Creating Public Goods: The Missing Link in Your Developer Marketing - John Fawole

Let's welcome our first speaker for the today's section who will be speaking on creating public goods the missing link in your developer market by name John Fle.

All right. So I'm John Flei and a couple of things about me. First of all, I'm very sure all of us here are engineers. So I think I'm in the right place. So I'm John F.

I lead the team at blockchain alpha. I'm more of a technical content creator. So developer and in my spare time I work out and I fight Awando. Okay. So today I want to tell you something very it's not fun.

It's quite sad. So my friend broke up with his girlfriend and before I who can probably give you me give me ideas of why you think people break up. Not something deep. Don't give me music stuff. Just just something on the surface.

Yeah, my chief Billy, God bless you. Okay, they build you, right? Anybody else? So, to the main point. Yeah, my friend, you know, when you do, you are an act of service guy.

You go all out for your babe, you buy stuff all the time, yada yada yada yada. You know, you use your scooies to finance stuff like that. You won't say it because you know the things you've done for love, but you can't say it outside. But yeah, so like when is my guy when it was my guy's birthday, so his girlfriend said, you know, I'm the best gift you can have, so I not get gift for you and stuff like that. But that's simply an illustration and it's something I've noticed with most of us engineers.

We love to take from the industry and that's understandably good. You know, you apply for roles, you get them, freelance stuff, you get them, everything, you get them and you are good, you are balling, you are fine. But beyond that, what would you say you have actually done for the industry? And that is simply why I'm here. I'm not really trying to talk about how you make money even though they can give me money though.

But so yeah, it's time to think of creating value for the love of it. And the reason most of us are in web 3 today is because some people created good stuff for us to actually run with. And we also now start we need to start thinking about what we actually do for developers to have good devx or better devx or maybe for even users. If you are building on solena here I'm ideally an EVM guy. The very first time I was try writing anchor, it was it was the devx was somehow even though I eventually got over it, but I was expecting someone who was actually more familiar with the ecosystem to probably build something that will more be more that will be better for new people to learn stuff and everything.

So the main point I'm trying to say is that we actually need to start thinking of creating good stuff. And there are a couple of companies I love that I think we can actually draw inspiration from. So the first one is Open Zeppelin. If you have ever used any OZ library in your contracts, can you wave your hands? Beautiful.

I think if you're an EVM guy, you should really love Oz and love what they're doing. If you have ever ever used Onable Onable Twostep um vault wallet, they have a couple of very good Yeah, a very a couple of very good libraries that it just opens source for people to use and that has saved the industry from lots of hacks. If you thank god you're engineers so you are very much aware if you read wrecked regularly you would have seen this stuff of hacks going on blackout stuff. Now, oit guys make things easier by giving us libraries to make things to create first of all standard and secondly a kind of underlining security baseline for everyone to operate with. So you don't always have to write your 20 token from scratch and bother about security have it audited.

They already have a library of 20 can just use into your stuff and it makes building faster. So let's kind of learn from Ozid. And another one is Paradigm. You know the interesting thing about Paradigm is that it's actually a VC firm. So the way they actually making money is by investing in companies.

But then these guys will go all out to actually build stuff for everybody. If you use Foundry here, can you say hi?

Okay. And that's just to show you what these guys have actually done. I'm not so strong with JavaScript. So when I came to solidity, this paradigm folks built Foundry for everyone to actually test solidity with solidity and that was very mind-blowing and they did not really stop at that. You know the buzzes when you are creating stuff at that very first instance you feel the buzz everybody will be praising you and it's not even a paid product anyway.

So not like but then even after a year or two they are still working on it. There is this guy on Twitter, I don't know if you follow him, Jos. He's a Greek guy. He's the one working on Forge on Foundry by Paradigm and they always shipping very cool stuff, very cool stuff that is helping developers, helps me as a person and is helping everyone else in the industry. And now let's talk about ciphering.

You should know Cipher now. The OG, God bless you. So ciphering guys, they've been a blessing. I write contracts but I'm not so confident of my security and that's not good enough especially by the time when I'm ready to launch real products but these guys came up with something very fantastic they identified that there is a knowledge gap in web 3 almost everybody can write contracts on the other hand there are people who are very good with security but it's very rare that you see people who are good at contract and also security at the same time. So for engineers, you can actually go there to learn security and that makes it very very beautiful.

So when I when I when I launched to their website, I got to learn my foundry. I thought I knew how to use foundry till I encountered these guys. They are very very good. Then I got to know fuzzing from them invariant testing stuff like that. And it's not just talk talk.

They are giving you practical lessons to actually work with. So you should actually check them out if you haven't. It's on Twitter. Cipher and you know Patrick Collins so he's the founder of Ciphering and they are doing something very very remarkable for the industry. So I'm almost done anyway.

Now let's talk about Pascal and Michael. You should know Pascal on Twitter. Okay. I also assume everyone uses Twitter anyway. But Pascal is this very cool dude in the EVM space and he helps with mainly security too.

But then he doesn't really charge you know you should know this guy um Zach that helps with recovery but Pascar is a more kind of technical guy. So he kind of creates tools for EVM developers and in terms of communication and breaking things down Pascal is also helping with that. All right. So, same thing with Michael Amadi. He was working at OP Labs at a point and I really enjoyed him.

So, what public good should you create? Honestly, that's up to you. If you see anywhere there is a gap, just step in and do something maybe a dev tool, maybe a consumer product for example. Now, I noticed that many people invest in stocks whereas I believe if you invest more in crypto stuff, you actually make more money than stocks. That's my bias and I'm actually hoping someone will just create something for that.

And so if you feel you have any solution that you think people benefit from, you don't actually need to make it a product that you make money from. Just something for the love of it. For example, now at the company where I work, we are working on a couple of things including bank statement visualizer. Imagine okay if I ask you now that what do you spend money on so far in the last six months? You most likely might not be able to tell me factually, but we are building something for you to just see how much you spend money or how everyone how you spend money say on transport stuff like that.

It's simply a public good and we are not charging for it when we launch. How can you ship? So learn to code and thank god we are engineers here. So that makes it easier. If you're not an engineer and you want to fast track things, this type coding stuff are actually very good for building MVP.

I wouldn't recommend you push to prod with them, but I think they're actually very good for MVP. So, what's the main point of everything I'm saying? Beyond building stuff for the industry, beyond getting jobs, which most people like, start thinking of what you actually do in terms of developer tools and everything to make in terms of product for developers and for general consumers. I'm wrapping up already. So, question time.

Not like I can take question anyway. It's 15 minutes. So you might want to catch up with me on Twitter. Yeah, I tweet a lot. And thank you [Applause]