AMA: The Road from Web2-to-Web3 - Ryan Coordinator and Nader Dabit

what up youth denver welcome to today's developer doubt ama notter ryan we're gonna make it happen thank you for being here uh so obviously we got to kick it off with some swag who wants some of these developer dow socks and a probably nothing sticker first one to come grab it gets it yes it's a duocracy get in there so for those of you who don't know developer dao we're training the next generation of web 3 builders and we're building public goods and we're training builders to build public goods we're making a better world yeah yeah we're getting some collapse for a better world that's good that's good we're on the same page um have you got any talking points now's the time yeah i mean the title of this talk is like are this discussion is the road from web 2 to web3 and um so we're going to talk about both the dow itself because like that was part of my journey from web 2 into web 3 but also just anyone that has questions or wants to kind of just um have like a discussion around certain talking points about kind of transitioning from web 2 to web3 i've been a developer for like 10 years worked at um the traditional tech world for nine years and transitioned into web 3 like in april of 2021 um okay sorry i wasn't talking close enough so i transitioned to this space in april of 2021 and um i have a lot of thoughts around you know how developers can kind of you know like this like this like this okay yeah anyway so like this it's gonna be a general like discussion around both developer dial as well as uh moving from web 2 to web3 so ryan do you want to kind of like take it from here or what yeah i absolutely do i i made a promise that i would wear this on stage and so so that i could get it so i'm just going to take it put it on so uh first of all i'd love to get our our members if anyone's got some questions they want to tee us up uh what world do you want to see us build or what questions do you have about the world that we're building uh the man with the mic is back here this is a discussion format you know so much of the of the theme of the dao has been like it's so easy to get on stage and talk at people right anybody can talk at people you know i could i mean i really could i could talk at you all day i'd have a great time doing it i don't know that it would suit you guys though so we're here to connect with the community and and build a better world together so let's talk about let's talk about public goods let's make it happen um [Music] yeah does anyone have any questions they want to throw out a man with his hand let's go yeah just to kick this off i'm kind of new to the whole i'm a web 2 dev getting into this so could you just give a brief overview of dowse and in this case what differentiates your dow developer dao in this case from just dowse in general yeah like what do you what do you guys do i i know nothing about what it is you have going on so just an intro would be kind of nice all right all right that's fair it's a softball so um dows are like in the traditional world you would have a company right and the company would have shareholders and the shareholders would vote and you'd have directors and employees and they'd be bound to a certain jurisdiction but in the web 3 world it's not all about boots on the ground it's about having a global community so we've got members and we're a democratic dow and our mission is training builders and building public goods and so we all decide together what do we want to happen and it's instead of like uh we employ you to do this job it's more like what is your vision and what are your dreams and how can we support you to make that happen what do you want to see happen how can we enable you to take initiative how can we give you resources to make it happen so the model is a little different it's not about you changing yourself to work with us it's about us adding your uniqueness and growing together was that buzzwords or did i answer your question yeah i mean the way i might also phrase it is like it's just a community of people that have gotten together and we kind of like share ownership of the community and we build stuff together we make friends and we make connections we you know people have landed jobs they've had opportunities and stuff like that and part of like building this community the strength of it as it grows um typically they're tokenized so it can be an erc 721 token or an erc20 token or both so we launched our dow with an erc 721 anyone that wanted to join could actually pick one up for free they all they had to do is like mint it directly from the contract and in order to kind of like access the token gated discord you would need the token now our um objective is to build public goods that don't need any type of token or anything to kind of enjoy what we're what we're doing and to maybe benefit from it so a lot of the things that we're doing are like open source software free events um like we did at developer down meetup last night that everyone in the whole world could have come to regardless if you're a member or not we're putting on web 3 con which is going to be like to me the the best web 3 conference ever rahat is over here and a lot of people are here from the dow that have helped organize it we share really really great content from our twitter feed a very good curated list of developer learning resources and anyone that participated in the dow over the last six months if they um found themselves bored or they don't want to kind of be a part of the community anymore they can kind of take that token and transfer it to someone else and let them come in or they can even sell it so it's kind of like they have stake they have some type of ownership and um we're still just experimenting and finding like new things but i've never ever i've been a community builder for like five or six years i've never seen the incentive uh like the incentives line up to build a strong community than i have with dallas i mean i've i've seen and i've tried almost everything and this is like on a like a whole other level like i would say when you think about these ideas of like 10 or 100 x improvements i think that dallas are kind of like giving that for people that want to build communities so yeah tooling to enable people's visions and communities across the world and if you've got if you've got communities you want to see built like maybe we can we can help you build them if your community is about public goods i see a question yeah hi yeah i'm curious how you see uh brands surviving like big brands how are they going to survive in web3 they're not well i was going to ask how can they leverage dows uh to build you know communities of brand advocates and things like that what sort of data analytics i'm also curious can we leverage to understand how like they're engaging these communities um traditional companies i mean we're starting to see a lot of like quote-unquote web 2 companies try to kind of get their foot in the door in web 3. a lot of the high-end brands like burberry and gucci are like getting into nfts you obviously have heard like facebook paypal like google microsoft all like doing blockchain stuff like mainly i feel like the hype over the last six months has kind of like gotten all of them you know wanting to participate i have no idea how those brands will be doing it but i'm sure they're going to try and i guess we're still going to kind of see how that happens but most of the time you know when someone launches something there's meaning behind it that like the successful projects either are providing some utility or something like a value or there's like meaning behind it like the person that created this community they have like a background of doing cool art or something like that and they want to kind of actually you know now maybe monetize that whereas like buying an nft from like mcdonald's just doesn't feel right you know so i don't know what i don't know the answer to that all right all right all right i had to think about it for a second it's a real mind mindset shift so like brands right they they have their thing that they're doing if you want to leverage let's let's talk about developer down okay so we're building public goods right if you have a brand and you want to ride our success then you have to be about what we're about so you have to care about public goods you have to actively support public goods so it's not enough to just i mean and we welcome you to come give us money for sponsorships and like all that stuff that's really good but if you want your brand to actually carry weight with people then you have to be about what we're about so we're about public goods so get together with your teams and talk about how can we actually make the world a better place like the mcdonald's example it's like are they you know they'd have to they'd have to really work kind of hard to be about public goods but they could do it if they really wanted to if the leadership team got together and they're like you know what we're gonna we're gonna go feed the hungry we're gonna make that our thing we're gonna pick a week every year where we just give out hamburgers or something you know it takes some thinking hey what's the um what are the big impediments for hunting web 2 developers going into web 3. could you hear me no one more time what's the big impediments preventing web 2 developers going to web 3. what are the big impediments yeah to getting into web 3 psychological impediments are are the greatest like people hold themselves back they're like oh i couldn't do it or oh i'm not good enough or oh it's too confusing like spoiler alert it's confusing forever it never stops feeling that way you just gotta want you just gotta dive right in and make it happen so join up with developer dao get the nft we'll train you up how do you how do you alleviate those sorry oh no no go ahead how do you alleviate those that big hurdle you know what's the easiest way to get started um i can kind of speak to this a little bit a lot of the the focus that i've had over the last 10 months is onboarding developers into web3 and i've kind of talked to like so many of them and seen so many of them successfully transition i would say like two thoughts around this whole idea of like what would be the impediments first of all the tech stack is a lot different than what we're used to as developers in the traditional world um i've talked about this a million times but um i guess it's worth repeating here since you asked but like when you build in a traditional tech stack like using primitives like aws or maybe uh google cloud or or just building your own server you typically have like these building blocks like you need a server you need a database you need a file storage system maybe s3 you need like a front end and like using these primitives and these building blocks you can build out an application and the web3 space the tech stack is like so much different because if you're building like a decentralized application parts of the tech stack are not even fully fleshed out yet like so what does peer-to-peer data look like a decentralized uh data like off-chain data store we have a handful of options but none of them are like as mature as something like a traditional database so i'm trying to understand like where all these pieces fit in how mature they are like when to use them um and then now we're adding in this the idea of like smart contracts and blockchain in addition to all that other stuff identity is a lot different so i think the successful developers are kind of like taking a look at like what the tech stack looks like understanding the ecosystem and like which tools and primitives and protocols to use and learning how to do those or learning how to use those front end developers tend to transition extremely well because they don't really need to do anything with their skill set transitions 100 but a back-end developer typically has issues because like i mean i wouldn't say issues but they can't just directly transfer their knowledge but i would say that um another just general thought is like web 3 seems to reward the people that take action so if you want to kind of get into web 3 um you you you can have there's just so much opportunity and i've never really say that i've met like too many talented people that wanted to get in that weren't able to just land a role um and the people that seem to succeed the fastest are the ones that just like take action without having to like have their hand held or have someone like tell them what to do like join a uh that discord or maybe follow a couple of protocols that you would like to work with understand like the people that are involved in those um find ways to contribute and get your your name out there and things like that um one final thought is like i'm a big fan of like we've been talking about public goods but grants programs and web 3 are really really really powerful and people that want to kind of get their foot in the door in web 3 don't have to actually like quit their job and go full time you can actually land a grant so the graph protocol where i work we have around a million or two million dollars of grants that we give out every um every wave and part of those grants could be for tooling or documentation or educational resources so if you want to get paid you want to learn you want to like get connected with the people within these protocols every protocol has a grants program sometimes up to in the hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars in certain circumstances so i think like finding a grants program uh getting paid to contribute and learning and that's a great way to kind of get your foot in the door as you've been building out your dow what are some of the biggest challenges in terms of managing and governance for the dao it's not so easy [Laughter] what are the biggest challenges getting getting the right people in the right positions and getting the structures right and being nimble so we know that we're gonna have to reinvent ourselves and come out of the cocoon over and over and over again and we just have to be comfortable with that so uh i just uh we just had an election for our operations team i'm on it kemp he's not here but we're leading that operations team and today we've got an operations team because we realized we needed an operations team because we had operational challenges months from now seasons from now that structure may change we'll have different structures um but if we continue to listen to our community and bring in new people and work with our partners uh and stay nimble we can meet the challenges that we have at the time that we have them so so just just being open to change so it's challenging to be constantly changing but uh you get used to it yeah it seems to be defining like the balance between taking action and getting community buy-in and how delegation might play into all that it's it's been extremely complicated i mean governance is like one of the toughest problems to solve in the world so like in general you know it always has been like historically i think dows offer a better um mechanism for people to kind of like express their thoughts and feelings around how a company or a team should like function better than what we had in the past but it's still not there yet we're still learning and improving and stuff and i think everyone is just experimenting and i think dow tooling over the next 12 months or so will probably help us out a lot but um i think the key is maybe like learning from as many other dows as possible experimenting and being willing to change and try to understand that you're never going to be perfect and you're going to make mistakes and when that happens you just learn from those and keep going i bet you weren't expecting the the challenges that we had when you released that nft the first time things changed yeah i got one from josh back here from metagov chris i just have one question why that's one question why what why why are we here just why we're making a better world we're having a lot of fun even if we close the dow today and we never do anything again the party that we had last night was worth it yes that's what i like to hear great answer we we can't stand by and do nothing the world needs us to build these public goods and it we can't expect anyone else to do it for us it's got to be us it's gotta be today there are people out there who need what we're doing so that's why i wake up every day i'm like we're making a better world and we need your help get in here join us work with us i'm gonna make it happen thank you josh teed us up for that one another question about oh we have a couple but um we'll here and then these two here yeah and then we'll come back here hi thank you for the party last night it was amazing shout out to developer now let's give a round of applause for developer doubt i want to shout out em and um ryan and all the other coordinators and they they did an amazing job i mean we're just so lucky i guess we should start with a court uh i have a coordination question for ryan coordinator what do you think are some of the business biggest obstacles for dow coordination and coordination in general in these systems what are some of the biggest hurdles some of the biggest hurdles so there's a balance to be struck in terms of initiative and empowerment so like i was saying you gotta take initiative uh and you gotta you gotta take action and so right now each of us as individuals we're empowered to do whatever we want um and then on behalf of the dow there's a question of how much initiative can an individual member take like if someone buys an nft today and joins our discord and then talks to you and says i'm going to make a commitment on behalf of the dao like is that legitimate trying to find a way to structure the empowerment around how much initiative people can take and how legitimate that is is is a a structural coordination question and then once we've decided where we want to go like getting community buy-in on direction then coordinating people to all move in the same direction at the same time so so getting ideas from the community and like making decisions about them collectively uh continues to be a problem not just for developer dao and not just for taos in general but for like countries and justice systems it like is not a small problem i'm getting the the two minute warning so i think we had two more questions up here so first of all thank you very much for the party last night uh do you have any advice for developers with a web 2 background looking to get involved in grants programs yeah just uh i would just kind of uh look at the landscape i should write a post about this but i've done a couple of threads that line up like 20 grants programs that are very generous i would look at all those programs maybe narrow it down to five and then just think about ways that you might be able to contribute using whatever knowledge that you have or maybe even things that you don't know today so a great example of a good place to start is let's let's say you want to learn near protocol send in a grants request to create the best near protocol tutorial ever built before even if you've never written a line of the code you can learn that as for five thousand dollars i'm pretty sure you're gonna get it as long as you express that and that's a really easy place to start we've given grants to the tune of like half a million dollars or more to developers that like a single developer that is proposing a tool that will improve the web3 ecosystem also so there's like a very wide range but use your use your um imagination and just throw ideas out there you just never know what's gonna like happen and yeah thank you they're they're pretty generous imagination is the key word there you gotta channel your dreams lots of people are out here ready to help make your dreams come true you just got to channel them don't let don't lose them do we have time for one more question and thank you for coming to the party we got to do a lot more of those sponsors let's make it happen uh hey uh i was curious how do you guys deal with people that have different appetites for decentralization when you're building these tools so like you said you mentioned like building open source software you know what if someone wants to just like run everything on a database you know how do you choose that stack obviously developers have different tech stacks that they want to use how do you come to that decision and uh yeah i was just curious how that like voting works i think the the primitives that web 3 offers are kind of a lot different than anything we've ever thought of before and if you really want to build applications that are truly decentralized and therefore leverage some of the characteristics like having composable open public back-ends then it's automatically kind of out of the question to use a centralized database i also think that there are um a there is a like suite of technologies that we have today to build on and it's different than what we had five years ago and it's different than what we had 10 years ago and if you want to kind of be a web 3 developer that doesn't mean you're going to not use all of those things that you had in the past instead you're going to now say okay now we have blockchains we have um you know we have identity that can be completely anonymous identity we have new ways of self-sovereign identity where can i you know leverage my existing skill set along with these new tools and primitives to build out new applications and then you know kind of come up with things based on just your understanding of the entire ecosystem and i also think that if you want to kind of build a decentralized application today you can't always have every single piece of functionality that you need because we don't have the the air the the space is too nascent so you have this idea of progressive decentralization where you kind of build applications decentralized when possible and then you know fill in the the other parts i guess with other pieces that may be not be they might not be centralized decentralized yeah all right thank you everyone this has been so awesome and it's early days we can't wait to build a better future with you come bring us your dreams we'll make it happen thank you everyone