DApps Dev Club Season 1 reflections

DApps Dev Club Season 1 reflections — 4 minute read

We’ve recently published a recap of DApps Dev Club’s first season, where we thanked everyone who has helped run the events, before doing a round up of the entire season.

What was missing from that though, are my personal reflections from running this club. I felt there were a great many take aways - there were a great many good things that we accomplished, but also a great many opportunities for improvement that exist. There were also many things learned along the way.

A few of you who have been coming to the sessions regularly have heard me talk about these ad hoc in the mid-session F&B intermissions or after-session breakouts. In the spirit of openness, I felt it would be for the greater good to share these more broadly. Here goes!

Legend

  • 👍 ⟹ This went well
  • 👎 ⟹ An opportunity for improvement
  • 🤔 ⟹ Learnt something

In, no particular order, and prefixed with the symbols above, here are my reflections…

Reflections

  • 🤔: community management
  • 👍: kueh
  • 🤔: AV skills, including HDCP
  • 👎: should have switched to pizzas sooner
  • 👍: logo
  • 🤔: auto-didactism
  • 🤔: how to handle heckling
  • 👎: duration per session
  • 👎: the solidity session should have been split into two
  • 👎: the web3 session should have been split into two
  • 🤔: would like to have explored the ethereum fork of the anders blockchain demo further
  • 👎: the explanation of cryptography should have been improved
  • 👍: the explanation of testing quadrants
  • 👎: should have a standard vagrant or docker set up, especially for windows users
  • 🤔: metamask has a reset cache button
  • should switch to a lapel microphone for recording (too soft)
  • 🤔: events are a lot of work, I have a 70-point checklist that needs to be executed per session
  • 🤔: getting sponsorship is a lot of work, need to allocate more time for it
  • 🤔: graphic design skills
  • 👎: certificates
  • 👎: projects didn’t quite pan out, but it looks like hackathons did in their stead.
  • 👍: lots of networking, got too meet lots of interesting people, and learn about lots of interesting projects
  • 🤔: two sessions per month is unsustainable as an organiser, going to switch to one per month, like every other meetup
  • 🤔: get more guest speakers in for particular topics
  • 👍: eventbrite
  • 👍: discord
  • 👎: telegram for announcements
  • 🤔: need a co-organiser
  • 🤔: social media, I don’t like it, but everyone else does
  • 👎: need to be more consistent at marketing
  • 🤔: singaporejs book club format
  • 🤔: projects didn’t work out, but hackathons did
  • 👎: venues can cancel on you at the last minute
  • 👎: demos need to be more interactive
  • 👍: workshops were very popular
  • 👍: javascript testing using mocha was a very big hit
  • 🤔: how to get the difficulty level of workshops right. in a meetup, cloze-passage style workshops work best
  • 🤔: built my own solidity diff display tooling, but perhaps using an existing tool would have been better
  • 🤔: handling heckles. only got one in the entire season.
  • 👍: javascript testing using mocha was a very big hit
  • 🤔: suggestions made that I should compile all the material into something accessible online
  • 👍: “hackathon starter pack” post from NBC’19 was a hit, received many thanks for putting that together

Things to research

  • ECIES without client-side or centralised-server-side key management
  • EIP712 example
  • Etherlime and ethers.js
  • Block explorers and other visualisations
  • Expand on state machine driven development, since it was popular in NBC’19

Open sharing

  • 🤔: meta: DApps Dev Club would not have been able to record its sessions, if not for the EngineersSG wiki. Paying it forward with open sharing here too.

Next season

DApps Dev Club is planning to hold its next session season soon!

… but we would like to hear from you first!

  • What are the other networks that you would like to build DApps on?
  • Are there any upcoming hackathons that you would like to build a DApp at?
  • What would you like to learn about in DApps Dev Club season #2?
  • Do you have a venue that we can use for session in season #2?
  • Do you have cash to splash to sponsor sessions in season #2?

Please join the DApps Dev Club chat group and let me know your answers to the above.