Mastering Technical Communication: The Art of Scroll | Sandy Peng - Scroll

all right hello thank you everyone for joining thank you for the great introduction if you didn't guess by The Branding I'm from scr I am Daniel Helm I lead the developer relations team there and this talk is called the art of technical communication inside and outside of crypto um very very happy to be here talking on this subject uh also so glad to be in Denver which is close to my home of Oklahoma where most conferences are not very close to my home of Oklahoma um yes if you are here for mastering Crypt technical communication the art of the scroll by Sandy Pang unfortunately you get me instead uh but I've put together a talk that I think is a bit of a a spiritual successor to her talk on similar themes uh and and my role in a developer relations you know thinking a lot about technical communication and what it looks like to bridge um you know external audiences with what we're trying to do at scroll so this talk is a bit of talking shop right I'm not going to be talking about scroll and how great of a ZK evm we have or how great our rollup is uh even though it is great um really thinking about marketers growth people devil uh and how you can better communicate with folks interested in your Technologies um and for folks that are researchers or developers maybe there's some tips in here for you to better communicate uh what you are doing background on me why am I up here speaking well I've been doing developer relations in crypto for about 3 years here now uh this is a cute photo of me back at eth Denver 2021 uh which was fully online but before getting into crypto fulltime as a devil I was actually um teaching and creating artwork so I was making art about technology and making artwork using technology um and if you think working for a ZK rollup is Niche or obscure or uh isolating try uh showing New Media artwork in the state of Oklahoma um it takes a lot of attention into who you're talking to and what you're doing so I would be doing things like going into uh architecture colleges and doing site specific artwork that would be catered to you know folks thinking about architecture students academics practitioners and thinking about okay how can I talk about AI in this context how can I let them physically interact with the latent space of a model thinking about what a building is and how that might maybe affect their roles in the future or I might be bringing Bitcoin into an art gallery and saying you know who knows what I'm saying here I might be talking about um Mining and educating folks uh I might be making a comment on energy consumption and proof of work uh I might be talking about the state of crypto and uh who knows what I might be saying there or I might just be exploiting the fact that I have free electricity and internet to mine Bitcoin in the middle of an art gallery but through these experiences right I think well before I actually became a Dev I was doing things uh and honing in on ideas and these are the three that I decided this morning to bring to you know your audience bring them something of value and always know that you're never just doing one thing all right know your audience this might sound like marketing like 101 right um a very simple idea uh but in crypto it's actually more complicated than it might seem uh there's rabbit holes to go down so these were slides from s's presentation uh she said you know she was looking at knowing your audience and thinking about in scroll how we have ZK researchers eth researchers we have these concentric circles of identities to try to understand and communicate with or maybe you can think about the crypto subcultures of Deens and Builders and researchers right these are all mental models for understanding your audience or maybe you're interested in metrics maybe you want to look at the developer report and say this many people are building on this and here's the new ones and here's the ones that have left or maybe uh this triangle is uh how one Dev on my team breaks down thinking about things is everything in crypto is a balance between ethos diplomacy and degeneracy or incentives or maybe you just want a platonic ideal right you want something simple straightforward something that's got a Manifesto attached to it uh and then you can go just label your audience as cyppher punks but whatever you're doing know your audience have a mental model know who you're communicating with and once you know that your job is to meet them where they're at right you don't want to be going above them you're not trying to impress them you want to meet them where they're at and bring them something of value and the last item I have for this is that you want to make sure that you also account for who you are in relationship to them right um I'm not a Deen and when I'm talking to djun I have to acknowledge that I have to acknowledge that I'm not a researcher but know still what I can bring them and bring that audience um when knowing those audiences and knowing those mental models right like as developer relations people want to ask me about developers well developers aren't a monolithic thing right a someone with 20 years experience living in SF is going to be very different than a first year student in India and we have to acknowledge that in the types of things that we're making and how we engage with them and understanding that our values and what's important to us might differ from theirs and we just need to acknowledge that so here's an example from uh our work at scroll right we have talks talking about zero knowledge proofs on the left you see us describing zero knowledge to folks that have no idea what zero knowledge is if I say ZK their eyes gloss over but we still want to make that accessible to them make them feel empowered when we're talking about this technology but this is quite different than the slide on the right where we're talking about ZK evm circuits and the stack and execution traces right these are different audiences you want to know what you're doing you want to cater to the Right audience for the right moment uh perhaps a more fun example here uh recently we had a uh lot of great contributors uh spam our GitHub repos in the hopes of achieving an airdrop uh created quite a commotion a little bit internally and then on Twitter uh in another spaces and having kind of like the awareness and confidence to just embrace the chaos uh is is always a ploy to be able to communicate to folks um your values and what you understand about the people interested in your project even if sometimes it can be painful all right next up here bring your audience audience something of value okay so one great way to provide value is don't shill don't show up and try to sell developers or researchers on something no one wants to be sold to we we in Tech are chronically skeptic especially in crypto if you want your developers to run the other way try to sell them something instead give give knowledge give ideas give head starts give non-tr swag give money whatever it takes to build these relationships you are there to provide and help these developers and the people interested in the technology the next one I have on here is pretty simple don't waste people's time right um you know I think I put this on there thinking about the Devils who might show up at a hackathon right and they have this brand new project and they've never even tested it in production don't waste people's time if your doesn't work don't waste people's time if you're just there to sell them on something and not actually help them don't waste people's time lastly communication is always a relationship you know you want to open up you want let to let people get a read on what is valuable to you what your ethos is what problems you're solving and you want to make sure that they understand that you are speaking to real folks with real needs and that you're having a conversation for a reason so uh again showing some of the work that we do at scroll back in our pre-alpha test net days in uh late 2022 we had a largely an audience of developers or largely an audience of researchers and and some developers that were interested in our technology but they couldn't quite grock it yet right there wasn't very much out there providing support for people to understand this emerging field of zero knowledge cryptography and so we spent a lot of time you know not just looking at Scrolls architecture and and all the engineering trade-offs that come when you design a rollup and try to scale ethereum um but also just publishing uh accessible pieces on kzg right like people need to know how these things work and hopefully these resources provide value long after a pre-alpha test net has changed uh another example I like here is something that is from our devow team um ahed has a Blog right this article Ian da start developing on blob today you can go through this entire article it doesn't mention Scroll once right that's not what he's interested in doing here he's interested in providing a need he knows his audience is interested in these emerging Technologies these New Primitives they might get used on scroll they might not doesn't really matter if you try to look for scroll you won't find it but you will find it right up there in the corner right we have Noir on scroll a different article by allowing developers to see that they can deploy Noir deployments on disc scroll you know we we sneak this in I guess in a way um but also if you're not familiar Noir is made by Aztec who in any other industry would be labeled as a competitor to us right doesn't really matter we're providing values to developers what they want to know we're there to give them and the last item I had on there was you are never doing just one thing so you can't speak to one audience at a time I talked about how this talk was for uh professionals right I have no idea what this audience is everything that you're doing everything you're putting out into the world is not just being seen by the people that you want it to be seen by or the people have good intentions for you um you can't speak to just one audience at a time and it's going to be taken in different ways by different folks and just keep that in mind in how you're crafting your message and um how you're communicating uh another way of phrasing this maybe is every everybody's watching uh but not really if they're already watching you're doing something right uh and well done cuz people care another item here I have is everything has second order effects every kind of Engagement you do you might think of it as doing one thing and it's going to have other ramifications right us doing education about kzg um shows to folks that we're invested in other things right that is a second order effect we might say we're doing education but we're also doing branding we're doing marketing we're communicating who scroll is who are like who we value what we value uh lastly relationships are complex and they're also built over time so be consistent with your output uh be consistent with your identity be consistent with your values um but also don't be too worried if you mess up a few times right um you're going to mess up embrace it learn from it uh and um just acknowledge it so again object lesson from from some of the work that scr has done uh we have been going all over the world doing events like these and one of the things we started doing is bringing food items as swag so we have macaroons in Paris we have hot sauce in Dallas te or sorry Austin Texas we have uh Donuts in Berlin and we have uh mooncakes in at token 2049 in Singapore right and so on the one hand it's it's just swag we're giving out swag right but what are the other things that we're doing right what are these second order of effects we're commenting on how other people approach swag we're giving something to someone that is not immediately disposable in the same way as a shitty t-shirt it's disposable and that you get to enjoy it you get to eat it and you get to keep growing with it but we're also talking about locality right part of scrs ethos part of what we really want to do is make sure that we connect with local communities and that we understand the global needs for ethereum and what it is to like connect with those communities and so this is a tip of the hat to that right translating things is a tip of the hat to that um but it also works the other way right we're also acknowledging that a lot of the people that descend on Denver or descend on Berlin or descend in Singapore are not of that place we are kind of temporary transient tourists trying to understand our place there um and this is a way to like acknowledge the local culture and the local folks all right so let's think about an object lesson here uh how can we put some of this into practice and have a case study um I was going to present like a lot of my favorite uh marketing ploes and product marketing and vision Marketing in the space uh but I thought a more fun one might be to look at where we are right now eth Denver I am standing on a stage kind of talking about scroll but kind of not talking about scroll right um and what am I doing I'm not teaching you about scroll or what we do I'm trying to like imbue things into folks maybe right know your audience I started off this talk saying hey I'm talking to all you web3 Professionals in marketing and growth out there I'm well aware I'm on the Biddle Hub stage most of you are not that most of you are maybe folks showing up randomly from Denver uh and so implicitly I might be saying one thing but I actually know that right there are various audiences watching me right now and this content is valuable to all of them right right because I'm trying to bring something of value I'm trying to let normal users understand that in the circus of eth Denver everyone here is doing marketing efforts right all of this is marketing it's all games um but what you can do with that is understand who are building these things why we're building them and hopefully you can start to almost do your own research right not just in a technical capacity but understand who these people are what they're trying to achieve why they're here and why they're trying to talk to you and why they may or may not be wasting your time and lastly you're never doing just one thing uh I am not doing one thing by giving this talk uh I am you know I can have the multiple goals of both giving tips and tricks to folks uh and maybe encouraging devell to keep doing God's work and uh bringing complex technology to folks that uh it hasn't been prepared for yet but also again um I really hope to increase the uh media literacy if you will of folks in the space and and let them know that as they're showing up to these events um you can keep asking hard questions and you should ask hard questions and the same cynicism that the external World brings to crypto it's fair to bring to every single project out there so I am Daniel Helm thank you so much appreciate it and uh have a good rest of your day