around 2021-2022, i first found blockchains and it was fascinating as a piece of technology to me and specially after you know the “satoshi lore”, how can one not be a fan? he singlehandely catalysed a financial change. bitcoin wasn’t created to create digital money and this isn’t what most people don’t understand, instead it came to exist naturally as part on how the system was architected. i’m open to learn whatever strikes my curiosity, so next thing i knew was heads down into blockchain papers.

i got into gitcoin as a junior dev around jan 2022, thanks to @sidcode who bet on me. those were the first internet dollars, or rather crypto. the work was remote and it was mostly web dev though i wanted more core tougher projects.

  • i worked on stewards-backend (as it was called) which was working with a startup called karma that was building APIs for DAO-tooling. gitcoin was transitioning into a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization, these are organizations that run on-chain) and this tool was a way to transparently monitor the core contributor performances using score points. simply put, a crypto webapp to display data on core members. the math for scores were handled in backend too like which factors were important & by how much; the frontend has changed a lot (maybe backend too). here.

  • also worked on simple frontend sites

    • gitcoin primer: a site to explain what gitcoin does. first time i dealt with SVGs (vector graphics) rendering efficiently, with good design. i didn’t design all SVGs though, we had designers (only modified them). find here
    • regen-vs-degen: card game site dealing with SVGs too. i was called in last moment for this, they had to present this at a conference & i pulled two all-nighters and pushed it on time. fun times. find here

  • later, i met LSkyWalker @Beler on discord who told me about padawanDao which funded broke students (me) to attend crypto conferences based on their work and skill in the space. i applied and got rejected and only got in the third time for ethereum community conference, paris, 2022. it was one of tbe best weeks of my life.

ethccparis2022

i attended lots of events from ledger to crypto security startups and also participated in the eth cc hackathon with some cool people i met there. we built web3d, a decentralized 3D maps thanks to zero-knowledge proofs!, checkout here. though it sounds too cool, it was relatively a simple demo. we won a category prize from polygon worth 2k euros.

  • i also worked on a college project under a prof where the aim was to have a literal college election on-chain but it should be a private network and also extremely cheap. it was me & a phd senior (mostly me, he wasn’t helping much). we were basically trying to run a smol lite blockchain node on a raspberry pi and wanted to make a cluster running the network. fast forward, it was a failed attempt BUT it was good experience, the phd guy was doing another of his own project, and everything was slow, it took weeks to get new raspberry pis to test.