A Journey of an Ethereum Core Dev/Researcher - Hsiao-Wei Wang

foreign [Music] I'm from Taiwan I joined the Eastern Foundation research team as a researcher in 2017. so today is a bit personal that I want to tell you some stories and lessons that I've learned over the past few years ah and as a protocol is as a is there a political workers just my perspective there are many send buys here so first episode I want to talk about the draft geographical boundaries so my background is that I completed my undergrad and graduate education or in Taiwan in computer science so in Taiwan the send me conductor industry is the most popular and critical to the country and so many of my classmates after graduation they work at a semiconductor supply chain companies after yeah but but however I was not that interested in spending the rest of my life in a supply chain factories and to do the similar things every day so I wanted to do something more challenging and more open to the rest of the world so after graduation I started working as a back-end software engineer in the first year so all through the pay was not matched with Hardware Engineers uh in Taiwan but I did have more time to explore the skill sets that I am truly interested in and in 20 16 one day my University made he told me that their company was looking to hire blockchain Developers so at that time I didn't know what ethereum is or how Bitcoin works but after some research on the weekend I discovered that uh it was a brand new area and with new challenges for and opportunities here and more important to me back then was that it just really interesting so in 2017 my former colleague Dr Chung Chen he's sitting here he told me that it's there a foundation without a king self was building a team for sharding and Casper research so um I had met vitalik in Taipei before at the local community event but I didn't think he would remember me at all so after some days of consideration I decided to take this shot I sent my CV to metallic and express that interesting in the position so sorry in the potential position and would like to start with pro bono work if he was willing to teach me foreign so two days later I got his response it was a very magical moment for me um and today I still think one of the reasons that had made experience successful at the earlier time was that Italian is such a wonderful approachable and down-to-earth person that he see the community so the first lesson I learned from my experience joining the Research Foundation in 2017 was that the geographic boundaries would not stop anyone from pursuing the opportunities in this field and at that at the time the Webster industry was still in its infancy and the community was already globally distributed I found myself working with individuals all over the world from all over the world and collaborating with on the project that translated the geographic limitation so the next thing let me tell you a wild story uh when we kidnapped Barry White so in the summer of 2018 vitalik was like flying around the world he was like spending around three days in one city and then he will fly to another city so one time taliq was in Taipei uh would and we discovered that the famous uh Berry white hat was also in Taipei so we sing this guy's handle from actually nowhere uh he was working on sound ZK snacks projects He called like um mixmas okay and roll up there's something sounded like a sushi restaurant to us and we haven't met this guy he or she uh he might be a criminal or not we have no idea he's totally Anonymous to us um so one day italic was departing from Taiwan to and to Hong Kong for another local conference um I was also going to the same conference so I booked the same flight and the flight was scheduled Alec 7 pm so through the connection from Channel we met very well I had in prison at about 3 P.M on the same day so the meeting was great in your tea place uh Barry he is not the murderer as far as I can tell and he's just a really nice guy he was willing to fight for the right to privacy and we wanted to learn more about him and his work but we also had to go to the airport for the flight so retelling proposed the solution he said to bury yeah Mary do you want to come with us to the Hong Kong conference and you look at his cutting watch set the fly is in like three hours so so functionally uh Barry said yes and he was really good at packing his luggage so we we really just kidnapping to the Hong Kong to meet more people in the community and then we the foundation assault of hiring him from the team to continue his great work and later on Barry Whitehead began knows the father of robots and so the as the web 3 Industry continues to grow and merge up the new collaboration technology emerged with the post-covet work lifestyle we kind of sorry for uh yeah song sit and become more efficient and regardless of their locations so in 2023 I believe the geography boundary will no longer be a significant obstacle for people starting their career in Webster industry um episode 2 about the joy and chaos so the progress of external Cloud protocol upgrades is like building a huge space station for some wild space colonization um it requires multiple entities and things work their night to reach a consensus from time to time the crew have also have to do the daily maintenance work or sometimes a new research topic pop up and the ship has to address the destination or send a fight to somewhere during the development so um the space is full of Chaos regular meetings at 10 pm 1am or 6 am and the impressor meetings is in-person meetups with the price of 20 hours flight also the real map um changed every crawler but the good thing is that the things are very motivated and collaborative it's been my honor to work with many outstanding and talented people here we are looking for we are not working for a One-Stop company we are working for a protocol that changes people's lives in a better way though the merge is an epic tell that shows the incredible resilience and the attack adaptability of the ethereum community so by successfully transition from the proof of work to proof of stake we were able to dramatically reduce the energies consumption of the network um by a factor of 36 000. especially considering the fact that the transition in involved like coordination with more than like 10 or 20 different things and the supportings the successful of the merge is actually a proof of the power of collaboration and the determination of from the Eastern Community the lasers I've learned over this year's are the first one perfect is perfection is the enemy of of progress she also talked about it in her speech yesterday so Israel protocol has just plenty of technical depths that we soon understood that it's impossible to fix everything in one hard Fork we can only set goals and investigate how to achieve them step by step and so a complete system needs complete tests the little one is getting more complicated while adding more scalabilities but it's also getting simpler um in some way in the whole up Centric road map so personally I'm still learning to bear with the imperfection so we can actually deliver lesson two is that building a common good doesn't mean that you are not spatial so technical speaking English decentralized model the centralized clients everyone is sort of replaceable however it doesn't erase the fact that your contribution is part of Reason like why the decentralized system is strong and robust so the input device the input of device perspectives and the ex expertise from broader group of the participation is really essential to the success of certain systems so while it's true that every individual can be replaced it is also true that each person's unique computer contribution is integral to the overall functionality of the this decentralized system and so in essence 3 here's like um try to take a break to reflex so too sorry to read reflect um when it says the the word um maybe once a year so personally that kindness of my bad really bad work-life balance had eaten my mind a couple of times and I think kind things have suffered more since they are maintaining a system that never turns off and after one spring another taking a break um can help you to come back and refreshed and be focused and ultimately leading to a better result okay let's talk about onboarding um so I always say like certain culture is the most valuable properties of why I want to continue but to talk about this topic um I found that the culture in my mind might not be exactly what other people think because it's a huge community however or one of the common properties I think we all agreed is a grid on is the openness so Instagram is open sourced everyone can use it and to contribute it in some way immediately um working at the Eastern Foundation has been a unique experience to me personally I'm really glad for to working with search brilliant co-workers and it's also thanks to the opportunities that given to me by the EF that I'm able to present at this stage and explore my career so there are multiple approaches to join the southern core developments for example Danny Ryan he started to contribute by reading the ethereum protocols internal documents and found typos and many clienties are hiring now um the EF always embraced the talents and for example the EPF ethereum protocol Fellowship is a program to seek for talents to work to look on the local works and to unbroad it in to make a real impact so we had several successful cohorts previously for the next one please stay tuned on the EF blog post and here are some more resource to get to know the core protocol and the topics on the things and is there a community is the backbone to of the EF and while the EF is gardening and collaborating the external ecosystem it's also important to follow those of certain sustainable model to building the common good so Global Guild games to achieve a big picture of a sustainable independent funding source for the core protocol in the long term so we really appreciate this approach from the community that helps us to build ethereum and also to make the ecosystem become healthier so if you feel is Tokyo is talk is too short and typhoon will buy too fast congratulations um you may want to consider go to attending the East Taipei next week yeah in cover this so it's a local event organized by the Taiwanese community and this event with like two three days dedicated to Hexum and two days for conference so check it out so the last thing here is my them Japanese challenge so I have to read it sorry yeah please give me a five three okay uh [Music] this is a sorry I forgot okay um o foreign [Music] um ass en no Aloo Shinko shinkong sangyo demo arimasu so foreign uh name is totemo or this is