[Panel] Developer Community Building: Challenges and Experience Sharing | CrossLink Taipei 2019

our panel discussion would be developer community building challenges and experience sharing now a generation jelly keV I searched the couch judging senior French town Nauman Tinian odds of voyage hallelujah waiter Vincenza no no we send you down with a microphone jack a woman duh chil chan let me give my microphone true church and and Justin will be the moderator for this panel discussion and design is from ether Ram researcher right okay thank you very much [Applause] hello thank you to join this panel this is a easy one is that like no technical part that I think everyone spent a lap times and efforts on this topic and but before we begin this panel I want to like how the audience so who here consider yourself a developer okay who here finger self is not a developer and who here wants to be a developer oh that's really nice yeah amazing so yeah we are going to have our panelists let me introduce alberni for a firm foundation and Phoenicia has been working on supporting developers and ecosystem and liam hall for and not believe it global each global host hackathons all over world learn a story and Yuriko for past my lab but but she build an amazing student society in college and in Raoul Raoul I invited as a like project project owner so to learn about like when developers work on a project and how the project like neither I attract talents to the coal base and finally we have Scott Moore and maybe you have attempted to ask us previous panel a previous talk and Scott has like a lot of lab of like funding model and sustainability model for open source projects so now that each panelist share their stories Albert try this well hello everybody thank you to Chen I am Albert from the etherium foundation as you would expect we think a lot about developer really every aspect of developer communities not just growing the developer communities but also helping existing developers be more impactful so I'm very looking forward to just hearing the thoughts from everyone else on this panel I feel like big part of my job is to hear as much as I can from different perspectives and hopefully we at the etherium Foundation can use that to do better at supporting the ecosystem hello yeah I'm Liam from eath global in college I started this thing called hack the North which became the largest collegiate hackathon in the world where every year nearly 1500 students from around the world go to Canada and build projects on all kinds of different things it wasn't the theorem specific it was just a general hackathon and I noticed that there was a trend in etherium where you could get an enormous number of people like you are all a representative of today interested in the technology and to come and build something together over a weekend and so that's what the genesis idea was behind eath global so like like you mentioned we run these hackathons all over the world literally like in Paris Berlin Buenos Aires San Francisco Singapore and we get developers like like you that want to build an aetherium and so I've obviously seen a lot of growth in this industry and I think it's a really interesting time to be working on this stuff hello everyone my name is Yuriko I'm currently taking a gap year from my University and working full-time at our company called crypto economics lab building on out to the application framework before starting working at crypt economics lab I was running a student group research and development blockchain student group at my university oh it was at our University in Tokyo during that time I was facing a lot of challenges to kind of including a lot of developers students who are interested in blockchain space so I'm excited to hear everyone's opinion and discuss it thank you everybody this is Raul work for a company called protocol labs in the Libby to be project if you're not familiar with protocol labs you might have heard about the BTOP itself I'd BFS of Hal coin we the technology that we build tends to like be directed and targeting the infrastructural pieces of the decentralized stack so for us it tends to be very difficult to get people and developers really engaged and to understand to understand those deeply layers of the stack and get really engaged and pumped up and excited about contributing to those a were the ecosystems that we building are very open they we have created these projects but we don't consider ourselves the owners these projects particularly of Nebat appeal a p2p is being adopted by by a large number of downstream users including aetherium if here IAM 2.0 as the as a strong rock-solid networking layer that power is the protocol itself so I'm super excited about this panel it's been as I say it's very difficult for protocol labs to engage people and to market the importance of the technology that we built in which is not always visible it doesn't have a visible head it doesn't have a UI so it's very difficult for people to understand what it's about so yeah super excited about this panel cool I'm Scott Marais work in a project called get coin which helps you sort of sustain your open source projects in a variety of ways we actually got started in a very similar way to Liam and in fact have sort of history with the global a lot of our early work was sort of started around the first eath Waterloo in Waterloo Canada and we've been really focused on not only trying to solve this like sustainability problem but also figuring out ways to get more web to developers actually engaged in web 3 there's usually a bit of a gap in learning and understanding and by sort of creating these good first issues these easy ways for people to get engaged this is a way that we see you know our role and building the developer community kind of flourishing yeah and so my first question is that so you can as you can see the panelists here are like they're having their core tasks they are like busy on their own projects but they have some nice time to allocate to the community building but what are some efforts that you always wanted to have no resources like time or funding or like friends to bring more challenge to the to echo system sure I think when you talk about what we wish there was more time and resources for its there's so many different areas because I think one of the biggest challenges for any new space is quantity beats quantity every time in terms of getting people interested so each person it's really like one or two big things that suddenly go makes them go from maybe interested - very interested and one of the big challenges is how do you kind of customize for different types of people so that the thing that they might not realize they should like know about the blockchain space how do you make them aware of that but if you want to do that scalably you can't just sit down with everybody individually and like learn what their interests are and learn what motivates them and so almost by definition there's always more ways that resources can like more resources can be used to help grow the ecosystem um I think more concretely one thing that I think a lot about and even like the local Grants program that we talked about earlier as an example is how to find like instead of making it so that you have to join the entire blockchain or a theory of ecosystem how do you make it a little bit easier and kind of safer for people to get started and sometimes that means like making a little bit smaller finding a local community it could be at a university it could be at a hackathon I know personally just having dinner with some friends and I think doing more to make it easier for other people to do that so I'm not going to tell you how to have dinner with your friends but maybe we can give you some suggestions for how to organize it so you can focus on the hard part which is like the specific group of friends that you know best so those are some of the things that I always wish there was just like way more resources we could go to every city in the world we could go to every virtual community in the world but I think we can do better at like making it easier for people in those communities to bootstrap more and so that's one of the things that we're thinking a lot of at the etherion foundation nowadays yeah I okay so from so peer-to-peer networking which is what Libby to be focuses on has been pretty niche for the last few decades and as more platforms are being built more decentralized assets are being built and public goods for the world we like more developers are realizing that having important like rock solid foundations and having stable technologies where we can all collaborate to build a great networking layer that a lot of projects can rely on is is important so making the leap between peer-to-peer networking being like a pretty niche topic in the engineering side of things to making it more mainstream getting people excited that kind of outreach that kind of technical communication you know and we are a bunch of engineers and there will be to be team a protocol labs right and engineers don't precisely like writing documentation blogging and communicating outwards and putting the focus on that is a huge linchpin to be able to untap and to unlock a lot of potential that there is in the developer community and there was if only they knew that their work if they spent and invested you know their time and resources and learning this technology and contributing it to it because contributing to it because there's open source that would unlock a lot of value for everybody that's building decentralized platforms right because it's this thing then networking peer-to-peer networking is this thing that underlies underpins everything else right and you can't build robust decentralized platforms if the network is fragile just to add to what's been said I fully agree with both points that we made already I think I would add like mentorship as one core component that is also really hard to scale like you can't easily just get like a mentor is in every local community to just like volunteer and pop up but I think if we can find ways to try to get more of those people engaged and maybe incentivize them more to be Mentors I think that's super valuable like powers basically help solve this problem that reals talking about to where like it's not really common for most people to be dealing with this level of granular like network stack work when they're like entering their development career so it's like hard for a new developer to really engage in this ecosystem in like an effective way and if we can make it easier for them I think that's that's better for the system overall I would say one of the things that I wish that I had in the X system of Japan from a perspective of student we kind of black technical professors who are knowledgeable on the technology technical side of blockchain and it was it was kind of tough to find a professor who can be responsible responsible for my student club and in the end we got to find this professor from from a law department she was in John who's researching anti money laundering and stuff like that but it was yeah kind of tough to find a CS background a professor who has a computer computer science background and yeah I wish they can open up more classes who are for students who are who are interested in learning box chain technology but new to the space I think like Scott bring brings other really like time points I've been like hearing of many like blockchain developer and researchers they come saying about the mentorship is like the lake of mentorships yes like they have to like search and like find out figure out things themselves but like it's really typical to like get like professional to to like get some advice not sure if you have some experience or like comments for mentorship or like or your program projects provide some energy so one one aspect is well coming from speaking from an open source project we try to make the community itself or at least you know the people who are who make the p2p or ipfs Falcon and so on they're basically the core part of the workday right because we work at protocol labs we try to be very welcoming to everybody that tries to you know either find an issue or open a pull request or whatever and we try to provide that level of mentorship for people to whatever you file a pull request even if it's if it's not mirabile straight away you know it's not a matter of just getting your code to be a contribution but it's also like we take that as an opportunity to help instruct or teach people on how to do future contributions as well to the project or you know maybe instill development practices or I tell them about like you know things like things that they haven't immediately spotted that could turn into bugs or whatever so make that a learning experience for them as well as well as for us right because at the end of the day open-source is a two-way street right so that continued level of mentorship I think it's important in open-source communities right for the collaboration aspect to prosper one one one thing I'll mention is that in a theory on something that's really unique is that there's very few gates that prevent you from collaborating with and working with literally the people on the bleeding edge in a lot of other places it's the case that if you want to work with the leading researcher in some area you have to go through a bunch of Hoops maybe attend some institution and it's just hard but in the theory I'm if you just take the time to understand what the latest work is and you write a post on e3 search pretty much immediately you're gonna be chatting with vitalik and taking they are gonna be taking your ideas very seriously so I would definitely take advantage of that especially if you're like an up-and-coming student or someone that wants to build a research career theorem is a phenomenal place to go from you know never no one ever having heard of you to immediately becoming one of the most well known people if you put in the time and effort and I've seen countless people in this space do that and one even strategy for that if you're seriously considering that is take one of the ideas that are kind of vaguely out there right now and write it up into a very well-structured paper that goes through all the details there's one guy I know that did this really well he wrote up a paper for the plasma cash construction he just took what was out there and talks and then III search posts and just wrote a formalization of it and that that became the standard the standard like description of plasma cash and now it's used as a reference in all kinds of other papers and he's now well-known as being like the layer 2 guy so you anyone can do this if you just take the time and and put in the effort I think one of the things that's really interesting as Liam mentioned there are very few like hard gates in etherium like things that like our hard obstacles and so what you're left with are our soft gates like things that exist maybe because you personally like put it on yourself or even culturally and so one thing that we've thought a lot about in the etherium foundation is if you look at different cultures around the world you know different cultures will have a different style for how they will approach new problems and new areas one of the reasons we focus the local Grants Program on Asian communities at first is because we know that at least stereotypically in a lot of Asian cultures people are uncomfortable kind of asking questions or getting involved until they feel like they're already an expert and but this is a in a fast-moving new space no one is really an expert so part of it is about getting out of your own comfort zone for like how much confidence you need to have to move forward that said not everybody can be expected to approach the problems in the same way and so I think one of our big challenges that we would like your feedback from is you know how can we go to different areas and make it so that moving one step out of your comfort zone is enough to make progress right now I think in some cultures you'd have to move five steps out of your comfort zone whereas in others you only have to move one or two and so that's why a lot of the research and progress is dominated by those areas where you only are moving one or two and so thinking in terms of how many steps outside of one's comfort zone they need to move to be a contributor and how we can build the bridges around those steps that's something that we we care a lot about and we're going to need the feedback from everybody in every area so that we can provide better options for that just adding to Albert's comment just I just want to share my own experience with other students if there are some of the students are here at the time that I joined the space I literally knew nothing but I just I was just curious what's going on in the space and last summer I went to this conference in Hong Kong and I got to I just taught and I just I just went talked to this hello Virgil Virgil Griffith he's one of the managers at a thorium foundation I didn't know he was a that special person at that time but he treated me very nicely and he introduced me some of the very professional researchers I jumped into the space and a lot of the researchers professional researchers helped me through learning some of the new things and that helped me a lot so I was doing the exact same thing that Albert was saying I got out of my comfort zone I was making an effort to new things that I didn't know at all so please join the space with your courage and it's gonna be super fun so I just wanna quickly add to Liam's point and I think that's really good story I would just say like in addition to like research just looking at like what's out there like that's of interest to you interpret like on github like what projects are interesting to you what protocols are interesting to you just like opening up issues or just working with existing issues and trying to like open up PR for them is a really good starting point and like there's nothing stopping you if you want to go and like do that yeah I just wanted to add to to the previous points here I think if you if you realize the space is being built as we as we speak right and it's being built every single day and the people who are building it tend to be the ones that are presenting their own work at conferences and you know the meetups and so on so getting speaking don't be afraid to reach up to them and speak to to the people about the work that they're presenting because in many cases they are the authors and they're interested as well and like you know that they're invested in it and they're happy to continue you know elaborating on that topic exploring ideas with you helping you you know helping onboard you into that topic to continue contributing so don't be afraid to like break that barrier break the ice because generally like you might feel that there is you know some kind of blocker that does never access that's there's no blockage right and in most of the cases it doesn't exist because as I say people people want to speak about the work and they're and at the end of the day everything that's being built here most of the things are open-source right so they're free for they're built on the principle of collaboration and they're built on the principle of you know getting a community together to continue evolving it as a as one yes okay so I think oh you know they are like the South Gate is like the challenge of the entry entry barrier of entry to the system and I think I think yuriko's December is really good I talk to people but and as Scott says you you try to like like explore all the open source project but most of the project in ecosystem like they're really like hard to understand or like p2p is like you need to like understand the blockchain and then you you you start to appreciate the value of like the the p2p layer but how how do you like get the new contributors to start like to appreciate those like niche project and like get started with it every one way to answer that which is the best way to get in is to try to build something like in the shortest time frame you can imagine like what can you get done in like seven days is that a hard deadline for yourself I want to build some project which takes advantage of block chains in seven days and then when you start to do that you're gonna be forced to figure out all these different elements of your project it's probably gonna be some peer to peer messaging component and I figure the UI how do you interact with the wallets how is the contract designed like the whole system you have to figure out and just try to set a limit to yourself in seven days to get something literally anything built and by doing that you'll realize oh there's a lot of stuff in this industry and that's when you understand why there's so many people doing stuff so yeah the best way just like understand one project really well and you'll you'll find all these pieces in the process and to do that maybe it's better to join one of the hackathons like eath global host I just recently joined eath Boston that happened last month and it was very good experience a lot of projects were providing their own product that so that everyone can utilize that project a product into their product they can build they are building during the hackathon so it's maybe easier for intermediate beginners yeah so from a project perspective I think we it's on us to make it easy for people to actually get acquainted enough and people have different styles right and people have different learning styles and ways that they wanna ramp up to do understand a particular set of technologies some of them want to get into building straightaway want to be able to read technical documentation up front to like figure out all the different you know elements and their mind to then start reading code and actually start developing whether that be so we need to cover all of these bases as as projects right and and that in sometimes in some cases is challenging right so one model that I like a lot is self-serve so if we use platforms for example like Bitcoin or other platforms or even you know in hackathons Heath global hackathons and so on we encourage people to we give them enough information buy a workshop within those you know hackathons and so on to give them enough information so that they can start exploring the codebase or they can start exploring a project and then they themselves writing documentation that would be essentially for them but if it's for them because they're you know new people in this project then it can be then it's probably readable by a lot more people of their same level right so we can use that it kind of like the the dog feeding aspect of you know writing documentation for oneself to then push it out to the crowd right that is one good way of onboarding people projects need to make it very easy so that you know minimize the friction so that when there's a potential contributor that might be potentially interested in your project that would not like to hack with it but would like to build inside it so instead of actually using it as a library you would in the case of nepeta P there are users that are more interested in building lit b2b itself and like playing with dhts and pops up and playing with with you know handshake protocols and multiplexing and so on then actually building applications right on top of Liberty P that's particularly my my case right that's why I work on on the project itself to make it easy for those people we need to be we need like they need to have one place where they can go and see everything that needs their help in the project right and this could be by a gig this could be github issues that are tagged specifically which then get promoted for example by a bounties and get coin or whatever but there's a there's a lot more things that that can be done and you know that's I think the projects really really need to level up in this particularly maybe to be just add I think that that makes a lot of sense like documentation I just want to like really hit home that we I think it's kind of our bad as a community in part like our documentation is not that good and tutorials are not that good like I think this is more of an ask for the community but if you do happen to go through Liam's like steps and like build your own project just really making sure that you have good documentation and making sure that you have like almost if you could write a tutorial for it I think I'd be super helpful often you'll find that like when you search for a certain topic it'll be out of date by like maybe a year or so they'll be like a medium article or something and like that is something we need to rectify so we definitely are working on that but that's a call to action for the community as well to at that how do I do and have anything to add sure I guess the only thing I have to add people have said so many great things here so I'll just go in a different direction and and remind everyone that it's okay to go at your own pace I think what's wonderful about this ecosystem is it's new it's growing there will be many many years of like great changes and improvements to come I know that especially nowadays it always feels like you have to rush into everything because like you're gonna miss your chance you know I felt like I missed blockchain and aetherium when I first got interested in 2016 right so everyone feels that way at first but you have to go at your own pace and yeah it's the opposite of running out of things to do it's going to be there's gonna be more things to do it's going to be easier to get started so when you are feeling ready and maybe energized to do more than like following and reading you've heard a lot of good ideas from from this group but yeah like 2020 in 2021 and so on there's just gonna be even more here so you know take your time if you need it yeah thanks Ted so really like good advice and I'm thinking like taking questions from the audience any question so hi I'm feigning so I'm kind of like co-organizer for this event so I'm just wondering because we're talking about you know like developer community and my background is actually found startup so in startup we're talking about ecosystem but it's pretty similar things but I'm just wondering you know like Taiwan we have like really good you know like engineering you know like coop and then we have you know like different kind of like a you know language you know like community and they were doing pretty well I'm just wondering you know like um for developer you know like a exterior or sort of like they're like you recall just say you know like a you things if Japan got more professor teaching school and that might be get more student understand blockchain so I'm just wondering you know like it's a you know type a certain uh Ysera meetups you know co-organizer I'm just wondering is there a sort of the way to sort of build you know like community there about there and then how do we sustain the you know like system so like citizen or you know our major you know organizer they have to you know like answer or if a kind of you know questions but you know would be easier to just that you know like a anyway my idea just is there there you know structure for developers to kind of like learn but itself and you know to then as a group like anything thanks I don't have an answer for the entirety of the layering but one small thing that you guys could do and I would recommend doing is run a hackathon [Music] yeah I really just like imagine everyone in this room instead of watching us talk we're like talking amongst each other and working on projects and their laptops together and you know at the end of the day they all present what they built that's a really fast way of learning a lot of the things that maybe you don't realize you could learn much quicker than it seems that's like that that I run one recommendation in terms up in terms of nutrient a good developer community I would add I actually got on the same question from from a person from interim foundation before why isn't there a good developer community in Japan even though it seems they are a lot of good developers individually who are interested in blockchain and I think it's it took me a while to think about the question I couldn't answer the question immediately but now that I think there is not there is not a lot of knowledgeable investors venture capitals who can invest on this protocol technology there isn't a lot of there aren't a lot of good startups who can invest their times on their protocol research and then there not a lot of good there is not a lot of good developer protocol developer community here so it's like a notorious cycle coming from the venture capital not good funding resource so maybe you won't think me we wish to have in Japan as well as maybe Taiwan is a good venture capital funding resource who are not knowledgeable on the protocol itself yeah that's those are very good points another aspect that I would like to add is one thing that's amazing about being part of this ecosystem is the fact that you get to work on global technologies with a global team that's spread across the world with mixes so many different cultures so many different so many different approaches about how to think like in terms of you know thinking about things reasoning through and communicating it's just like any it's just mind-boggling that any developer anywhere in the world can participate in this global ecosystem right and I think not a lot of developers have realized this in the sense that I come from a small island in Spain right and most people who are studying at university most people who are studying you know they're for for the future they get told that they have to look for a job normally in the same place where they work or they have to relocate but the fact that being a developer being an engineer in this particular set of technologies gives you unlimited access to work for any company that in the world or any project or build your own project or participate in open source communities like structure your day in which have a way that you want to structure it and get incentivize for it that's just amazing right and so reducing that friction between what do I as a developer what do I invest in learning right so that it will get me somewhere in the future and to make those developers realize that by learning this they can literally like they have you know a limited pathway to the future I think that is you know a potential linchpin as well okay yeah I think that conclude oh okay okay okay oh because yeah we have a break and so we can take another one questions for the audience so anyone okay sorry I'm not supposed to ask this question since I'm one of the staff here my name is Julie I'm a researcher you know so I'm pointing at Cogan Iser of a type of amitabh and I just came back from DEFCON as well so I I would like to give you a feedback and a small passion for about hackathon things so the feedback is so I heard well what where else says when you are trying to attend summer conferences you can always approach the speaker ensure your new ideas this is really this mindset is kind of different from well how the Asian students behave because we are know we normally just think there's a gap and there's a distance between the instructor and a student it's not easy for like students information to you know take that left because well you gotta wait wait what you're supposed to do um I mean we used to try to bring more confidence and white we already have to have the courage to to approach to that instructor so I think that this kind of massive it's pretty it's pretty important I mean to all of us here in this room and as a organizer from tapping to meet up I think one of the challenge is to you know to to bring the the the information the technology itself to the newcomers and this is actually hard is we already around the community for like 2 years 2 plus year 3 years and we were doing like videotape taping and we just record everything on the speech and then we will post on video but the audience not that much so we we then tried another approach which is we write an articles no matter it's an intermediate level or or more evidence articles or still the these contents are not really get into the audience I mean it's not really well known yet so maybe hackathons the next step we should do we should take so I would like to hear more opinions up front if global and what you say this about basically the best way to bring in developers together and figure out something learn your stuff so is there any outcome after afterwards like for example any content that the sort of like in a whale to reticence so that the people who are going to enjoy in the next alpaca who is going to reduce that content or is there any ideas that you were going to conduct yeah yeah that's a good question I think I think it might be the case that hackathons are kind of like the best way of iterating on people's understanding of the technology because they are not structured exactly like maybe it's really hard to you know record videos of everything and have that always be up to date or write articles and keep that always being up to date but at the hackathon that the model is like just show up repeatedly at these types of events and just talk to people and in the discussions you will learn a lot and then when you have a problem you just go to the guy you know across the hall ask them and how do I do this thing and they'll give the latest up-to-date answer on the spot and so it's the fact that it's this like time and place where in all of your questions will be answered in a relatively short timeframe because everyone's in the room together that enables you to like have a really fast knowledge transfer as opposed to like written documents or videos which theoretically are better they're just in practice really hard to maintain so at least in my experience hackathons are just good for that reason it's like a very special time in place where things can be learned fast and in terms of outcomes we do actually produce a lot of video content like if you go to our YouTube we have like tons and tons of videos and we try to add more from every event that are more of like a snapshot we look at it more as a snapshot in time as opposed to like the de-facto description of this technology there's a lot of content it gets produced and then at the end of the day it's the relationships that are formed that are also really valuable so like a good example is get coin like Scott and and and the end of the the panel here is he met his co-founders at one of these hackathons and so as a good output of the act natural hackathon or there's more teams in the industry now with a shared vision and a shared understanding of what they want to do together so there's a lot of reasons I keep talking for ages about why hackathons are great there's a lot of reasons why they're valuable and I think they just like they gloss over all these like issues that you described in a way that which is some value me we're not the perfect value but some good value everybody any chance you are going to Taipei soon we literally have like like you name like a top like 100 populated city in the world we have an email in our inbox of somebody that wants to run a hackathon there I don't think we need to be the gatekeepers if you want to run 8th Taipei then run eath Taipei like we'll definitely find a way to support you we're just trying to run as many events as we can in places that we feel confident we can like structure the structure logistically but um there should definitely be an EVE Taipei whether it's us or you guys independently running it that's a different question sweet thank you so if we are like running a hacksaw what's the like advice for our organizers yeah I think it's a really long answer I think if you guys if you guys like follow up with me afterwards I can give you the playbook in and help you out I think that concludes our panel and thank you all for joining and thank you for we started shared thank you very much yeah thank you so yo can you go