Week 13 has finished and the first of the final course at the Coding Dojo, Projects and Algorithms, is over. What an exhausting week. Seriously, this might have been the most mentally and emotionally challenging week of the entire boot camp experience so far. Not just because of the difficulty and time management necessary for keeping up with the boot camp, hackathon, and extra components, but in personal life as well. The culmination of everything presented a particularly difficult week to navigate and I am thankful it is over and that I was able to remain as focused as I had after using intermissions to reflect on the reason and value I gain from the commitments I've made in my life. 

With only 3 weeks left, the finish line has really snuck up on me. Welcome to the non-technical recap where I'm talking about the articles, webinars, and non-coding side of what I'm learning. If you want week 13's coding stuff, you can find it here.

<usual_enterance> If you're new here I'm creating this blog series as I go from coding newbie to working in web3. I'm creating this to reflect on the technical and non-technical growth and to leave it behind for others who might be interested in how they can follow a similar path. </usual_enterance>\

In this week's non-technical recap:

• Daily Articles, focused on DAOs
• a16z Crypto Canon readings
• Chainlink Spring Hackathon status
• What's Next?

Articles

I tweet every day about at least one web3 article, here are the biggest takeaways from those articles this week:

• Differing definitions change how DAOs can be categorized
• DAOs are decentralized in their; infrastructure, payments, workforce, governance, community
• Reminiscent of cooperatives, these allow for permissionless and anonymous membership and 
• They are becoming the natural governance structure for collaborations and organizations
• Narrative control over terms imposes authority and exclusion; we must identify what’s at stake in these discussions and introduce a spectrum within the label
• DAC: companies, sub-cat of DAO’s, with distinction sources from paid dividends 
• Blockchain can add financial incentives to people to participate in, maintain, and build opensource services
• DAOs solve for governance limits such as age, stakeholder alignment, access barriers

And you can find my sources here:

• The Spring of the DAOs  
• What is a DAO? 
• A DAO Defined: The Big Picture 
• Scissor Labels 
• DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide 
• Blockchain Can Wrest the Internet From Corporations' Grasp
• DAOs: a new organizational and governance paradigm

a16z Crypto Canon 

Articles are grouped by categories, found in bold below, and articles that I found within articles are identified with indentation.

Cryptocollectibles, Token Curated Registries (TCRs), and Curation Markets

Basics of understanding various token theories, and examinations of why they may be more popular or effective over another.

I am particularly interested in the application of TCRs, several project ideas were added to my list.

• The Emergence of Cryptoeconomic Primitives
• Token Lexicon
• Digital Pets That Don’t Die
• Digital Collectibles and the Weird Future of “Digibles”
• Cryptocollectibles Are XLNT, But Nobody Knows What’s Next
• Rare Pepe
• Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information
• When Can Token Curated Registries Actually Work?
• Token-Curated Registries 1.0
• Token Curated Registry (TCR) Design Patterns
• Curate This: Token Curated Registries That Don’t Work.
• TCR Design Flaws: Why Blockchain Needs Reputation
• Building ‘Google For The Economic Web’ on The Ethereum Blockchain.

Developer Tutorials, Practical Guides, and Maker Stories

Helpful segway and nice way to end the Crypto Canon. Will be trying out the Crypto Zombies ASAP

• How to Code Your Own CryptoKitties-Style Game on Ethereum
• Learning Solidity Part 2: Commit-Reveal Voting
• Introduction to zk-SNARKs with Examples
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Smart Contracts in Ethereum
• zkSNARKs: Driver's Ed.

Fun fact of the day; the Crypto Canon is fin.

Chainlink Spring Hackathon

Our team is back to full and the project is full steam ahead. Clickable prototypes and basic functionality have made an appearance and lots of learning on the fly is happening. 3 of the of 5 of us on the team are still in the Coding Dojo boot camp so don't forget were are truly beginner coders. The other 2 have a little more experience but they aren't beating us by that far so this is definitely a team that has to learn as we build, regardless I am happy with where we have gotten to today. The webinars have been fantastic introductions to some of the protocols and tools available to us.

Webinars Watched:

• Polkadot, Parachains, Substrate
  • Great intro to what these are capable of
• Adding Play to Earn Mechanics to a Browser based game on Polygon
  • Example of how to add P2E, should have been a code along
• Intro to Substrate
  • Further intro to Substrate
• Building Universal Data Feeds With Covalent and Chainlink
  • Helpful for coming up with project ideas
• Alchemy: How to listen to NFT mints in real time
  • Interesting webinar, will keep in back pocket for a future project
• EVM Opcodes for Gas Optimizations
  • Very valuable, does anyone have a gas conservation cheat sheet?
• How to Win Bounties by using Filecoin x Chainlink together
  • Review of hackathon reward categories, this is aligned perfectly our project
• Alchemy: Building faster NFT projects
  • We are going to use Morlis for this project, but I intend to stick with Alchemy after the hackathon so I found plenty of value in this session
• Smart Contract Security and Auditing 101
  • Clearly explained, and easy to understand intro for security and auditing
• Why you should use BAS (BSC Application Sidechain)
  • I’m convinced to at least experiment with it in a future project

What's Next?

A lot. This next week will be week 2 of the daily article reading + tweet combo which, if you've been following along, is the end of focus period for that section. I finished a16z Crypto Canon list! But, now that means shifting to the NFT Canon and finishing up what I didn't get to during the NFT weeks. There are a few more webinars coming up that I want to watch that not code alongs, so some time will be spent there. Aside from these non-technical items, I've got many technical items to be working on; projects to finish the boot camp, the hackathon project, personal projects, and so on. Which you can read all about here.

If you'd like to join the learning community I'm building on Discord for web3, you can find the link for that here. It's a space that I am trying to build for myself and others to share their growing knowledge of all things web3. 

You can also find me here:

LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter |  My Website