Polkadot, PoolTogether and Expanding Your Knowledge

PoolTogether Community Interview #36 Bread

Hello,

Welcome to the latest PoolTogether Community Interview with Bread.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts:

I’m a software engineer by trade, overall tech enthusiast, and tinkerer. I’m always working on or reading about some new tech project whether it’s custom tools for Discord, fun websites, or a weekend video game project.

How long have you been into crypto?

I graduated college right when the pandemic started and struggled to find a job despite applying to dozens every day. My brother suggested I check out Gitcoin as a way to make some money while I was still looking. At the time I really didn’t know much about crypto nor did I really care for it after having seen everything that happened during the ICO craze.

Despite that I would still check out the available bounties every week to see if there was anything I thought I could do. One day I came across the Hello World Polkadot hackathon aimed at beginners. After reading through the Polkadot wiki I was really impressed with how thorough and technical it was, that’s when I thought to myself “okay, maybe it’s not all hype.”

I decided to jump head first into the hackathon and treat it as a full time job. By the end I had made a ton of great connections in the Polkadot community and through their help I was able to land my first job as a developer on one big projects in the ecosystem.

Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?

I think the biggest thing I want people to understand about crypto is that tech is really amazing, and there are a ton of brilliant people working in the space. Often we get caught up in the prices but 99% of developers I’ve met in crypto, including myself, don’t look at prices. We’re all just excited to to build.

What was your best crypto moment?

My best crypto moment was probably when I won first place in the second hackathon I did right before I got my job. By that point I had been in the space for about four months and was spending all my time building and learning. It was a moment where I really felt like all of my hard work was paying off and that this was something that I could continue to pursue.

And your biggest fail?

Like a lot of people when I started in crypto I was really confused even on the basics. I understood broadly what a wallet and a private key were but I didn’t fully grasp how they worked. At one point I had about $5 in Metamask and was teaching myself Solidity. I had some code that would deploy a smart contract on chain that I put on GitHub. In that code was my private key for Metamask.

I knew that was something I shouldn’t post online but I figured it didn’t really matter because I had set my network in Metamask to a test net before exporting the private key. Well a few days later I checked my Metamask balance and saw it was 0. That’s when I learned that regardless of what network your wallet is set to your private key is always the same.

How did you find out about PoolTogether?

I don’t remember the exact conversation but about half a year ago one of my co-workers who has been in the space for a long time told me about a no loss protocol on Ethereum. At the time I thought it sounded cool but since I wasn’t really using Ethereum I never looked into it. Recently I’ve been exploring more and asked her for the name of the protocol which ended up being PoolTogether.

What made you stick around?

As I read more about PoolTogether and how it worked I was just really impressed with the protocol on all levels. One thing I’ve struggled with in the past is imagining what the future of crypto looks like. I’ve said before that I’ve always been really impressed with the tech but when people would ask me what they can actually do in crypto right now it was hard to give them any suggestions that didn’t require an entire exposition.

PoolTogether provides a service that anyone can understand, get excited about, and want to try out. And the goal of the protocol really resonated with the future I want for the industry.

How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.

At the moment I’ve mostly interacted with the PoolTogether community as a user. But for my own personal project I’ve been developing with the PoolTogether libraries to make some tools that I want to use. I’ve been keeping an eye out on the bounties for something I can work on but until then I’m just enjoying being in the community and answering questions where I can.

I’m really impressed with how helpful and welcoming everyone has been. I think that PoolTogether has done an amazing job of fostering a community that cares about the core ethos of the protocol rather than just the price of the token.

Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?

Did you know that in 2020 Americans spent $89.59 billion on the lottery? I think there are two driving factors behind that. The first is that the idea of becoming a millionaire over night is universally appealing. The second is that it’s undeniably fun. I think that 99% of people who participate in the lottery would admit that it’s not a financially savvy thing to do, but we do it anyway. PoolTogether taps into those feelings and makes saving fun.

Sure, I know realistically I’m probably not going to be one of the people who win big but I still get a kick out of going to the site every day and watching that treasure chest pop open. At the moment it’s hard for me to recommend crypto to people because it’s complicated and it’s risky. PoolTogether is easy to recommend because it’s neither of those.

Are you involved in any other projects or communities?

As of a few months ago I was hired at MEW to work on their new multi-chain extension Enkrypt. It’s been amazing to learn from some of the most OG developers in the Ethereum ecosystem as well as just learn more about what’s available in web3 in general.

Beyond my professional endeavors I spend a lot of time making and maintaining open source moderation tools for discord servers in order to try to make Discord communities a safer place. And outside of crypto the space I’m pretty active in a lot of different development focused communities. I’m always eager to learn about new technologies and finding projects to use them in.

Do you have any other thoughts and comments you would like to make?

I’ve touched on this a bit in my other answers but I think the biggest thing holding crypto back right now is education and UX. If we want web3 to be successful we need it to be as easy as web2. We’ve seen amazing innovations on the technology side of crypto and I’m excited to see how we can level up the user experience to match.

What are your thoughts on how to be successful in life?

Find something you’re passionate about and do it. It doesn’t have to be for your job but having something that excites you and something that you look forward to doing will get you far. Enthusiasm is infectious and you’ll be surprised about how many people you meet and connections you make just doing something you love.

Which books would you recommend people read? And why?

Honestly I’m not a huge book reader nowadays. I love everything by Neil Gaiman but my biggest advice in terms of reading is to just constantly look to expand your knowledge. Don’t take any information for granted, actively pursue new and contrary ideas to what you already have. You never know you didn’t know some something until after you learn it.

Right now I’m interested in learning more about the theories behind creating public infrastructure that leads to happy and healthy communities. I think that this may be a topic that can be applied to the digital space to build better online communities as well, but you’ll have to ask me my opinions on that again in a few months after I’ve actually done the research.

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We hope you have enjoyed this interview with Bread and have learnt something new.

Please join us for the PoolTogether Community Call on Fridays at 1.45pm on the PoolTogether Discord. Plus, to deposit into PoolTogether and to learn more about the protocol, please goto https://pooltogether.com/