GM! This is Narb
Hi my name is Narbeh (Narb for short) and I'm a full-stack software developer of 6 years out of Vancouver, British Columbia. The banner quote you see at the top of this article with Arnold Schwarzenegger is the essence of who I am and how I approach everything I do. The line "I didn't come to compete. I came to win" to me represents my belief that it's not good enough to just "show up" to do something (coding, working, working out, etc....) but rather that everything must be done with purpose, dedication and a desire to inch closer to my goals.
My path to becoming a software developer was more a traditional one where I went to university to study Computer Science/Mathematics and then found a job at Expedia Group shortly after. I've been working professionally for about 6 years now but have been coding for 10+ years. Over those years I've had a chance to get my hands dirty with a lot of cool tech, helped launch impactful software and got to work with some really awesome people that helped make me who I am today.
When I'm not coding up a storm, you'll find me at the gym, watching hockey(Go Canucks Go), learning some cool new Web3 thing, hitting up a podcast, reading books, watching anything with Batman in it and 100% drinking a coffee. I'm a bit of a health nut and have been working out ever since I turned 13 years old. I was pretty obese as a child and made the decision early on in my life to change myself for the better. I believe a healthy body leads to a healthy mind and don't think i'll ever give up lifting weights; however, just as important physical exercise is, I don't think i'd be where I am without proper nutrition and sleep. Fun fact about me: I haven't drank a pop/soda for 17 years now and still going!
How I started in Web3
I started my Web3 journey January of 2021 after a year of procrastination by reading the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers and then, as any curious developer should, started to experiment with Proof of Concepts (PoC). The more I read and went down the rabbit hole, the more my mind started to expand to all the possibilities public, decentralized blockchain protocols could provide. I started by coding a ERC20 smart contract for creating a fungible token as that seemed like a reasonable place to get my feet wet. I then started to read up on decentralized oracles and found myself playing around with Chainlink coding up an external adapter to fetch Web2 data, spun up a local chainlink node and coded a smart contract to stitch them together. It was around this time when the NFT craze really started to get heat up and I wanted to see what this was all about. Trying to get in, I found that I was priced out pretty early out of most projects and those that I had a chance to buy into sold out before I had a chance. Fine. So I continued to read up on different Web3 tech, built more PoC's and also started to follow some of the more prominent Web3 figures on Twitter. Fast track to early October and I happened to stumble upon a tweet from Nader Dabit around this thing called "Developer DAO" and then things really started to take off.
Enter Developer DAO
I started in Developer DAO in early October of 2021 and didn't really know what I had gotten myself into as this was my first exposure to Discord, NFT's and DAO's in general. I was hungry to start coding and contributing to open source (check another thing off the procrastination list) and found myself picking up a frontend issue from the developerdao website repo. At the time there wasn't any real getting started material like there is now but I found myself jumping in because I didn't want to wait around for someone to ask me to do something. I wanted a piece of the action and stepped up to take it. Being predominately a backend dev, my frontend skills were pretty rusty and I wanted to push myself and get out of my comfort zone of a bit. The Developer DAO gave me a perfect opportunity to improve my frontend coding skills, contribute to open source and collaborate in a community of enthusiastic folks who are passionate about Web3 like I am.
Fast track a month into being in the DAO and I found myself becoming an open source maintainer for the Developer DAO website repo. This was absolutely nuts all things considered. A few weeks back I had just finished my few open source contributions ever and now I was dishing out code reviews and helping others start out in the DAO. Let me be very clear that all of this was way of out my comfort zone but was also just so fun to be apart of.
As the weeks progressed, the DAO saw itself grow and eventually sell out of D4R membership NFT's. This was so exciting to see a community of passionate builders and Web3 enthusiasts come together in a single place; however, with this huge influx of people a lot of good discussion started to take place around organization, onboarding, documentation, what the DAO values and mission are, etc... After a while we started to introduce the notion of guilds in an effort to streamline people to areas of interest (development, writing, community, design, governance and marketing). After joining the development guild (and D_D in general), I noticed we had a lot really talented folks in the DAO and I was amazed by the all the cool stuff people were building and shipping. I really got inspired by my surroundings and started my own open source project called Glosseta which is an educational tool to help people demystify Web3 and it's ecosystem (a dedicate blog post to come on this as well as some exciting news around the initiative). At the same time, I noticed that a lot of us didn't really have a proper platform to show each other what we've been working on and building. A lot of folks either didn't have the huge following on social media or were too hesitant to step up to show the world all the awesome work they had done. From this the DevNTell initiative was born.
DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on to their fellow peers. Each session is held once a week on a Friday with presenters needing to book a slot in advance. The live sessions are only available for members of the DAO to attend and present; however, all sessions are recorded and uploaded to the Developer DAO YouTube channel the same day. I started the DevNTell series for the members of the DAO to have a safe space to be able to present and demonstrate their hard work without needing a huge social media following to get exposure. I've never had any experience hosting weekly events like this but I must say, it has been such a fulfilling experience for me to host these sessions while getting to meet so many talented people.
Entering 2022, I now found myself part of the moderator team in the DAO and started to notice that there were a bunch of really cool initiatives in the works. The most ambitious of them all at the time was a virtual conference that was in the early stages of getting set up called web3con. I wasn't involved in the initial inception of the conference but eventually got pulled in after learning that the team needed a hand from a few of us to set up an associated hackathon. Let me be very clear, I had absolutely no prior experience with setting up a conference, a hackathon, or working with sponsors and found myself getting that uncomfortable feeling. Perfect. What a great opportunity for me to learn and grow in a setting I wasn't accustomed to being in. Soon enough I ended up leading the hackathon efforts for the conference. More importantly, I found myself working with an absolutely out of this world team that came together in the chaos of the DAO to create one hell of a conference and hackathon. I could go on but this topic is so content rich that it could be it's own blog post. Maybe it will 🤔
If you haven't noticed, there's an ongoing theme here in my story: Start being comfortable being uncomfortable. A lot of the time we are our own worst enemy and don't want to deviate from the things we're comfortable doing. Some of the best experiences and growth moments I've had in the DAO in particular have been from stepping up to do things I felt unexperienced/unqualified doing. Through these experiences I've unearthed skills I never knew I had or thought I'd ever have the opportunity to experience being a software developer.
At the very least I hope my story can inspire you to step up and get out of your comfort zone with that "thing" you've been hesitant to start. Go grab that GitHub issue and start coding. Go start that YouTube channel you've been meaning to start. Go launch that blog you've been want to start for years. Build that golden idea you've been sitting on. And always remember: "[you] didn't come to compete. [you] came to win."
What to expect from this blog
If you got this far, thank you for reading my genesis blog post! Going forward, you can expect technical and non-technical content out this blog with a Web3 flare as I learn, build and experience all the cool stuff this space has to provide. If you so choose, you can follow me on Twitter, GitHub or check out my personal site
Till the next one, cheers 🍻
Parting Meme
