DEV Community: Gulcan Yayla

Did learning blockchain and web3 feel intimidating to you?

Gulcan Yayla — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 22:48:36 +0000

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Stephen Hawking

This post is a confession. I debated whether I should write it or not; because intimidation is widespread when it comes to web3. People I interacted with tend to look down on trying to understand the fundamentals of blockchain as ‘beginner’ level and want to skip to more ‘advanced’ topics, which often spirals into a conversation that I struggle to follow, let alone differentiate whether it’s completely bullsh*t or meaningful.

Coming from a science/engineering background, I am not comfortable jumping to conclusions, let alone being a fanatic, without really internalizing a subject from a critical viewpoint. When I finally determined to learn what blockchain and web3 is, I couldn’t find any resource demystifying it and answering my critical questions (until I started having long conversations with ChatGPT :D ). Don’t get me wrong: Yes, like many Twitter threads and blogs list, there are many resources. But here is what I struggled with. I’m sharing these to tell those who feel intimidated or puzzled that you’re not the problem.

There is a lack of critical approach in many resources. Instead of explaining the technology in an intuitive way and asking questions, most resources tend to do one or another:

Encouraging you to ‘do’ things like downloading a wallet, joining a DAO, or setting up your identity: These may be useful at some point but they are meaningless for those who genuinely want to understand the technology first and have tons of questions in their mind.
Starting with terminology and jargon: I tried many things like reading books and documentation, discussions, white papers, and taking online courses. Most of these lost me when they started to define a term without explaining why it exists. I've been in the education sector for a while now, and this is not good pedagogy. We need to first understand why something exists before memorizing terms.
Being a fanatic on a positive or negative side: It was alienating when a resource claiming to educate me on blockchain started pushing its own point of view. I can make these judgments myself if I could learn.

Most content is developer-focused and highly technical, providing little information for those who want to understand the technology. This is expected as the sector is still at a very early stage and the priority is to onboard developers before anyone else. But even if this is the case, most courses jump into writing code even before explaining why this technology exists or matters. This is also concerning to me in the sense that there are too many grants and investments that pour into developer founders but it’s unrealistic to expect only developers to run a successful startup.

There is not enough handholding on how to navigate the scammy parts of the crypto space. A non-negligible number of people in the cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFT/web3 world are scammy. As Vitalik Buterin himself said in a recent interview: “I personally would not blame anyone for being suspicious of the crypto space, because I think most sane people within the crypto space are themselves — ourselves — suspicious of large parts of the crypto space.”

I feel like this is something that most old timers know about this space. For a new person with genuine curiosity and good intentions, there are not enough guardrails against these parts. Discord servers get flooded with scams. People need some literacy on how to differentiate between all these signals and, in such a field that is still overly-complicated, it is left to beginners to learn these things. The whole experience fills someone with a low dose of anxiety which makes true open-minded learning even harder.

Discussions on real-life applications are shut down with slogans. We clearly need to figure out more potentially-valuable use cases. This requires interdisciplinary, open-minded, and critical discussions. But most of these discussions get overwhelmed with a fanatic belief in “decentralization”.

I am familiar with the web2 world. Tons of questions pop into my mind when someone claims to build a decentralized solution to a problem I am somewhat familiar with. Often, their argument starts and ends with “decentralized is better”. When I tried to understand how it would be better, what I met wasn’t openness but dismissal. It is very hard to bring your own perspectives and life experiences to such conversations. If people can’t connect new concepts to their own experiences, it is much harder to learn complicated topics.

The lack of clarity and understanding makes the space exclusive. There are two reasons for this:

It’s intimidating to ask questions because people in the space assume you understand fundamentals, although I’ve seen several times that they themselves can’t answer simple ‘basic’ questions. Although the meetups and events are full of friendly people, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation clear of jargon.
Although people in web3 claim to like it because of ‘decentralization’, domination and demonization of ‘others’ seems to be a hidden agenda. This ‘cult-like’ approach makes the space exclusive. This tweet from Eda summarizes my feelings:

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Can we change it for the better?

I think like everything else, education in web3 is also at baby steps and will keep improving.

This is an interesting problem to work on.

I want to make it easier to intuitively understand how blockchain and smart contracts and cryptocurrencies and DAOs and NFTs and web3 and everything else works. I want to make it easier for all sorts of people to get involved and equipped to discuss these topics. I want to expand conversations beyond basic aphorisms. I want people to be able to avoid scammy stuff.

Please please let me know if I’m not alone and you’ve experienced similar things, or if I’m missing something and being unfair. I’d love to hear your thoughts and have an unbiased conversation.

DAO engagement levels with numbers

Gulcan Yayla — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:30:53 +0000

This tweet made my engineer brain wonder about the engagement numbers in DAOs:

https://twitter.com/brownrygg/status/1491455450088640514

Then, a book I’m currently reading increased my wonder. The book is “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software” by Nadia Eghbal. She writes:

“One study found that, in a sample of 275 popular GitHub projects across various programming languages, nearly half of all contributors only contributed once. These contributors accounted for less than 2% of total commits. [Another study found that in more than 85% of the open source projects on GitHub, less than 5% of developers were responsible for over 95% of code and social interactions.] The regular presence of hundreds or thousands of contributors making few substantial contributions, rather than a smaller group of developers making meaningful contributions, throws the idea of ‘contributor communities’ into question.”

Then I started to research and found this article. The writers dig into the numbers behind Aragon, DAOstack and DAOhaus – three of the most popular DAO platforms facilitating the creation of DAOs. I loved how they had both growth and activity numbers – exactly what I’ve been looking for. Below is a summary table based on their data sources: (Aragon was omitted due to the lack of a user creation timestamp in the Aragon API)

Note1: “Activity” means whether a DAO or a user was active in a given month if at least they performed an action in that month. The available actions to be performed depend on the platform, but generally take the form of creating a proposal, voting a proposal, or staking in a proposal.

Note2: There is more fluctuation in DAOhaus activity (for instance, % active went up to 75% in October 2021; but in the overall picture, the rates are similar to this table.

So, here we are: There seems to be still a long way to go for DAOs to realize their promise. I am far from an expert on DAOs, but I believe they hold a potential to motivate their members to be active contributing ones if structured well. On the other hand, I am hesitant. At the end of the day, “people” like you and me form these organizations.

I am wondering what you think, especially if you’re involved in DAOs. Please let me know!

Do companies really have to make us feel bad with their random rejections?

Gulcan Yayla — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 18:30:59 +0000

We all had that feeling: After a job application, emotions rising as you start reading that email starting with “unfortunately”. You can never even know if a real person saw your resume for “average 5 seconds”. Your self-confidence starts to sink. If you have no community / role model / a family member that experienced something similar before you, it takes a long time to figure out why.

Do companies really have to make job applicants feel like this? I argue no, and I’ve a solid model to do otherwise.

When I first heard of “candidate experience net promoter score”, I was surprised but glad that someone could think of measuring “how job candidates liked or didn’t like their experience with your hiring process, how they felt they were treated, and what they’ll tell others about their experience, your process, and your company. In other words, it’s how your candidates rate their experience with your company.”

Now I’ll share my honest learnings about how we attempted to create a fair and better experience for our bootcamp participants at Patika.

Between 500-2,000 applicants apply for our free, company-sponsored education programs (bootcamps) that we open around 10 times every month. We admit only 30 people to each class – so, we shoot a rejection email to more than 94% of applicants. After doing this for a few months, people started to share their frustration. Especially when you consider that these people are applying to find a job at the sponsoring company at the end and they are living maybe one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives, it is tough! This is the same thing happened to us when we were looking for a job. My team didn’t want others to experience the same.

So, a question came to our mind:

What if we allow people select themselves instead of us selecting them?

We called it “the preparation (prep) program”. Now, we tell people “collect 100 points on Patika.dev (our free, online coding education platform) as you learn, and we will admit you to our bootcamp prep program". The bootcamp prep is a cohort experience of around 300-400 people in each cohort. We support them to build their skills more on our courses, send them weekly challenges, practice interviews with each other, get and receive peer feedback on their resumes, and receive help from each other the cohort-specific Discord servers. Those who keep progressing and contributing to the community are invited to our bootcamps. So, it became a self-selective process.

We still have so much to iterate to make this model a success, but the first outcomes are promising:

We started the first prep program in September 2021. We opened the 4th one in January 2022. In total 1,112 people joined it.
Out of 1,112, 319 (28%) qualified for and joined a bootcamp - a much higher ratio than we anticipated. Since the most recent cohort is still ongoing, these numbers will increase even more. Bootcamp placement rate was 42% from the first cohort!
The prep students showed much better performance in the bootcamp compared to their peers that were accepted without a prep: Actually, in two of our bootcamps, 100% of people that the sponsoring company hired were from the prep program!
Graduates of a cohort program started to work as volunteer teaching assistants in the next one to support each other.
The program went viral on LinkedIn: People started to take the screenshot of their prep program invitation emails and share them on LinkedIn! We were not expecting this at all :)

Thanks to this viral effect, our weekly active users on Patika.dev increased around twofold! (of course, there are so many other things that we did, but we believe the program was a contributor).
We had a prep student that was just rejected by a company. After the program, he joined the bootcamp that was sponsored by that same company and received a job offer :))) – (I secretly enjoy this story so much!)

We hope to evolve this program to a degree that we don’t have to reject anyone with random hiring criteria anymore. Instead, everyone will have a leveling field to showcase their skills. 100% merit-based admission or hiring – sounds so exciting!

So, I urge companies to consider this: Create your own skills development pathways / certification programs / learning programs/ challenges that are open to your applicants. Give them a chance to prove themselves. I know this is not easy to do it yourself – but there are other training providers that can help you (let me know if you want to talk with Patika about how we help our partners on this). Once a candidate has a true chance, you’ll be able to meet those who really want to work with you and can commit to learning the skills you need. Isn’t it much better than an imprecise resume screening both for you and the candidate?

A list of web3 learning resources

Gulcan Yayla — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 03:11:42 +0000

My job for the past 5 years has been to help people start their careers in tech. By tech, I mean web2. By people, I mean around 50k learners on Patika. There are so many things I learned in the process, and recently I have been getting more and more excited about web3 and the kind of change it can bring to our world. Of course, talent will be perhaps the most important thing we need to consider to realize its potential. So, I started to dig into the resources out there that help people start learning web3.

Good news: There is an amazing, welcoming community in web3. And this community is working really hard to create as many accessible resources as possible. Bad news: There is still a long way to go for web3 education. But with the increasing number of grant programs, I hope this gap can be filled.

So, let's start:

Platforms with relatively structured content to start learning:

LearnWeb3: Has a more solid pathway and rick content compared to other platforms. Dividing the content into freshmen-sophomore-junior-senior tracks makes onboarding easier. The content is mostly text-based. There are some exercises to test what you learned on Google Forms.
Odyssey DAO: Great place to start learning concepts. I highly recommend Odyssey if you have zero ideas about web3 and are wondering about where to start. It took a few hours for me to go over all of it. There is not much-advanced content (yet) but they have plans to produce more content. The Discord community explains their plans very well.
Questbook: Again, the content is still entry-level although more advanced compared to others; and mostly text-based. But the cool thing is that they award learners with tokens for completing content (as long as you share the learning on Twitter).
Web3 University: There are several mostly text-based (sometimes supported with videos) tutorials resembling blog posts.
buildspace: buildspace mostly helps developers who already have a good background in software development start building projects in web3. I am a big fan of buildspace's approach to project-based learning and its founder Farza's community building efforts.
Figment: There are many one-off tutorials on so many different protocols. May not be starter-friendly to navigate and start learning. Discord community is relatively larger than others with ~5,000 members.
NFT School: The content is limited to NFTs but really well structured and starter-friendly.

The followings are just starting off:

Invisible College DAO: Has almost no content yet, but hosts some good educational events. Has a Discord channel and getting ready to become an NFT-gated DAO.
Lirners DAO: Has no content yet, but is getting ready with its ~500 Discord members. Describes itself as "We are not building a digital game but a digital school. We will be focusing on covering 7 main areas in web3. NFTs, DeFi, Social Connections, Cryptoeconomics, DAOs, Blockchain Development, and a General Study. This will be a peer-to-peer school with a constant expert appearance."
Pointer: Currently has only a few, and practice-focused tutorials like building an app with Solidity.

Videos:
Of course there are many great videos on YouTube like:

freeCodeCamp's Solidity, Blockchain, and Smart Contract Course – Beginner to Expert Python Tutorial - 16 hours
Nader Dabit's YouTube channel is great, and I am a big fan of his leadership in the field, he really makes people like me feel welcome. I suggest joining his Twitter Spaces, too.
Udemy courses like this one.

Documentation:
If you liked what you have seen in the starter-level resources above, I guess the best places to go to have a really good grasp on things are documentations like Ethereum documentation, Solidity documentation, Web3.js documentation, Ether.js documentation, and Solana documentation.

Please let me know your comments, and if you'd like to discuss about web3 education especially to welcome more people from emerging markets 👋
🙏 I used Nader Dabit's blog post and useWeb3 heavily when preparing this post.