Can The Devs Do Something? Panel featuring Zach Seward, Abbey Titcomb and more...

this panel is so popping that everyone wants to be on stage for this one all right here we go hey everybody i'm zach seward i'm an editor at coindesk we're leaning into the meme here and we're calling this one can the devs do something we've all been there in that state of panic it's not about the state of panic but it's about devs so why not go mimi here we go all right we're gonna do a quick intro from each of these fine panelists just to let you know where they're coming from to situate this conversation in context we're gonna keep it peppy fun we're gonna get you to happy hour and beyond before you know it all right starting at the end of the line introduce yourself sir hi everyone i'm duran and uh i lead engineering at uh massari hi everybody i'm abby i'm the head of community and default devrel at radical which is a peer-to-peer stack for building software together hey everyone my name is robbie krasinski i'm the lead of developer relations at block daemon oh hell yeah look at that did you pay those people to do that nice good work thanks thanks hype squad all right cool so i just want to give a quick shout out to electric capital's annual developer report comes out every january came out last month really great uh trove of data on the current scene of web3 development gonna pull some numbers from that during this talk but first of all i'm i'm tasking each of these people to do a couple sentences state of the union as it relates to web3 developers right now at this point in time so i'm going to start with you if you had to sum up the state of the union as it relates to web3 development how would you characterize the currency i think to kind of quickly summarize my thoughts on this i think we have a lot of very excited developers that are pushing deep into this space but what i think we need to focus on is making sure that we have tooling that can continue to allow developers to develop at a faster rate so for me the importance of tooling is going to be the future and that's going to help when it comes to overall developer adoption for web3 got you abby from where radical sits what's the feel right now i mean i think that it's telling we've been coming to eat denver a couple of years now we're just saying how crazy it is compared to a couple years ago the interest the excitement the engagement i think is higher than ever and i think now shit's kind of working as well so like that's good we're kind of building stuff that's working but now we're entering kind of like this make or break phase where one we have to keep and continue attracting we have to formalize we have to continue to develop develop tooling to retain and keep you know i think moving the developer ecosystem forward instead of just getting getting bogged down with building new stuff so i think that there's a maturation that we need to see that's a word we need to mature a little bit and kind of get our together to keep all of this new excitement in and engaged god and iran from asari what is the state of the union as it relates to web3 development right now well i think it's fair to say that we're seeing a shift in momentum between web 2 to web 3. we're seeing more and more developers go from web 2 to web 3 and that's because there's a fundamental difference in incentives between web 2 and web web 3. in web 2 you're building against a closed system so you don't have data agency you don't own the data that you're building against like i think we all are on social media we all post our like fitness data maybe up upstream but none of that data we actually own as a you as a user and a consumer and that incentive changes drastically going to web 3 where that data ownership is front and center and that openness is very attractive to developers building in an open system but also migrating away from this old paradigm which is i need to build for a big tech company as opposed to building for a community all right guys so here's where we go to the data for a little bit it's been a year of staggering growth in terms of monthly active developers committing codes to web3 protocols according to electric capital 75 growth in 2021 alone but the raw number is still very small we're talking about like 14 000 monthly active developers committing code to ethereum and other smart contract blockchains so i guess the question is robbie i'm going to put this to you how do you think we sort of catalyze and kick-start that next level that you mentioned abby to get more developers who are uh already existing in the web 2 world to learn and lend their strengths to web3 development yeah no i mean i think that's a great question and again i'm just going to keep banging the drum of like tooling right and so what we need to do is we need to create faster more like protocol agnostic tooling that's going to allow for developers who are interested to build to very quickly spin things up something i think a lot about is let's say um the this abstraction of adoption and so we go from hyper curious to curious to interested to neutral to uninterested to against right and so feedback loops for tooling becomes very important the people who are hyper curious they are going to explore all the tooling and everything regardless of how easy it is to use simply because they're very bullish right but as we start to get toward that neutral and the interested or perhaps the uninterested that tooling needs to have very low friction and in order to get to this low friction state developers need to have a funnel in which they could give proper feedback to the engineers that are making this tooling so this pinwheel of you know let's say developer and engineer responsibility needs to start spinning faster so developers that are using things have the ability to very quickly tell the engineers this is what's working this is not what's working engineers can iterate on that and this cycle continues again and again until we you know push the needle forward even faster yeah i think that cycles uh thing is really interesting because there's actually kind of meta cycles happening in at least uh blockchain protocol ecosystems because we also have them the feedback loops with the developers building on top of ethereum and then the feedback loops there and so i feel like it's making sure that internally within project ecosystems you're maintaining those feedback loops you're really leaning into them and you're you know formalizing tooling you're documenting you're creating accessibility and then in terms of your relationship to the ecosystem we're also keeping very tight feedback loops and how what we're building can be better based off of you know how our infrastructure can be better for what we're building so i think uniquely we have this space where we're also all building with each other and so i feel creating more modes of feedback loops between developers across different protocol ecosystems within specific uh blockchain worlds realms um is also something that we could lean into and then how that relates to other blockchain realms is like tremendously important because that's really going to be crossing the chasm right is when we all envision well most of us envision a multi-chain future and so how can we kind of also steward that um within our ecosystems love the word realms i want to refund that a little bit more so from where you sit at massari i mean obviously ethereum is the top dog in terms of ethereum count but clearly some other upstart chains are emerging in terms of capturing developer interest what are you seeing in terms of other networks that are building developer counts in a meaningful way yeah so in terms of um so picking backing on this i think evm compatible chains are super developer friendly because it has the time to it's been battle tested for many years now the the ethereum tooling and any chain that is evm compatible has that tooling sort of compounding effect behind it but we also see um the way that i see it is there's three general buckets there's a evm compatible bucket with which has very mature tooling so to speak there's the second bucket which is the solana bucket or move fast and break things so in order to get their edge i need to be able to break a lot of and that's okay in the solano world and solana has invested a lot in terms of developer documentation and onboarding and the third bucket i would say is the ibc aspect the cosmos ecosystem where if i build something then i can bridge it across to a different chain and that's the third dimension that it's sort of attracting the developers so you sort of have that spectrum and all three have uh interesting aspects yeah and i guess you you know you go to default and you see it right the developer count sort of mirrors tvl on these networks and evm is still you know the big dog when it comes to what's actually being used robbie i want to put this question to you as we talk about this multi-chain thing do you think evm compatibility or sort of this idea of like evm maximalism will continue on into the future in the near term or in the medium term i guess yeah i think that's a great question ultimately i personally believe that the future is going to be uh very open to cross protocol adaptability right i think that the evm is clearly a staple you know and i i think that building upon it to your point you know that tooling has been battle tested and it's tried and trued and now different protocols and you know people are experimenting very quickly in avenues that they think are going to perhaps again push this needle forward get more people developing get faster adoption right but in my opinion the future is just cross protocol and there might be a point where you're not even sure perhaps like what you're on and you won't necessarily have to so abby when you are onboarding folks into the radical community where are you finding those folks like what is what is the like the source of the you know shadowy super coders out there where are you going to you know make that top of the funnel more full yeah i mean i think it's coming from many different places i wouldn't say that there's one it's probably just a culmination of all of them i mean it's anything from hackathons where you're getting one-on-one experiences and actually putting your tech in front of people and saying hey this is what you could build contextualizing it and giving them the space to kind of explore and i think we learned so much from uh people learning about radical and then using it and trying to incorporate it into their own projects um i actually find that we find a lot of great contributors um across ecosystems uh radical is a hybrid project in a way right we have um at its core is actually a peer-to-peer network uh that's built on top a peer-to-peer protocol that's built on top of git so it's actually crypto based but not blockchain right um and radical is unique because it takes that unique peer-to-peer data and actually links it to our ethereum identities so we actually border two worlds right we have this like very traditional fast peer-to-peer ecosystem along the likes of dap product protocol scuttlebutt and these hacker communities which you can really tap into and when you have something that's ideologically driven that's something that's really attractive to developers and that's kind of where developers are kind of developer interest started but since then again it's about tapping into different people's developer communities and figuring out what you can build together you know we have a lot of cross-collaboration with uh ceramic and the graph like how can we um kind of be creating this patchwork of web3 technology in which you know it's not just about our independent protocol ecosystem but we're growing the developer communities of each other by building tech that we can build off of ourselves right and so i feel like that's really kind of key and so we try to support those protocol ecosystem collaborations as much as we can got you robbie i'm going to put you on the spot for this one but i want your perspective as well like so there's the emergence of all these really big really valuable developer platforms block damien is one of them and fura is another alchemy also valued through the roof everyone's raising a bunch of money investors believe that these are going to be big companies for the long run like what's the smart way to interpret the emergence of these big developer platform uh firms yeah i mean you know i'll speak on like block payment of course um what we're trying to do is reduce developer friction right and so um ubiquity for example is going to be the api that's going to have a single endpoint that's going to allow you to connect to multiple protocols and to then kind of iterate on what i was speaking about earlier when it comes to making sure that we're listening to the developers every protocol that we're pushing forward in terms of ubiquity which will just be a single endpoint and i know that other companies are doing the same trying to essentially create aggregators of aggregators that allow you as a developer to reduce your tech debt and to develop faster and faster and this touches on my earlier point of now it's about tooling that is going to allow for you know developer speed so i think why there's a lot of value in this is because it's becoming a protocol agnostic and and i think that this is the future and a lot of people believe because there's so much effort across so many protocols um let's just uh allow developers to communicate and pull the data they need very easily got it so like devil's advocate right like that could create a situation where it's sort of like platform dependent dependency for a lot of developer activity in the space is that something that you guys have any thoughts on on the emergence of these big platforms uh i was just going to say like the protocol agnostic agnostic aspect of this is so important right because i mean at least for radical you know most projects start out with a product like a solution to a problem right and it develops and it's mvps and it launches and it's there and it's solving a certain problem and then i think in the web 3 space what happens is that that product that product is usually built on a protocol and then the product actually becomes the protocol and then you realize that it's about building out the resiliency and um developing the protocol ecosystem not just the ecosystem of that initial use case that you started and we had this right and that transition from being product focused app focused experience focused to protocol focus is something that takes like a way different uh relationship to developers and um it's a transformation and it takes a lot of different work and so i feel like over the last six months that's really what we've been focusing on which is like how do we make our stack more easy to build on right while also powering up the use cases and showing people what you can do and that's when community and devrel split i think and turn into growth products um and then devrel and and and development and and i think like protocol management in the developer perspective product management in the uh developer perspective and then community is what i think ties those together and tries to keep the interactions going fluid tighten the feedback loops and all of that so it's definitely interesting different scopes and i think that that's what's so unique and possibly sometimes a hindrance to our ability to kind of create developer ecosystems but net net we're going to have stronger more resilient larger developer ecosystems if we can transform our ecosystems to be more less platform and more protocol focus competition is good competition is great so i for many years the uh the entire web 3 economy basically sat on the back of infura right we love infuriating fewer powered basically 90 of our daps out there but obviously we don't want to rely on one central source so competition like alchemy block daemon bison trails this is all great and for adapt developers too it's it's also not a moat in a sense because they're all rpc based so if i'm a app developer i can very easily transfer my code from calling to infura to alchemy tomorrow and vice versa so competition is always great and at the end of the day the community benefits i totally plus one that competition is healthy right and in my opinion where someone could perhaps take the lead uh in terms of that competition again is keeping an ear to the ground and making sure that they are listening to the feedback from the developers uh and so in my opinion the you know the future is i mean developers are here and they're building like crazy it's incredible adoption of web3 inevitable but now what we have to do is make sure that developers have that megaphone right and they have to also have the ability to point that in the right direction for them to be heard if everyone has a megaphone they're pointing this in different directions this becomes noise that noise is again just going to contribute to tech debt uh because this feedback loop starts to break but if we can ideally through community through adoption of web 2 to web 3 through developer relations create these funnels that are going to allow for a very streamlined uh mechanism that also combats developer fatigue um you know volunteer fatigue giving developers that voice to empower themselves and to use these tools the company that really believes in the developers in my opinion is the company that's going to pull forward gosh good notes all around very good perspective all around thank you thank you so much for that dear i'm going to put this one to you first uh let's talk about the hiring picture for web3 devs right we talk about the interest the excitement big giant companies want to build apps on various public blockchain networks are there enough developers to go around are we having like a developer supply crunch in the market like what's the situation with that yeah i think um our community or web 3 there tends to be a feeling that hey there's never enough web3 developers and there tends to be a feeling that hey if there's a web3 developer we need to just push them away but i think the reality of the picture is is is very different where there's so many web 2 developers in this conference here that are that have this inkling of hey there's something new here there's a new movement here that will power the new internet and there's so much potential here and i think if i were a recruiter in a web 2 big tech company i would be afraid right now because all of the intel intellect is going into web 3. so i think on the short term yes we have a shortage of engineers but that's just because the industry is so new but on the long run we're winning against all of these big tech abby curious for your thoughts on that for sure i just have like one critical perspective about like retaining talent in web 3 and crypto is that the space is so hyper capitalized right now that i actually find that it's usually um more beneficial to go out and start your own thing than work for another project and i think that there's been a couple established ecosystems that have like really worked on this but it actually takes a different frame on kind of your protocol ecosystem to make sure that you're incentivizing and retaining developers and contributors in the long term like this is why we have like a shortage of like rust devs because everybody worked at parity and then they all made a ton of money and then they quit and now they're all don't want to work on anything anymore right and so i feel like there's like this balance which is like a very people problem um and i think that while we of course like i think everything is shifting towards like web 3. it's also about navigating these like negative externalities that we see in the space that are kind of making you know maybe fighting against us a little bit robbie what are you seeing on that front the hiring side i totally co-signed everything both of you said um i would agree i think that the golden handcuffs are not as appealing anymore in the web 2 space and developers are now becoming very bullish on developing for the future and they're more interested i believe in um you know community development and developing tooling that is going to ideally you know create um you know a future that we genuinely believe in opposed to you know perhaps the day in day out um obviously i i understand everyone has like their own situation but i i do very much believe that web two people and perhaps there are a number here are here for a reason right and it's because you're curious and that curiosity is grossly intoxicating once you start to dig in and kind of once you get in it you just you can't go back so i think it's inevitable it's also just like um again everybody's building with each other so when you're building your you're part of a larger ecosystem which i think is different than kind of like traditional web 2 models where you're building within one scope and since there's more collaboration i think that actually creates more space um for developers to flourish and have more personal gain and also kind of like develop themselves and so i feel like it's very unique and i think that we'll see with dows and with these large protocol ecosystems that are also decentralizing the way that we collaborate um we'll see uh even more developer interest and space for developers to kind of you know just in general like thrive um which i think will continue attracting and retaining i would edge our community into one aspect here which is discoverability it if i'm a dev in web 2 how do i discover all these cool projects that are being built right now there's like dowels for me left and right uh but what are these dolls doing what what's their roma what is the appeal and how what is my incentive for contributing to a dial i think there's so many cool projects out there but i'm a dev i want to figure out how how i can hack on some stuff there's uh there's very little discoverability in our space right now so you three are all very much on the ground seeing how this situation is evolving over time i guess i want to get just a clear picture of what the pipeline is looking like i know we're talking now pretty much exclusively about web 2 devs making the jump into web3 technologies is that where the predominance of new entrants the developer space are coming from is there a role that university blockchain clubs are playing is it established devs making the jump or new devs learning this out the gate is there anything emerging on that front that you can speak to robby i'll put you on the spot for that yeah i mean i think that's interesting and it's a little bit of everything right uh what's really incredible is as as like developer portals are being created um you know i i personally know a lot of people who weren't developers who are becoming web 3 developers out of the gate and i had always thought you know the adoption of web 2 to web 3 was kind of the more natural flow to you know get developers interested and this tooling but i like it's blowing my mind that like their first you know uh repositories are dealing with like web 3.

and i think this is incredible i also believe education is everything right because if you just have people kind of coming in without perhaps like understanding what's interesting or why it should be interesting as long as we are you know creating systems that are very like digestible for a complex topic and exciting people through education and then kind of putting them on a pathway we have this web 2 to web 3 we have the new developers we have you know retaining web3 developers all of this is kind of happening simultaneously yeah i think that there's like also different pathways based off of the type of development right there's like the traditional turnover of like um like spotify or some big corp lays off a bunch of people and then that influx is captured by the other corpse within the uh decentralized ecosystems you know you could talk about like think about the coinbase and their talent acquisition right now but what i think is really important is for us to be supporting the development that you just talked about right which is like discovery through education and accessibility hackathons finding languages to build on and to have and enable open source experimentation which then leads to getting involved with different protocol communities in a decentralized and online based way and i think that that's really the spirit of web 3 is like supporting these more emerging you know nebulous forms of developer communities and figuring out how we can create the space for developers not only to discover find those and then understand them through education accessibility and documentation but then also find their role and belonging in them and that's kind of like where the community work was very like community thing right but how do you incentivize and then bring them along and empower them throughout that entire process and i think that that's like really the spirit of web3 and i think if we can nail that and do that really well that creates like a net better situation than most ways that we kind of find discover and retain developers right now all right well that was very lovely forward-looking sentiment and i would like to end that panel on that note thank you very much abby please join me in thanking our wonderful panel we're gonna get you the next topic thanks a bunch guys you did great all he is we love you the best all right thanks everybody see you around