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The past week was still a lot of work for Bankless Japan, rather than my intended work with Voyageur and the hackathons. This week was a reminder of how I need to setup a project for success if I’m going to continue web3 development while being a core contributor to Bankless Japan.

Building is a Muscle

One thing I realized a long time ago is that I actually don’t enjoy programming. Rather I program to achieve an end result I want, such as getting a product out the door that I or my friends need.

One reason I had left front-end development for InfoSec was the general fatigue I had with that ecosystem: inefficient package management, obtuse error messages, tons of boilerplate, and other headaches. I don’t find these quirks with modern web development fun, but rather an impediment to a result I actually want to get to.

Coming into web3 development I knew that I would be signing up for enduring some of the pains that made me want try another career path.

At the same time I realized through Superhack that the result I’m aiming for really has to resonate for me to go through the drudgery of going through modern web development again.

While I feel I have this hunger when I work on security topics, or working with friends on really creative projects, I found out later this wasn’t the case with the idea I had in mind for Superhack: an on-chain way for airlines and hotels to attest to the loyalty status of their customers.

It was a neat idea and got me to play around with Ethereum Attestation Service and some of the newer OP Stack chains. But ultimately that idea doesn’t resonate as much as making sure web3 users don’t get scammed.

My building muscles had atrophied from the years of mostly being a white-hat hacker and educator. When it gets to this point it was too easy for me to try to work on something else other than Superhack.

Bankless Japan

I have been writing about Bankless Japan a lot more than I thought I would when I first submitted my DAOpunks application. But the reality is that our team is making a lot of progress in developing partnerships that will help feed new content, new events and eventually a new DAO.

So the momentum has really swept me away from the hackathons I had intended to participate in. While I did do some work for Superhack, ultimately the context-switching that was occurring during the 10 days was too much for me to get a solid hack out (in addition to not being as interested in the idea, as mentioned earlier).

That being said I’m happy with what we were able to accomplish in the past week for Bankless Japan:

• 🧑‍💻 Co-worked at the new Centrum web3 space in Shibuya + figuring out new partnerships we want to tackle

• 📢 Announced our first DAO Night which we’ll be cohosting with Fracton Ventures, Phaver and dYdX, which will take place at the space mentioned above

• 💴 Submitted our Gitcoin grant application for the official launch of Bankless Japan, where we will kickstart our journey towards being a self-sufficient community DAO

• 👕 Planning our バンクレス t-shirt airdrip – not a typo – for Permissionless

My time in Tokyo will be coming to a close soon. With more mental separation between me and the activity in Japan, this should provide me with enough space to start working on Voyageur again and submit something for NAVH (which is due in 8 days).

Voyageur

My next hackathon is due next week. As I had not made as much progress on Voyageur: Prologue as I thought I would, I’m considering just developing a “vertical slice” of the main vision I had for the daap and delivering that for the hackathon.

Time is more of a concern now not only due to wanting to show something useful and useable by the end of the DAOpunks cohort. But to also have something I can show to people at the next three conferences I’m attending: Ethcon, Korean Blockchain Week and Permissionless.

With that I’m now slowly getting back into a consistent building mode and hope to try to maintain that momentum. Let’s see how the next week fairs for me!