This week was a bit of a challenge that slowed the BUIDL momentum I had but nonetheless, it was filled with learning and project advancements that I can be proud of. I struggled a little with energy levels this week which may have impacted my ability to fully comprehend all of the material I covered and my capacity to stay on task all day. I did what I could to help strengthen my focus and avoid distractions but hopefully, this week's recap showcases the commitment.
Working with APIs in the front-end was a bit of a learning curve for me while I tried to understand how to fetch the data and store it in JSON format and then showcase it. Blockend work with API has been all the scope so far for me and there's enough of a difference that it made me slow down and work through some learning materials. This was the cornerstone of the main projects I was hoping to make significant progress on this week, Road to Web3 Analytics and TheDrop. Regardless, the progress was enough for me to reflect here with pride so let's get into it!
p.s. check it out, I have all the PoK's from Road to Web3 finally!
p.p.s. I originally mislabeled last week as Week 22, it was in fact Week 23 which makes this Week 24.
<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 recap:
- Supportive Content
- WAGMI Squad
- Road to Web3 Analytics
- TheDrop
- Polygon BUIDL IT
- What's Next?
Supportive Content
Reading articles and watching videos to learn, review, and research.
GraphQL Explained in 100 Seconds
- This and the next one to understand GraphQL better.
GraphQL Full Course - Novice to Expert
APIs for Beginners - Learn how to use APIs in this free video course
- Learning how to work with API's and JSON was the central effort of this entire week
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There were a LOT of other videos where I watched snippets this week on working with APIs, Axios, fetch (js), and next.js but I forgot to write them down; and because they were more reference material than anything else, I'm not going to list them all here.
WAGMI Squad
I've secured what will be the official domain for the squad, after we get a few more updates in place for the website we will move it from Vercel to IPFS and assign it to "wagmisquad.dao". I purchased the domain with Unstoppable Domains to reserve it. After the DAO is on-chain with a wallet of its own, I'll transfer the token from the wallet I currently have it stored on.
A component of our all-hands meeting last week was to talk about how a number of current members that had joined the Discord but had not checked in or responded to any messages in nearly two months. It was ultimately determined that these members would be notified one final time with a week-long notice. If they did not respond to confirm they were still committed, then they would be removed. Unfortunately, none of these pledged members responded, thus we had no choice but to remove them from the Discord and subsequently their place in the coming DAO.
In a squad, there is limited to no room that can be allocated to individuals who are not contributing to conversation or efforts. The size of these DAOs requires that everybody be active. And, while these people were absent there were others who had reached out wanting to join. We now have room for new members who would like to join the Squad, please send a DM to me on any platform with any questions if you are interested in joining. There is plenty of work to be done around building:
- the website
- the DAO
- internal documentation
- setting up the discord with bots to automate functions
The intention of the Squad is to be an accelerator to help its members quickly build old and new skills to reach the next level in their career as web3 developers, there's especially no long-term commitment as we hope that members can quickly advance through collaboration and feel confident upon retiring from the organization.
Road to Web3 Analytics
I partnered up for this project with another person I found in the Alchemy Disocrd server and we've been making great progress on this project. As mentioned earlier learning how to work with API calls was a huge effort this week. I didn't have much experience using them to pull data and then using it to show something on the front end. I've used Alchemy's API on nearly all of my practice projects but that was on the blockend side. API in the front-end has been a whole other experience and challenge. I spent way more time than I would like to admit trying to understand how these calls work and then actually getting them to do what I want them to do. This learning held back both this project and TheDrop (see next section).
I've made sufficient progress with API calls to move forward with this and we now have the system mocked up. What we have now is using the Kudos API to pull in the wallet owners for the Early Student NFT, this data is then taken by the Alchemy API to search their on-chain histories.
Our next step is to expand the Kudos call to pull the wallet owners of all the Road to Web3 PoK tokens. Followed by using this data with the Alchemy API calls to extract common contract addresses these wallets have interacted with and building out the dashboard to show this activity in a more human-readable format.
The repo
TheDrop
Along with all this work to become a blockend dev, I've also been running an NFT newsletter that shares weekly news recaps, tools, resources, events, and some other infrequent sections. The website has been a wreck for a while but I've been so narrowly focused on learning blockend to work on that when the newsletter already took so much time.
I mean look at it!
I've rebuilt it, slapped a new domain on it and I've started work on the next phase for TheDrop, providing a NFT project analytics platform.
So here's the status update. I've ripped the site from its old domain with SquareSpace and rebuilt it with Next.js where it's currently hosted with Vercel.
I'm now working with API calls to bring out the first version of the dashboard where you can search for the NFT project, view the contract's metadata, and the gallery which showcases the collections item's with their respective metadata points.
Of course, the API gave me plenty of issues. I tried building it with Axios, the Alchemy SDK, and fetch. Ultimately, I've had the most success using fetch so that's what I'm going with for now. As the SDK improves, I will consider switching to it but for now I'm focusing on just getting the dashboard built and showcasing all of the data I'm pulling. I'm building out the Ethereum Mainnet calls first with plans to do Polygon next.
There's a massive informal roadmap for this project that I'm following so this is a project I'll be working on for months as I build in more stats, blockchains, and features. Don't expect this section in the recaps to disappear anytime soon.
The repo.
Polygon BUIDL IT
Okay, so this one wasn't for sure going to happen until the organizers announced they were pushing back the submission date. There was a team and then no progress was actually made when the project outline was requested. After the new submission date was announced I quickly mocked up the outline and the team recommitted.
We're building a Web3 version of Kickstarter. The system design I've mocked is an NFT marketplace for ERC1155. Users can come here and set up their project, creating an 1155 contract that will deploy with different tokens for each pledge level where the metadata is customizable. We've got the work divided and assigned to team members now. I'll be sharing the WIP repo next week.
The hackathon
What's Next?
This next week will be a tough one for me. I'm moving halfway across the country and as you can imagine that takes a lot of time and energy away from developing. I have a co-driver with me that will give me some opportunity to work on projects but I won't be able to make the same kind of progress that I have these last few weeks. I've communicated this to the various teams and partners I'm working with on these projects and we're all prepared for the limited availability to meet and for me to code. In truth, this move is just the start of a disrupted schedule. After I've finished moving, I have several small road trips planned for the first few weeks. I won't be settled back down with a consistent schedule until late August.
Now, as far as the dream list of what I would like to get done this week; I would like to finish pulling and displaying metadata for projects in TheDrop, continue conversations around system design for WAGMI Squad, finish rebuilding the Kudos API call for Road to Web3 Analytics, and build the skeleton NFT marketplace that is phase 1 of the Polygon hackathon.
In between all of the coding for those projects, I'm trying to publish the article on DAO archetypes I hinted at last week. I've been sitting on a nearly-finalized version for a few days. I reflected on these archetypes and came to a realization that I needed to make a big adjustment. I'll be shifting the article a bit and changing what I was proposing as the current archetypes. I realized some of these archetypes were really just categories (investment DAOs for example). These archetypes fall into different categories when you evaluate their core functions or goals. I'm making adjustments and gathering some final examples before I can hopefully publish by the end of the week.
You can find me here:
