Hi everyone, My name is Patrick Akio, and if you're interested
in the future of the Web Web 5, this episode is for you.
Joining me today is Adi Wali Ace Abbati, web engineer and
developer advocate over at Block.
And we talk about the future of web development.
And honestly, I love his energy. It's electrifying.
So enjoy this episode as developer advocate.
How much of your time is still spent on like hands on coding
nowadays? I got lucky on that aspect.
I like to tell other developer advocate, actually new ones,
that as much as possible, try not to, you know, get away from
coding because you're still a developer.
Yeah. In code before the advocate.
Yeah. Yeah.
I would recommend, you know, sharpening your skills so even
when someone brings an issue to you, it doesn't take you so long
to get back in space to fix that issue for them or guide them on
the route to fixing that issue. Because a lot of coding is very
most memory in my opinion. So luckily for me, TBD, a lot of
technology is very new, so we have to like not just be the
examples, also show the audience or the developers real life use
cases. Yeah, so I have to build out
some of these things. So when the engineers are built
out the SDKS, I actually have to build out almost full
applications to test out the SDKS, give back developer
experience, you know, feedback to be able to no respond to the
audience. So it's a very fine balance with
me speaking and actually getting my hands very dirty.
Nice. Well, I've had developer
advocate jobs in the past where I didn't do as much coding or I
just did surface level in hello world or check out how this
thing works. Examples.
Yeah, but that's not the case now.
Yeah. And I really appreciate that
that's not the case right now because it gets me thinking
about stuff deploying note servers, like all of those
things that I probably didn't do in my previous developer
advocacy rules. But now it's a fine balance.
I'll probably do more coding, to be honest coding and
documentation than I do speaking these days.
I mean, it goes hand in hand, right?
Because I don't do a lot of developer advocacy stuff.
You can say the podcast and you can argue that, but the fact
that I'm doing hands on stuff really gets my mind thinking.
And that's what you want to then cover and talk about and share?
Yeah. Because without that, then at
some point your list is done. It's only finite and nothing new
pops up. A. 100% I actually struggle with
that a bit in my car. Yeah.
Because for me, I wanted, I've always been a builder at I
wanted to keep building stuff. And then on the other side, I
like talking about those things. So I even got to develop
advocacy without planning to. OK, I just found myself like,
when I'm done building stuff, I'm still itching to build more
stuff. So I go into communities and I'm
just in the audience, like, does anybody have a bug to fix?
And then when somebody does, I'm, I'm right in there, like
helping them out with brainstorming.
We're talking about like, I just enjoy that.
Yeah. And then some, some of the
community members, you know, discovered that talent of mine
and started like recommending for developer advocacy roles.
And that is technically how I started getting jobs as a
developer advocate. Yeah, But I did not, like, start
my career like, OK, you know what?
I'm going to be a developer advocate.
I just wanted to be a developer. Yeah.
Except that I just enjoy doing all of these other things as AOP
on the side. So when it became my full time
job, I started to burn out a lot because now I'm doing more, you
know, developer advocacy, talking, helping people out that
I'm doing building. Yeah.
And it kind of like filled my, my balance a bit.
And I struggled a long, a long time trying to like recover, you
know, that part of me. So being able to finally get to
that was something that I really appreciate.
Yeah. Because there's, this is also,
I'm a huge advocate for it. You might be a developer
advocate, but don't let go of that part of coding because it's
always going to help. Either you're looking for a new
job or or switching industries. I just want to go back to being
an engineer. Yeah, I think that's the best.
I think it's really hard if you want to go from let's say your
educational journey immediately into developer advocacy because
a lot of this is not theoretical, right?
You might have the skills, but at some point a lot of what we
do is very much experience based.
You do a lot of gut based decision making and you can't do
that without a few years under your belt. 100%.
And it doesn't have to be many, many years, but I think good
production experience is like essential in that way.
I agree. And I'm really wondering because
in the developer advocacy role, I don't know how much experience
contributing to, let's say, an existing application you have
versus going again and building things from scratch and testing
it out in a, let's say, more experimental application going
from zero to one rather than building from 1 to 1.1 or
beyond. I think varying experiences
differ. I was just at this session
talking about this last week. And if you're going to hire, for
example, a new developer advocate that doesn't have a ton
of developer experience, but they have, like, say, the soft
skills, you know, they want to speak at conferences, They're
open to learning. Then in that situation, it's
very important to have, like, a more experienced developer who
has become a developer advocate on the team because then they
can support them and also teach them these technologies or tools
or approaches to stuff. Yeah.
So that's a fine balance to just hiring people and expecting them
to figure stuff out on their own if they've had the experience.
But if you've had the experience of, like you said, bidding stuff
from zero to 100, I think it improves your skills.
Because there are stations today where I'm speaking to somebody
as a developer advocate and they're asking me questions.
But because I've had the experience of like a full life
cycle of an application, I can have connections with them that
is different from the questions they're asking me.
What kind of like comes back to you like This is why I'm making
a decision because that's your business like this or you
probably need to approach this problem from this sort of
direction. So we're able to have these full
conversations that even outside of my SDK, for example, because
I did not just, I'm not just trying to understand what the
like the code they want to solve right now or why were they doing
it or why are they trying to achieve with it.
So I think that experience comes over time from building like,
you know, production tools or just building zero to 100
applications as well. Because I feel you might have
the empathy, you might have the soft skills, but then being able
to understand the the developer that you're helping out in that
moment or the audience are trying to reach to solve their
unique problems. You might build one SDK, but
it's seeing how people can use your technology for infinitely
impossible use cases. Like it's, it's ridiculous.
Sometimes I get surprised that, oh, wow, that's a very good
idea. Yeah.
But that's with any product, no, like any type of digital
product, at some point users just going to be like, no, I use
it for this. And you're like, oh, I didn't go
there. Yeah.
That's not what it's built for, But does it work for you?
Yeah, it works. And I'm like, OK.
And that's also. That's fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. More so on the, let's say coding
thing. With regards to web development,
what are you working on nowadays rather than speaking because I
know you're very much involved in, let's say the next phase of
web development, Yes. And what's what does that look
like for you? So what the aspect of the web
I'm working on mostly right now is what we like to call Web
Five. Yeah.
And before people come in the audience.
Yeah, I'm going to say, what's that?
Why not Web 4? Something like that?
It's trying to find a way to use open protocols, these that are
already out there to solve some of the problems with web two
that we have today. So for example, we web 2, which
is like our everyday web, there was never an identity layer.
For example, you come into the web, you just so probably
supposed to just read pages and get out or read books or
whatever the case is. But then we started to do things
on the web that required these websites to know who we were.
And as we did that, other platforms started coming out to
sell identity to us. So maybe like you have a Twitter
do or you have an e-mail address that you used to authenticate on
the web. But this kind of just allies the
problem that there was never an identity layer integrated into
the web. So what verifiably is doing is
there's a technology called decentralized identifiers.
It wasn't developed by my team. It was developed by W3C standard
for identifying stuff on the Internet, people, objects,
schools, whatever the case is. And there's also something
called verifiable credentials, which helps you, you know,
verify claims. So if someone says I did this,
you're able to issue them a verifiable credential that is
cryptographically signed and connected to this identifier
that they have. And the best number to identify
is anyone can create it just like your name, but no one owns
it. Like a Twitter cannot come to
you and be like, yo, give me the identify.
It's mine because you've created it.
You have the private keys, you have all of those things.
So it's yours. It's yours, yeah.
You can use it anywhere. You can choose to anonymize,
whatever the case is. So what we're doing with Web 5
in this case is bringing these open protocols together that
already exists separately on the Internet and trying to like make
them as a, as a stack of the web.
So you could be building your on regular web application.
Maybe we Knox or the reactor's case may be, but for
authentication, you're using a decentralized identifier
authentication. There isn't a verifiable
credential to confirm that this is who they say they are or they
went to the school or you're doing KYC, whatever the case is.
So we're using these open protocols to actually develop a
new stack, a new protocol for the web, which is what we now
call Web 5. And that also includes a very
interesting part called decentralized web nodes that
allows you to then store your data on your own devices or your
own servers as case, maybe without thinking too much about
it. A beautiful example I saw about
this just last week was at the at the conference we had
developers conference and someone built out a messaging
application that was actually Internet.
So the messages are sent between me and you are stored in our
local decentralized web notes. So it's not like so sort of on a
central server where someone claims to encrypt it, but they
are directing information somewhere else.
It's literally on my device, on your device or any server that
we choose to host ourselves. So these are like the, it's a
great development, it's a great technology, but these are like
things that have been made possible with what we call Web
Five. I'm using these three pillars
that literally open standards that are created by web
properties and what we're doing at TBD, for example, you just
bringing these things together and say, oh, this is how they
could work together. And that is what we've termed
with five S to answer your initial question because I feel
like I just went. Yeah, no.
Interesting. Yeah.
So to answer your initial question, what I do these days
actually to of course speak with people that are interested,
people are building amazing solutions around this actually
because it's a it's a new ecosystem that is developing.
So I'm having to like build out USKCS examples and we have this
program, this project called TBDX that also brings these
technologies into the financial world.
So how can you send money across borders using designer
identifiers, using verifiable credentials and all of those,
all of those things. So I'm having to build, for
example, for concept, understand what the edge case work do look
like. And it's difficult because or
like other technologies that already exist, there's no
documentation. I am actually created a
documentation for it. So I need to dig deep,
understand the implementations that have been made and at the
same time speak with the engineers that are doing making
decisions or this is what I think the the developer
experience could look like. You can get better, you can
improve like this, because I assume a developer might want to
use it like this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, stuff like
that. So my my day-to-day kind of like
revolves around building stuff to show what is possible with
these things and then sharing with the community.
And then we have conversations. I speak about it sometimes and
also get back to the engineers like, oh, I got this feedback,
this might be broken. How about we do this this way
and stuff like that. So.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, the web, if I
think back when it first was, when I first kind of did
something on the web, I made an account and it wasn't my name.
Like it was some weird ass name, basically.
Yeah, like, and then I changed it and then I used my name as my
e-mail and that everything shifted.
And nowadays more and more, like your e-mail is still somewhere
else and it's not really yours, but then it's now become part of
you, right? Because that's how you receive
information. Yet it doesn't belong to me.
At the end of the day, if Microsoft bursts to the ground,
then my e-mail goes along with it and I don't have anything
anymore. I think nowadays people are more
and more thinking of, but why do we have these people in the
middle or companies in the middle or service in the middle
when it's my data? And now all of a sudden people
want to, on the web, be identifiable as themselves.
And that's new, right? Because I didn't care if it was
my name or a different name, or if it was me or if I was just
trolling on the Internet. Nowadays people want to know who
that troll is. And people also fine with it
because then all of a sudden you can't troll as much anymore if
people know it's you. Right.
I think it's new and I think I'm not so new, but I think the key
part is the number of people that care about what their data
and identity is being used for has increased dramatically over
the years. Yeah, Also when I'm talking
about these things, I try to avoid just saying
decentralisation because people like, oh, blockchain or stuff
like that, but it's not connected to that in any way.
Being able to just develop applications that you have
control over or what identifies you goes a long way.
And people think about how can I handle this data or do I need to
be a technical person to be able to use identifiers and stuff
like that. But the reality is that they are
already already being used in the background for some of these
things. So let's say you go to LinkedIn,
for example, and you issue the certificate, most likely for
some of the certificates, I think they've created a de
serialized identifier for you and they've connected the
certificate that they issued for you to the identifier.
So even if you take it elsewhere, it belongs to you,
right? And so they've been like tiny
implementations of this all across the board.
But the goal is so that eventually every user, whether
you care about, you know, prioritising or, you know,
safeguarding your identity or your data or you don't care, you
probably don't even get to know that is happening in the
background. But if you like want to move
from being a regular user to a multi user, you should have the
capability to do that, Yeah. So I think the future would be
making that form of new identity structure and data storage and
all those things more accessible to the everyday user.
Yeah, interesting. Like I care what happens with my
data. I don't care enough yet.
That's the thing. And for the people that do
definitely care and care enough, Yeah, this is becoming more
important. But then to get adoption, like I
don't have, I shouldn't be a technical person to make this
happen, right? It should just be.
I should be unburdened in the same way that I am now with
whatever happens to my data, except then I own it basically.
Yeah, me too. But then a lot of organizations
are going to burn to the ground if they don't have the data of
the others anymore. So that that I think that boys,
I think just going to create a different type of when I say
business model, maybe people could start to gain incentivized
about buying their data so you can start making money off of
your own data. And also this company is good
avoid maybe litigation from using data that they were not
authorized to have. Yes, you've you've given off
your data now willingly. So I'm I mean, there might be a
bit of, you know, acquisition, adoption, you know, arguments
for and against, but I think in due time, the larger community,
larger audience would dictate out this the big tech eventually
adopt stuff like that. Yeah.
And there's this example that normally brings about the
question you just asked. And it's if you have
decentralized web nodes and you store your own data privately,
you, you we stand a chance to experience a platform like
Spotify allowing you to move your playlist from one music
provider to another. So let's say I'm on Spotify and
they're using the beauty of this realized web application and
they're using my DID, which is distressed identifier.
And my playlist, my music favorite music and stuff is
start locally with me. If I go to Apple Music, I should
hope to do that. Then people ask the question and
just ask what will make Spotify do that?
Yeah, why would Apple do that exactly?
Stuff like, and then boys that, OK, imagine someone else comes
along and they build an amazing experience and they say can
bring your data from anywhere. You can take your data anywhere.
Now people that care about their data at that moment will be
like, I want to go to this guy. And then it starts to like go to
this guy. And then more people start to
care about their data and the community starts to dictate what
is essential or not. So the criteria then becomes
from Singapore to Spotify, can I go with my data or not?
No. So yeah, I'm not signing up.
And it's what's fast. It'd be like, looks like we have
to let people, you know, ping their own data or go with their
own data, which probably just to improve our experience.
And then that way we've changed the ecosystem based on what's
the larger community wanted. But this is, this is my hobby,
which we're thinking because you might follow a different
approach, but I think that's probably what's possible.
But it just ties back to your question, like why would they do
it? Yeah, now we can't do that.
And it's, it's a thing of who's first to market because that's
usually what people use. And what's the experience then?
And then regardless of if there are better competitors in the
future. And I use this example of Google
Maps versus Apple Maps because that's a previous conversation I
had with Willem at V to use this.
He said when Apple Maps came out, it was actually not great
and Google Maps was already out there.
And because of that, you probably went to Google Maps.
And nowadays, nowadays Apple Maps is actually quite good and
everything's integrated into the Apple ecosystem.
Like they've improved it. And I used it recently, like it
is better and better. It might be better than Google
Maps, but I will not switch because everything is in Google
Maps now. And I'm like, I'm invested, I'm
hooked. I don't have any incentive to
switch, so I don't. I was just going to say that
like I just assumed in my head, oh, from maybe like 5-6, ten
years ago, whenever it was that Apple Maps, a sheet and that's
it. We use Google Maps.
It just became that default for me.
And that's a very good point. I might I might try it out.
I mean, development hasn't stopped, right?
So you have 10 years of, let's say, problems they've solved,
problems maybe you now have with Google Maps that they've solved
on Apple Maps and you don't know because you're just hooked in.
And you never just try. It no.
And all those safe locations, all those favorite food places
that you want to go are all in Google Maps.
Those are never going to be in Apple Maps or you have to redo
it and hell no, you're going to. Do it That is exactly.
Yeah, that's really funny, man. So in this way, because you are
the owner and it's on whatever you have, Yeah, device wise you
would be able to then let's say load it in into Apple Maps in
that way. Yeah, and you just.
Very interesting. I really wonder how this
adoption thing is going to work because if it if it's going to
be effortless, that's the only way I see adoption.
So then from a non-technical standpoint, I don't know how
that would work, right? If I were to make that switch
from Google Maps to Apple Maps and I have my data on my local
either on my phone or it's centralized also with my laptop
back home, how would that work? Florida State.
Yeah, I mean, let's let's go to a world where everything is
already set up and is the ecosystem has grown.
Just last week as well. The Digital Identity Foundation,
I think, I think I got that correct, in partnership with
Google Cloud, actually just announced hosting a community
digitalized web node. Yeah.
So now the way it works is while you have your data locally, you
can choose to sync to an online node for the digitalized web
node. So the way this works is if
someone will send you a message or you want to access something
on another device, it goes to the online one, which is synced
with your local device. And then the data is basically
on your local device on your on your own chosen server.
So if you're switching across devices, the information is
still with you. If you're going anywhere else,
the information is still yours on both your local DWN and your
online DWN, right? So, so many applications or
ecosystems, how would I put this already been built, right?
For example, we have something called Ellum and Ellum is we had
this, we have this live stream on my company that we do almost
every Friday. So we find people that have been
in stuff in the ecosystem and we interviewed hello.
I love that. Yeah.
And what they do because it makes us also learn about the
ecosystem, right? What they do is they go to like
schools, for example, universities and they try to
issue certificates for graduating, for example, to
these students that that live in the school.
And one of the the addest places to get adoption is the schools
because they made a point where they said they can go back to
the archive and find a certificate that they issued in
sheepskin. Yeah.
Like they needed to be able to stand the test of time.
They need to be able to, you know, last any for however long
it is because they want to be able to authenticate their
results. And there's no better
alternative to that than cryptographically sign digital
assets that will always exist and be connected to wherever I
see it's connected to. Yeah, because they're Tampa
proof. If you did anything there, it's
going to tell you there's an error.
Like all of those things can stand rest of time.
So I think adoption is going to be gradual where as people start
to develop, you know, applications that match your
need, you find yourself gradually getting into the
ecosystem and just think about it naturally.
You don't just think about, oh, I want to get my certificate,
for example, and to go by and to go get AD then to go, yeah, you
never think about that. It's just going to up until this
is your certificate. You can now state your Apple
Wallet, for example. Before you know it, you've
started in verifiable connections, your Apple Wallet,
and you have to do something else and you have to do
something else, and gradually. It becomes a norm for you and I
think we're going to get to that point where different providers
and have phone, you know, manufacturers, online services,
cloud services and even institutions will start to use
some of this and then you don't have to worry about it anymore.
In Louisiana, they already issue verifiable credentials in the
form of driver's license, so digital driver's licenses.
So you can, for example, my manager actually bought booze.
She has a stock that she gives that she bought booze with a
verified credential. OK.
And basically when when you are buying alcohol online or if
you're online, they have to come and give it to you That's check
that you're above 21. But normally you would give them
your driver's license or something else and they can see
your date of birth, which is unnecessary information.
But with this kind of process, and she actually did this
already, by the way, it's not like I'm not imagining this.
Yeah, the person that is delivering the alcohol to you
can literally just check using the driver's license.
Is this person above 21 or not? Yeah, it's a Boolean value.
Even though you have your best certificate, your date of birth
in the driver's license, it just responds to the check.
Yes, this person is above 21. Yeah.
And he's done. That's it.
And that. And that's exactly how it
happened for her. And that is how we slowly
integrate without even thinking. Interesting.
Oh, this is a disabled identifier.
It's a verifiable credential. It just kind of naturally flows
into our way of life. And that is the optimism I also
have, how it's going to become like just normal stuff for
everyday people. Yeah, I'm going to love seeing
how this evolves because I think it's very interesting.
Yeah. Do you think we would also lose
some things we have now? Because there's a whole now new
branch which is data science, data engineering, where people
basically solve big data problems and sometimes small
data problems as well. Because obviously data is kind
of hard to tamper with. But in the end, if it's
decentralized, can we still do, for example, figure out what the
best recommendations are based on the aggregates and the
patterns of the people that basically the data we have?
Because you don't have that data anymore.
You only have people checking in, probably sharing the data to
do some stuff and then going away as well.
That is a very good question. I'm sure there are probably more
thought out answers to that, but off the top of my head, the what
I would say is for when you're in control of your data, you can
choose what data can be public or encrypted.
Yeah. So for example, if I'm building
a review website in the age of the visualized web where people
have their own data, if you choose to make the review of
something you bought public, the the platform can access this
because it's very public, you share it with them or you can
have permission to access it and uses to develop recommendations,
which will also be for back into the music applications to get
recommendations and stuff. So it might be a different
approach eventually, like maybe or even new business model.
But because you have public unencrypted data that you can
choose to give people access to, it could shape how those things
research and also that things, you know, come into play.
Yeah. I don't think we'll completely
lose it, but I think there might be a change in direction into
how this is. Yeah.
How do you how you make it happen?
But the the plus there is you're gonna hope that there's a
there's a positive in you switching to this new way and
that is why you're doing it in the first.
Place, yeah, for sure, yeah. How much is data worth though?
Because there are, there are big organizations that basically
their business model is to sell other people data.
And it doesn't even have to be like people data.
It can even be data of a cat or a dog or whatever.
And they sell that and that's in their business model basically.
Yeah, that is a good question. I do know how to answer you.
Still don't know because the the worth is in the aggregation,
right? Because then you can do pattern
recognition and you can observe some problems based on the
patterns of similarities. That's what I think.
That's my assumption. So then the data might be worth
it to other organizations. And then even then, it's mainly
with the capitalist mindset to sell something.
Yeah, to specific user groups or specific owners of pets, and
even in some cases. And that will change if people
kind of own their data. But then, yeah, they have the
option in this kind of marketplace to sell their data,
but they have no clue what it's worth.
Yeah, actually, they don't have any clue what it's worth.
But then you might start having people that start to make offers
and then you start to get an idea of this person give me a
better offer for this than this. And any data that you choose to
share through that model, you know, they could use it for
anything. Yeah, but one thing I wanted to
print out as well is why do users have their own data?
Applications can also have their own data.
So you can have an idea of how people go through your
application, what they're trying to do, or even though you don't
know who it is, you don't have any access to their personal
identifiable information. You can on your application, you
can tell like 10,000 people or that calculators or something as
it may be. So you have your own data that
you can still store, process and use that to make decisions and
stuff like that. So while I don't have the full
picture, I think it's still something to consider that every
institution, every individual would be able to, you know,
control their own data. And, and that benefit for it on
the, on the end of the applications is that now you
don't have to worry about data centers that are just huge
because you want to store everybody's data.
And yeah, I just, I just hope for the best because I'm really
excited about it because it's it might change the way we just
approach the Internet and also false news, fake news or AI
generated stuff like this is legit or not.
And the entire potential just makes me excited.
So I'm. Looking for that, Yeah.
I mean, the more peer-to-peer we have, Yeah.
And also the more data you then have on a local machine, the
less data centers we need. And data centers are like the
biggest carbon emitters. Like I'm now product manager at
ING and we do a lot with sustainability.
Yeah. And I looked into Microsoft's,
let's say absolute emission charts and absolute emission
charts, they don't tell you that much, but they give you a
picture and they were on a downtrend, right?
Because companies nowadays have to set targets for themselves.
They publicly disclose it. It's more legislation driven.
So companies do that. But then all of a sudden when
you saw kind of late last year, early mid last year, when we hit
more of this AI generation and AI boom, compute started going
up on Microsoft's end, which also reflected in the absolute
emissions, then went through the roof with regards to that.
It's because people used more compute and you can't.
Like if you have data centers, that's where it runs on and you
can't just remove that. Microsoft can't say, oh, we
don't have data centers tomorrow because we need to compute
basically for people to do their stuff.
Interesting. But the more I think local
machines get more powerful, the more compute you can offload to
a local machine as well, which means you don't need those
centralized data centers anymore.
That is very interesting. Do you think that is connected
to? Because I had news about like
the new updates on Windows, I think, where you have like an AI
running locally that's recording your screen and then staying all
the comput locally on your devices.
That's what I would do to offload the computer on a on a
centralized server at the end of the day.
But the people are worried about privacy because you're recording
my entire screen. Of course.
It's like, how do I know you're not in the background?
Seeing this background, you'll never know.
That's the thing you have to believe at some point.
Yeah, but if you know that your data runs locally and it doesn't
exit your machine, then that trust is more so out-of-the-box,
100%. Yeah.
Like, I like those initiatives where people are thinking of
cutting up a data centre. And someone I forgot whom gave
me the example of there's a company that publishes or
basically creates a data centre underneath swimming pools at
hotels or even public swimming pools.
And then the heat of that data centre goes into the swimming
pool and they basically reduce their energy bill by 70%, which
is crazy to me because this is a different concept than
decentralizing, let's say on a local machine.
It's cutting up a data center and having smaller data centers.
Interesting. And you weave a web of probably
compute power at the end of the day.
But then you also don't just harm the planet, you give back
in saving energy costs elsewhere.
That is interesting. Yeah, I thought that was.
Really cool. Even if the eats from the what
is it called from the Saba data center eats up the pool.
Yeah, that's how they save energy.
How do you cool the data center? Yeah, you don't.
I didn't think about that. Yeah, you probably have to
offload in the compute somewhere else and just let it cool down
in that way. Oh my dear, Yeah.
Well, that's pretty cool. Yeah, for sure.
It sounds exciting. What do you have to?
Say, yeah, with this trailblazing that you're doing,
Yeah. Things have not been
established. And nowadays I see a lot of
people that are concerned with regards to whatever generative
AI can do and people losing kind of their own productivity to AI,
which also means that sometimes their job or their work might
become obsolete. Yeah, but for you, my assumption
is when you're trailblazing, AI doesn't know what you don't know
because no one knows. Basically, it still has to be
figured out. What are your what is your take
on kind of this AI generation boom?
I mean, at first you're skeptical when you see a lot of
people just, you know, talk from the pessimistic approach, like,
oh, this is going to be terrible.
It's going to take our jobs. And then when you see how
different other people start to use AI, then you come up with
your own ideas like, oh, I see the way I've found or integrated
AI into my work. Because like you said, I can ask
the AI question about web file right now and it's not going to
give me a quick answer. But what I, what I've tried to
use it for is to improve my own efficiency, my own pace.
So say I will be doing a wallet application to test out like
TBDX, which is an open protocol for sending money across
borders. So I wanted to do like say USCC
to sorry, USD to USDC. So I need to build out the
wallet that would show this example to people now in an
ideal world without AII have to like, you know, do a layout to
get them please blah, blah, blah.
But that's not what I'm trying to show you.
I'm not trying to show you that I can be a good wallet.
Yeah, I'm trying to show you that you can transfer money.
Yeah, stuff like this. So using AI tools like V0 from
Versal and also ChatGPT, I was able to generate like a very
like AI would like a design system.
And then I used ChatGPT to generate pages using our design
system. And then I just went to my
application with pages that I controlled.
I basically do the AI move this button this way, do this, this
way. Like I knew what I wanted.
So it wasn't like, oh, I'm relying on charge of this too.
Please give me an idea of a wallet.
For example, I could see the wallet.
I knew what I wanted to build, but I didn't want to take the
time to like do the manual labor.
So to see to do the structure. And I used AI for that.
So once that was ready, I just went into the code, you know,
cleaned up, make it like a view template, clean up the my
integrations, did my transfer and I probably caught my work
there probably 70% maybe because I didn't have to worry about
these other things that AI can do for me.
Yeah. And that is personally for me.
I would advocate AI for you to get better as a developer.
You push your deadlines. Yeah, you push your efficiency.
And sometimes I could just be stuck.
So maybe someone asks me a question and I know what I want
to say, but I can't really structure it.
And I ask AI the question and you response to me, I'm not
asking AI the question to take that answer to go give to you.
Or by reading the answer, I'm able to like form my own
thoughts better. And I respond to you like a
normal human being. So I use the the way I've used
AI in my work and just personally just trying to make
to accentuate things I want to do already.
So I know what I want to do already.
How can I make it faster? How can I make it more
efficient? And I think that's probably
going to tap into different industries.
So instead of people being afraid necessarily of like the
AI power and stuff like that, or replacing you, how it makes you
better that you become irreplaceable.
Yeah, 70% is a lot like in productivity that increase.
We haven't seen that elsewhere. Yeah, I don't think so.
No, because I mean, I know I just need to make like a few SDK
calls, but I could spend AGS and make sure that the button hides
or shows it's properly aligned, it's red color, you know, all of
those things that are just repeated tasks that we do every
single time. So why not let someone else do
it? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, for me it makes sense.
Be careful with the tapping on the table.
I think the mic is going to pick that up.
So sorry. About that, No, no worries.
I was thinking of the future of web development nowadays because
I still think we have the three biggest established front end
frameworks. We have React, we have Angular,
we have you. I think SOLID is gaining a bit
more adoption and then you have kind of spin offs with people
called meta frameworks of the same thing basically.
And it might even be one layer deeper where you have spin offs
than of the spin offs. Is that also something you've
seen? Because I I don't know where
it's headed. I think people want to be
unburdened in some aspects, but then want control and less
convention I guess. But I don't think convention is
a bad thing. I agree.
I was developing a code sandbox. I don't know if you know code
sandbox. Yeah, it's an online browser
editor for sure. And one of the things I had to
do was, you know, make sure that the editor could undo like the
forever coming new array of GS frameworks.
So you're building examples and you're, you know, speaking to
communities of these different, you know, technologies.
And while a lot of these, a lot of these frameworks still feel
very similar, I think it's just a problem of the JavaScript
ecosystem in general where people try to use frameworks to
solve their own use cases. I I think that kind of defeats
the purpose of frameworks because remarks are supposed to
be like a starting point that then goes right into different,
you know, solutions. And while you might have like
the major ones that try and like, oh, you can use this for
anything. I think it's, it's ingenious to
want to build specific free mods for almost specific use cases.
Yeah. But across that entire journey,
I've been able to find like very exciting ones that actually
makes life easy. For example, Astro and maybe
Remix. I haven't used a lot of it, but
they seem to have pushed this from either bringing back a new
technology or a new approach or saying this is the approach you
want to take to solve all of these things.
Yeah, but it doesn't exactly defeat the fact that they're
probably just way too many. Yeah.
So if we're able to like, you
know, have conventions, have conventions and say this is what
we want to be able to do and these are the tools that are
available for it, I think it will help a lot of people,
actually beginners as well, to just have a few, a couple.
I think this is how you build web applications in JavaScript.
So just on traits of frameworks that some of them do the same
things. Yeah, it's a like, I don't know
how to solve this problem, right?
Because people can also create a spin off of a programming
language, but it doesn't happen as much.
No, for some reason JavaScript frameworks just happens way more
often. And then you find things like
Astro, it's really cool and then you can see the potential.
But yeah, if you don't have the flexibility to create an Astro
in the 1st place, then you lose that benefit, right?
But then people take this and run with it and then you have
just numerous frameworks and at the end you use what is
established, especially at larger organizations.
We're not going to use an Astro if it hasn't found its footing
yet as much as kind of the bigger three at the end of the
day. And it's it's really hard to
find adoption if other people then don't use it.
So then it's this chicken egg problem where you want adoption,
but you need adoption to use it. I tried to tell developers that
probably fix fixated on that problem, like, oh, what
framework should I use and stuff like that.
I'm like, you're probably going about this the wrong way.
Yeah. What problem do you want to
solve? What are you trying to build?
What are you comfortable with? And then you try and like get
into that space. If you're trying to build a
solution for your company, you probably want to use something
that you're already using house and probably it's going to pay
you to learn it on your on your own time.
You of course you could learn like additional tools just for
probably for the fun of it, of course, some other experience
when it comes to actually solving these problems, like
what is the problem you want to solve?
Yeah. And what do you think will help
you solve this quicker, faster, efficiently and stuff like that.
Your preferences might come into play or you need to focus more
on how do I get the job done that says, oh, she that 100.
So I didn't language that 100 frameworks.
How do I spend like one day, 2 days and decide which one to
use? Right.
And I think we should probably have for doing that.
Yeah, you don't have to like it's if you think that's fun,
then you can do that. But what really drives me is
indeed more so the problem solving.
How can I use whatever I use and then do that.
And I haven't done web development in probably like a
Goodyear. The last thing I did was mainly
go on the back end. Then we had HTML generated
templates, and then we did vanilla JavaScript.
I was like, man, this just makes it work.
Yeah. So yeah, I've seen things kind
of evolve from the sidelines and it at some points I'm like, OK,
this is really cool. And at some points I'm like,
man, this is a mess. Yeah, I agree to be honest.
I agree. I hope we don't like
continuously reinvent the wheel. Yeah, I don't know why we do it.
I I have become a huge fan of Vue just because it's simple to
use. And I love Vue.
Yeah, I, I look at Vue and I'm like, there are tools in view
ecosystem that just helps me get the job done.
And of course people probably prefer React in some cases
because they've gotten used to that.
And that's 100% like fine. But I think with the options
that we have, we're probably able to build probably any web
application that we need versus trying to dense of a niche
problem with another JavaScript framework that's probably not
the. Answer no, no, absolutely not.
No. And I think it's it's OK to be
opinionated. Yeah.
And then just find your like minded people and execute
because at the end of the day, you can have an opinion, but the
execution matters more than your opinion and you have to execute
to get stuff done. Yeah, like that's the hard part.
I, I really love Go as a back end language and I was in this
team and I love programming also because I love the language that
I'm doing. If I were to do it in another
language that I didn't. Love.
I wouldn't have as much fun. And then someone switched from
the JVM language and landscape and ecosystem to Go and they
just hated it. They were like, I have so many
things in in the JVM language that I don't have in Go and they
hated it. And they really couldn't get
over that initial hump. So they switched back and I'm
like, OK, that's fine. That's understandable.
You can still like get over that and execute, but if you don't
like what you're doing on a day-to-day, like that's going to
hit you. So then it made sense to move
away again. I agree.
I just like to focus on like what problem I'm trying to solve
because for example, the developer advocate, it's part of
my job. If you want to put like my hands
into like so many technologies. Yeah, Most recently with our
SDKS, they are available in JavaScript, Kotlin and Swift.
So I've had to like Go learn how to use Swift, learn how to use
Kotlin. That's a lot.
Yes, I dislike Swift. OK.
Me too. Yeah.
Yeah, it's hard. Maybe it's because it's
difficult. Yeah.
Some of the things that they just feel very straightforward
to me, probably not because I'm a Swift developer, but probably
because of where I'm coming from.
Yeah, but I still have to do my job.
I still have to like, you know, do documentation in Swift, but
I'm probably a more much happier person while I'm doing
JavaScript or cutling in the documentation, right?
So it's one thing to like, not like language, but it's another
thing to focus on getting the job done if that's what's
required of you at that moment. I really like how you put that.
You're like, it's probably not because of the language because
it's where I'm coming from, right?
And that experience matters a lot. 100% I think if Swift is
your first language, you just have this love for the first
language like that. You can't get over that.
Mine's like 5 point 2.7, no brackets, no bullshit.
Is is that and that's involved. Yeah, exactly.
Like, like it's, it's, it's always going to happen that way.
And then when you pick up a new language, you have that baggage
with you. So then you compare.
I think it's very human to compare.
I agree. And if you don't like it, you
don't like it. I agree.
Yeah, but why did you choose to then?
Because I know you like solving problems, Web five, and the
problems that that will solve our problems we don't know we
have yet, right. And we can see some symptoms,
but that's like really big on the scale of the web.
Yeah. And previous products or like
smaller startups, they solve a specific niche for a specific
user group. Yeah.
How's this balance between solving, let's say, a huge
problem versus solving these smaller problems that you've
done in the past? Yeah, so there's a story there.
So and when I started out leading out to code, I became
really fascinated with the web. So I was like a front end
engineer at some point, a back end engineer at some point, a
full stack engineer at some point.
And I've had to like, you know, solve problems in those
capacities, like just building stuff.
But one thing that always stood out for me or even got me into
tech in the 1st place was getting excited by the idea of
people inventing things. So I'm like, how did someone
build this thing? Like I literally just imagined
it and as a developer and engineer.
After a few hours, days, weeks, sort of years, sometimes it's
now like a life, like people can interact with that.
I think that's the root of like the solving the problem.
It's not just solving problem for the sake of solving the
problem, but you've seen the advancement in the journey and
being a part of it. So as a as a kid growing up, I'm
looking at a Windows computer, for example, I'm looking at
different technologies. And I wonder why the people that
invented this, you know, studying computer science,
you're reading up on like the generations of the computer, the
the appernet, the Internet that it came about to be.
And then seeing the opportunity at TBD to work on like web
provide, for example, was I'm being in a position where I can
help bring in a new era of the web where in 10 years, maybe 15
years, maybe people start to talk about this technology like
it's not a normal thing, Like it's just just the way we talk
about web too, like it's just web.
It's just we just use it. And in this, I'm going to feel a
sense of pride there that I was able to create resources or
solve problems in advance or contribute to solving those
problems that make our everyday possible now.
So it's more of a futuristic problem solving in advance and
trying to figure out things that have not been figured out
anywhere because there's no documentation elsewhere apart
from the ones that already created.
And that's exciting in its own right because I'm doing work
that I've never done. But it also makes me feel like
those people I used to look up to as a younger child, like how
did the kids come up? Microsoft, how did you beat up
Ms. doors? Like, you know, do you know of
those things? And wow, that must be nice,
being able to be stuff out of nothing or something that never
existed. Then getting the opportunities
to do this on a global scale. It's amazing.
Yeah. And it gets me like up every
morning. Like, it gets me excited.
I mean, that that is where like, damn, I don't know what I'm
doing because it's a very huge space.
And it's been, a lot of this work has been going on for
years. But I think we're getting closer
to where it's taking more structure and the ecosystem is
starting to form more. And eventually, like I said
earlier, I think it's going to get to a point where the
integration is just seamless. So you're not thinking that, oh,
this is worth 5, or you're using a digitalized identifier or
you're using a verifiable credential.
It's just ease. Yeah.
Right. So like you have a detail or
what's it called? Driver's license.
There's some countries today that already do a detailed
travel document. So if you're travelling, you
just like tap something on your phone and you can board like
your passport, stuff like that. And that is eventually where
we'll get to not just on mobile applications or mobile, but
across the Internet. Yeah.
And I think there will be a sense of pride.
I'm probably telling my grandkids like I have been that.
Absolutely. I love that.
So that that is what it is. That's a beautiful story.
I I love the vision. I love the big dream.
Yeah. And the energy that you get
also, while you talk about it, like it comes across, it's
electrifying. Thank you.
It's been great, man. I'm having a blast.
Is there anything before you round off that you still wanted
to share? I think we've had a very
Commission that kind of cover the entire thing.
But I like, I have AI tried to share my experience on my, you
know, social media platforms and stuff like that.
And one thing that usually comes up that I think is it could
easily be A1 answer fits all questions.
And, and I'd like to share today is just, you know, focusing on
value. Just like you said, the way my
excitement comes in when I'm talking about these things is
'cause I'm just thinking about the work I have to do to get
there. I'm thinking about what value
this would present to like different people in different
areas of life. And it's not just starting
today, while I was learning how to code and I wanted to, you
know, build out my first website, for example, I wasn't
thinking about just checklist like, well, now I know I now
know how to code. I was thinking more about, well,
now I can build something that does this for people and all of
those things, right? So if you're starting out as a
developer or any role in general, thinking about how the
work you'd be able to do and the value they could build to people
and improving on that across the border, I think would just help
you go in your career. I also find meaning in the work
that you do and I just wanted to share that to the audience.
Great man. Focus on what value you can.
Deliver Yes. Awesome.
Thanks again so much for coming on.
I'm going to round it off here. Thanks again for listening.
Put some comments and some love in this in the comments below.
Let us know what you thought of this episode and thanks again
for listening. We'll see you on the next one.