September 2021, I was a 23 years old frustrated and depressed person trying to figure out what to do with my life. While I was recovering from COVID-19, I came across Nader’s twitter post and joined Developer DAO. I remember creating my first ever wallet to get the D4R NFT. Back then I didn’t even know what web3 is. Now I’m so deep into the web3 rabbithole that it’s all I can ever think about.

Developer DAO

My own introverted nature and difficulty of communicating always made me more of an outcast everywhere. I grew up differently even among the Southeast Asian households where I never learnt to deal with my emotions and communications with others. When I was in high school I went through bullying and shaming for my inability to go with the flow as everyone else. Things didn’t change much even when I started college. I always blamed myself for being different than everyone else. Later when I turned 23, My partner helped me to recognize myself and I realized that I have Autism and ADHD.

When I joined Developer DAO, I only knew about how blockchain works but not the web3 itself. I started to get curious and towards the beginning of 2022, I found my resolve and Introduced myself during one of the DAO calls. I was always encouraged to participate and get started with DAO involvement by with-heart. He’s one of the most precious person I have met in Developer DAO because without him I wouldn’t have taken the very first step of putting myself out there.

Education Team

When I started getting involved in the DAO, I realized I need to get started with coding. I decided to start a Study Group and opened a thread of discussion to create a Study Group to start learning code. I remember Wisety and others being there on the thread.Then I heard from couple of other folks who are creating an Education team and got started with the Education Team. That small study group turned into the Education Team where we all started learning to code while having web2 and web3 study groups.

At March 2022, I joined my first hackathon web3con by Developer DAO. It was my very first hackathon. We built a Decentralized Video Streaming Platform using Livepeer called Glitch. Our team won, livepeer killer web3 dapp bounty.

Later I have also attended Chainlink Fall Hackathon and the project won chainlink top 40 project bounty as well.

D_D Academy

After the web3con hackathon, some of Education team folks were hanging out on one of the voice chat on discord. We all won some bounty and didn’t want to let the builders spirit to die down so we were brainstorming some ideas. Suddenly I proposed, how about we build an education platform?
We all are still learning and while building this education platform and writing contents, we will learn much more. I put together the proposal for the education platform and put it out there. The proposal was approved for the project and I was assigned as the project champion. Later other core contributor joined the project and took initiatives as well. The idea was to create an open sourced education platform that prioritizes on newcomers and focuses on having healthy learning environment.

D_D Academy was a small team and I personally worked on this project for 5 months.
From coordinating, development, content writing and documenting. Honestly I was quite everywhere. I remember getting sick so many times because I was so passionate and trying to understand how to get things done. It was truly overwhelming and not good for my health.

But everything doesn’t always go the way we want in life, of-course things had changed. I realized I can’t work on this anymore or stay on this team, so I discussed with the team and left from this project. I was torn and devastated to leave from the project I had most fun working on but I couldn’t stay there while being held back and overwhelmed.

D_D Women

D_D Women is a group for women and nonbinary members within Developer DAO.
The goal of this team is to create a social layer while creating conversations around diversity. We are also working towards creating opportunities and partnering with more communities and their educational initiatives to onboard more members into the space.

While I was working on D_D Academy, I had the chance to be part of WomenBuildWeb3, even though I wasn’t part of the OG members but Cami was kind enough to invite me.
It was my first time being part of a female or nonbinary community and I was quite nervous about it. But the experience was so incredible that I started thinking of creating a Social Space within Developer DAO for women and nonbinary folks.

I discussed with Cami, Sarahz, Dawn, CuddleofDeath, Paloma and ExplorerGeek about it and everyone supported my idea. I quickly put together the proposal for D_D Women team. It was approved and D_D Women team was created. Well, ofcourse the team needed it’s own color and pfp which was designed by krinza.

What’s next and Kernel Fellowship

After I left D_D Academy team, I had a hard time figuring out what I want to do and what is my next step should be. I joined Eden Protocol for a very short period of time where BluePanda and the team welcomed me. I learned a bit about product and getting users feedbacks. Blue and Milo sat with me and went though explaining how to get users feedbacks, I learned a lot from this team.

I heard back from Kernel shortly after and realized that I will be part of Kernel Block 7.
I learned about Kernel from ExplorerGeek and she encouraged me to apply.

When I joined Kernel as a fellow, I was exposed to a whole new community and later realized it is nothing like my DAO experience. I followed bunch of guilds and explored sessions.

I started Kernel Vibe Hour calls on slack. I mentioned having no roadmaps, agenda or plans.

Even though Kernel Block 7 ended. The junto is till going on. Sometimes we end up talking nearly 3 hours or more.

The most important learning from Kernel that resonates with me is the opposite of FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, called JOMO or the Joy of Missing out.

Attending ETHIndia

I have never left home to visit any other country because coming from a middle-class Southeast Asian family, dreaming about travelling is what I can only do as I couldn’t even afford to travel. But I have always wanted to go to my first web3 event and meet my friends I have been learning and building with. Because of holding a weak Southeast Asian passport, my options for getting visa was quite limited also. I wanted to attend Solana Breakpoint but I couldn’t as I wasn’t able to manage to get the visa for Lisbon.

I applied for Indian Visa early and was preparing for my first in person web3 event.
I was sponsored by Cami for EthIndia. I already knew her from Developer DAO and WomenBuildWeb3. I’m always inspired by her. She had seen the initiatives I was doing at D_D and was kind enough to support me whenever she could. I never thought I will be able to go to EthIndia and manage everything in such a short period of time because I did have some difficulties acquiring visa. After I landed on Bengalore, Dhaiwat helped me out during my stay in India and was always there whenever I needed something.

When I was flying to India, it all felt so unreal. I kept asking myself if I am dreaming or truly heading for my first web3 event.

India was so wholesome and such an incredible lovely moments. I fell in love with Indian foods. My top 3 Indian food are Dosa, Pani-puri and Palak paneer. I never felt like an outsider and was welcomed everywhere.

Everything was so exciting but also chaotic. Well, there’s no web3 events without a bit of chaos. I have met Dhaiwat, Rahat, Aakansha and my other D_D friends. A year ago none of us knew each other but now these are the friends and circle of people who motivates me and makes me want to push forward everyday.

While I was at EthIndia, I wanted to onboard more folks into Developer DAO. I was given an opportunity to join the DAO by Nader, I wanted to do the same for some other folks also. I ended up sponsoring 4 members into Developer DAO. After that Nader himself sponsored for 10 more Developer DAO membership.

After that Ryan and Rahat also sponsored more Developer DAO members themselves.

Becoming a Mentor and a Judge

When I met Gyan and Sneha from The Phoenix Guild and decided to visit the PhoenixGuild Hackerhouse. This hackerhouse was different than ETHIndia main venue. TPG planned this hacker house to manage accommodations for folks and to give newcomers who weren’t accepted in ETHIndia a chance to build and learn.

I was already a mentor for their Solidity Cohort 2 online before ETHIndia. Gyan asked me to be a mentor for this hackerhouse and I was overjoyed for that. Before she asked me, I was already giving advises on what to build and helping with hackathon ideation during Women in Web3 brunch which I have attended earlier that day.

When I started mentoring folks, I was really nervous but to my surprise I realized I was able to help folks out around the hackerhouse without any issues. I loved how there were newcomers but they all learned and build something withing the allocated time.

When everyone submitted their projects, I was asked to be a judge as well. It was a really short amount of time and for the first time in my life I realized judging hackathon project is really difficult.

New and old friends

I met my friends whom I have been working together all these months. I have also met new ones.

I was never really extroverted so I did have a hard time to keep my social battery going. After 9.00 pm or 10.00 pm I tried to get to sleep. I was extremely excited but also nervous quite often. Even though my English is quite good but I still tried to focus on understanding Indian words. I picked up some Indian words within these couple of days.

Learning to approach people and to socialize with them was one of my greatest challenge. The new environment, new food and whole new language experience was something I wasn’t used to. It was exciting but sometimes difficult but I knew that sooner or later I will have to go through things like this where I will be pushed out of my own comfort zone. Which was one of the biggest learning from ETHIndia and it made me socially more confident.

I have not only met people from Developer DAO, I have also met people from many different communities and places. The fun part was that, a lot of folks already knew me from twitter but didn’t know me. So there were time, when I pulled out my twitter to introduce myself and people immediately said, I know you. It was quite magical and nice to be known and I was constantly getting surprised and getting shy while hiding my smile. It felt really incredible to have a place to belong and not being an outsider looking in.

Before getting into web3, I always thought about a different scenarios which always made me think that I wasn’t smart enough to code. Back at college, I took introductory programming credits and I was learning java. It was so overwhelming for me that I decided programming isn’t for me at all. From “coding isn’t for me” to “two times hackathon winner and contributing in web3”, I have never been so happy to be wrong in my entire life.

I came home with new friends, new connections, new learnings and confidence. I started to believe in myself more without letting myself down. A year ago, if someone had told me that things would be different and incredible like this, I would’ve never believed that. But here I am a year later, learned so much and excited to learn and explore more things with my web3 friends and even traveled for my first web3 event ETHIndia.

The outcast who had a hard time fitting in anywhere, finally has friends and own circle of people. I am grateful for all the incredible opportunities I have got.

Conclusion

At first, I didn’t plan on writing about my whole web3 journey. I was going to only highlight about my incredible experience during ETHIndia. But it made me feel like, I will only be glossing over the good parts. When I was trying to get into tech, I always saw sunshine and happy stories and it almost made me want to give up because I felt I was the only one struggling and not understanding anything.

My journey to web3 and recognizing myself isn’t without pain. There were time where I felt responsible for something and pushed myself to work on things so much that I have fallen sick so many times. I felt like I was the only one who doesn’t know enough and that’s why I have to be doing things twice more than everyone else. But that was wrong of me, I felt overwhelmed and got burned out. I have learned to say “no” and take a step back from things when needed. I learned about my limits and myself while figuring out where I should be taking a step back.

We as a human being try to focus on learning a lot of things but we don’t try to unlearn. Learning and unlearning is an essential part that we should be focusing on. Web3 is incredible but still evolves really fast. To keep up with the recent changes, we challenge ourselves big time. But in that process of fulfilling the challenge we often forget the sustainable bigger picture that we want to draw for ourselves and in web3.

My goal is still the same but I updated the approach for myself. I will be pushing my limits while learning more about myself but I will also focus on my mental and physical health while doing so.

Let’s paint a bigger sustainable picture while focusing on our own physical and mental health. There is also Joy in Missing Out.🌱