you're starting to see people doing, and a lot of venture capitalists are now investing in a lot of these companies, if you look at a lot of the companies coming out of YC and a lot of the new companies that these traditional venture capitalists are investing in, are a lot of TOMS crypto companies.When you think about the financial incentives, the things that we talked about early on, let's say you want to have the next version of YouTube and you don't want to have ads. How would that even work? Right? You still need to enable payments. But there's a couple of things that could happen there. Well, first of all, if you're building an application in the way that I've talked about, where you basically have these native payments or these native tokens that can be part of the whole process now, instead of waiting 10 years to do an IPO for an application that has been around for those 10 years and then paying back all his investors and all of those people that had been basically pulling money out their pockets to take part in.What if someone that has a really interesting idea and maybe they have a really good track record, they come out with a new application and they're basically saying, okay, if you want to own a piece of this, we're going to basically create a token and you can have ownership in it. You might see people doing these ICO's, initial coin offerings, or whatever, where basically they're offering portions of the company to anyone that wants to own it and then incentivizing people to basically use those, to govern how the application is built in the future. Let's say I own 1% of this company and a proposal is put up to do something new. I can basically say, I can use that portion of my ownership to vote on things. And then people that are speculating can say, this company is doing interesting things. I'm going to buy into it, therefore driving the price up or down.Kind of like the same way that you see the traditional stock market there, but without all of the regulation and friction that comes with that. I think that's interesting and you're already seeing companies doing that. You're not seeing the majority of companies doing that or anything like that, but you are starting to see those types of things happening. And that brings around the discussion of regulations. Is ... can you even do something like that in the United States? Well, maybe, maybe not. Does that mean people are going to start building these companies elsewhere? That's an interesting discussion as well. Right now if you want to build an application this way, you need to have some type of utility that these tokens are there for. You can't just do them purely on speculation, at least right now. But I think it's going to be interesting for sure, to watch.Jeremy: Right. And I think too that, I'm just thinking if you're a bank, right? And you maybe have a bunch of private transactions that you want to keep private. Because again, I don't even know how, I don't know how we get to private transactions on the blockchain. I could see you wanting to have some transactions that were public blockchain and some that were private and maybe a hybrid approach would make sense for some companies.Nader: I think the idea that we haven't really talked about at all is identity and how identity works compared to how we're used to identity. The way that we're used to identity working is, we basically go to a new website and we're like, this looks awesome. Let me try it out. And they're like, oh wait, we need your name, your email address, your phone number, and possibly your credit card and all this other stuff. We do that over and over and over, and over time we've now given our personal information to 500 people. And then you start getting these emails, your data has been breached, every week you get one of these emails, if you're someone like me, I don't know. Maybe I'm just signing up for too much stuff. Maybe not every week, but maybe every month or two. But you're giving out your personal data.But we're used to identity as being tied to our own physical name and address and things like that. But what if identity was something that was more abstract? And I think that that's the way that you typically see identity managed in Web3. When you're dealing with authentication mechanisms, one of the most interesting things that I think that is part of this whole discussion is this idea of a single sign-on mechanism, that you own your identity and you can transfer it across all the applications and no one else is in control of it. When you use something like an Ethereum wallet, like MetaMask, for example, it's an extension you can just download and put crypto in and basically make payments on the web with. When you create a wallet, you're given a wallet address. And the wallet address is basically created using public key cryptography, where basically you start with this private key, your public key is derived from the private key, and then your address is dropped from the public key.And when you send a transaction, you basically sign the transaction with your private key and you send your public key along with the transaction, and the person that receives that can decode the transaction with the public key to verify that that's who signed the transaction. Using this public key cryptography that only you can basically sign with your own address and your own password, it's all stored on the blockchain or in some decentralized manner. Actually in this case stored on the blockchain or it depends on how you use it really, I guess. But anyway, the whole idea here is that you completely own your identity. If you never decide to associate that identity with your name and your phone number, then who knows who's sending these transactions and who knows what's going on, because why would you need to associate your own name and phone number with all of these types of things, in these situations where you're making payments and stuff like that. Right?What is the idea of a user profile anyway, and why do you actually need it? Well, you might need it on certain applications. You might need it or want it on social network, or maybe not, or you might come up with a pseudonym, because maybe you don't want to associate yourself with whatever. You might want to in other cases, but that's completely up to you and you can have multiple wallet addresses. You might have a public wallet address that you associate your name with that you are using on social media. You might have a private wallet address that you're never associating with your name, that you're using for financial transactions. It's completely up to you, but no one can change that information. One of the applications that I recently built was called Decentralized Identity. I built it and release it a few days ago.And it's an implementation of this and it's using some of these Web3 technologies. One of them is IDX. One of them is Ceramic, which is a decentralized protocol similar to the Graph but for identity. And then it's using something called DIDs, which are decentralized identifiers, which are a way to have a completely unique ID based off of your address. And then you own the control over that. You can basically go in and make updates to that profile. And then any application across the web that you choose to use can then access that information. You're only dealing with it stored in one place. You have full control over it, at any time you can go in and delete that. You can go in and change it. No one has control over it except for you.The idea of identity is a mind-bending thing in this space because I think we're so used to just handing everybody our real names and our real phone numbers and all of our personal information and just having our fingers crossed, that we're just not used to anything else.Jeremy: It's all super interesting. You mentioned earlier about, would it be legal in the United States? I'm thinking of all these recent ransomware attacks and I think they were able to trace back some Bitcoin transaction, they were actually able to trace it back to the individual group that accepted the payment. It opens up a whole can of worms. I love this idea of being anonymous and not being tracked, but then it's also like, what could bad actors do with anonymous financial transactions and things like that? So ...Nader: There kind of has been anonymous transactional layer for a long time. Cash brought in, you can't really do a lot of illegal stuff these days without cash. So should we get rid of cash? I think with any technology ...Jeremy: No, but I mean, there's a limit though, right? You can't withdraw more than $10,000 worth of cash without the FBI being flagged and you can't deposit more, you know what I mean?Nader: You can't take a million dollars worth of Bitcoin that you've gotten from ransomware and turn it into cash either.Jeremy: That's also true. Right.Nader: Because it's all tracked on the blockchain, that's probably how they caught those people. Right? They somehow had their personal information tied to a transaction, because if you follow these transactions long enough, you're going to find some origination point. I agree though. There's definitely trade-offs with everything. I don't think I'm ever the type to argue that. There's good things and there's bad things. I think you have to look at the whole picture and decide for yourself, what you think. I'm the type that's like, let's lay out all of the ideas and let the market decide.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. I totally agree with that. All this stuff is fascinating, there is way too much more for me to learn at this point. I think my brain is filled at this point. Anything else about Edge & Node? Any cool things you're working on there or anything you want people to know?Nader: We're working on a couple of different projects. I can't really talk about some of them because they're not released yet, but we are working on a new version of something called Everest, and Everest is already out. If you want to check it out, it's at everest.link. It's basically a repository of a bunch of different applications that have already been built in the Web3 ecosystem. It also ties in a lot of the stuff that we talked about, like identity and stuff like that. You can basically sign in with your Ethereum wallet. You can basically interact with different applications and stuff, but you can also just see the types of stuff people are building. It's categorized into games, financial apps. If you've listened to this and you're like, this sounds cool, but are people actually building stuff? This is a place to see hundreds of apps that people have are already built and that are out there and successful.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, listen, Nader, this was awesome. Thank you so much for sharing this with me. I know I learned a ton. I hope the listeners learned a ton. If people want to learn more about this or just follow you and keep up with what you're doing, what's the best way to do that?Nader: I would say check out Twitter, we're on Twitter @dabit3 for me, @edgeandnode for Edge & Node, and of course @graphprotocol for Graph protocol.Jeremy: Okay. And then edgeandnode.com. Your YouTube channel is just youtube.com/naderdabit, N-A-D-E-R D-A-B-I-T. And then you had an article on Web3 and I'll put it in the show notes.Nader: Yeah. Put it in the show notes. For freeCodeCamp, it's called what is Web3. And it's really a condensed version of a lot of the stuff we talked about. Maybe go into a little bit more depth around native payments and how people might build companies in the way that we've talked about here.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, I will get all that stuff into the show notes. Thanks again, Nader.Nader: Thanks for having me. It was good to talk.

Talking Points:  Overcoming intimidation when using new technology The great aspects of the software community Choosing the right people to work with Qualities of a good team member Quotable Quotes: “Almost every problem is something that anyone really can solve and can understand if they spend enough time trying to really dive into the issue.” - ND “I heard recently, sort of like the key to productivity is the yin and yang of motivation, that energy, and discipline to stick with it when you don't have that.” - DG (Overcome intimidation) “Really looking at the technology that you're trying to learn...attacking at a hello world level and then start adding on.” - ND “I don't think I've ever been in any industry where there is such a vibrant and helpful community out there where people are doing stuff like meetups, where you can literally go and learn” “Read books, blog posts, and videos on how to communicate better and you'll learn a lot. I still do that, I'm still learning a lot and I have a long way to go.” - ND “You didn't need to get permission to do this, right? There's nothing stopping anyone from doing what you did...you came up with a project that you wanted to do and you started building it.” - DG “Doing everything you can to find out if it's going to be a good fit or not because the worst thing in the world is moving your entire career into a team and then having a negative consequence.” - ND “I think the number one quality is an eagerness to learn and communication. Those two things together seem to be really important.” - ND “I think the best indicator of someone being successful on a team is their willingness and their eagerness to learn new things, how quickly and how good they are at learning.” - ND Notes:Nader's Twitter https://twitter.com/dabit3Nader's Youtube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7mca3O0DmdSG2Cr80sOD7gNader's Dev.tohttps://dev.to/dabit3

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we meet Nader Dabit, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. He gives us his perspective on managed services in cloud development, tells us about AWS Amplify, and gives his predictions on the future of cloud computing. Key takeaways:As the front-end ecosystem matures, more challenging products are possibleManaged services give power to buildersPrepackaged managed service collections help startups get goingThe 80-20 rule of cloud apps: 80% managed services, 20% differentiating valueAWS Amplify users test apps on a local backendInfrastructure as Code allows incremental design of your production environmentStartup costs reducing as serverless, pay-per-compute model takes overNader's future in decentralized financeAbout Semaphore UncutIn each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In episode 69 of JAMstack Radio, Brian welcomes Nader Dabit of AWS back to the show. They discuss Nader's new book, building full stack serverless apps, and educating developers.

Hey podcast family! In this episode we catch up with Sr. Developer Advocate at AWS and Founder/Trainer at React Native Training, Nader Dabit. Nader has been on my radar for a bit now with his community involvement. We talk about cross platform development at a high level and then dive into what 'DevRel' actually is and then talk about his favorite Halloween things! If you need to reach out, email info@theunicornfinders.com If you want to follow us on social media: Head to our LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theunicornfinders Or follow us on Twitter! Jake Shepherd (sirjakeshep) Dan Thompson (dk_thompson) Taylor Desseyn (tdesseyn)

In our best episode yet, we host Nader Dabit (@dabit3), DevRel at #AWS Cloud and AWS Amplify, Author of #FullStackServerless, top StackOverflow contributor for React, and a tried and true web and mobile developer, consultant, and founder. "Good engineers figure out how to solve a problem. Great engineers figure out how to solve themselves out of the problem." Nader tells his self-taught story taking free online Harvard and Standford courses and shares his approach of his developer workflow optimization and automation as well as his fully serverless stack of dev tools and technology. > Never miss a video // SUBSCRIBE: https://bit.ly/2PzTqAI // About The Ops Show // #TheOpsShow is a weekly YouTube show and podcast hosted by Tristan Pollock and Kyle Campbell covering the wide world of #workflows in #DevOps and the greater developer experience. Watch ALL EPISODES: https://bit.ly/2WgD1F5 + https://w.cto.ai/theopsshow > Join the community // SHIP TOGETHER: https://bit.ly/3fTPKpe // About CTO.ai // CTO.ai provides end-to-end serverless infrastructure designed for the needs of fast-moving development teams who want to optimize what the business cares about. Easy to use like Heroku, and powerful like Kubernetes, CTO.ai gives you the tools you need to workflow smarter, not harder. > Try out the platform: https://cto.ai/platform > Or come say hello: https://github.com/cto-ai https://twitter.com/CTO_ai https://www.linkedin.com/company/cto-ai/ https://www.instagram.com/cto.ai/ https://www.facebook.com/CTOdotAI/ https://www.twitch.tv/cto_ai

Nader Dabit is a Developer Advocate working at AWS. He is also an author, blogger, and React Native expert. Nader and I talked a lot about his journey into tech and about the background we both share as technologists living in the southern United States away from the major tech hubs. Nader's internet home: https://twitter.com/dabit3

Nader Dabit is a Developer Advocate at AWS and Founder of React Native Training. He joins hosts Jared Palmer and Ken Wheeler on The Undefined to talk about React Europe, React hooks, the future of work, consulting, and more.FeaturingNader Dabit - Twitter, Github, Website, ConsultancyKen Wheeler – Twitter, GitHub, WebsiteJared Palmer – Twitter, GitHub, Website, AgencyLinksReact EuropeAWS AmplifyReact Native TrainingLe Centre PompidouThe Fondation Louis Vuitton"The Slaves" by MichaelangeloLes PhilosophesSupremeWhere the Heaux at? T-ShirtHTML Canvas Images - W3SchoolsMimic class properties with useEventCallbackuseSubscription hook PRurql GraphQL clientStartup Nation by Dan Senor, Saul SingerCoders are the new Rock Stars - Dan Stein aka @DJFreshUKPicksDrizlyGerhard RichterThe Clermont Lounge