Hey all, I will be taking you on a week-long journey that I have experienced from 18th to 25th April 2022 at DevConnect Amsterdam and ETHAmsterdamorganized by ETHGlobal. And also embrace yourself with the learnings from my perspective.

Welcome again to my blog, I am Praneeth Reddy Arikatla. Pursuing my master's in Computer Science at Polimiand living in Berlin as an exchange student at TU Berlin. Also, looking for full-time job opportunities in WBE3. Please visit praneethreddy.me for more details and here is my resume.

Enough, let's get back to DevConnect and dive in.

Okay, Before getting in I should thank two people without them I wouldn't have gone to this event. Baptiste for sponsoring enough amount to attend this week-long event and Piablo another developer_daomember for letting me crash in his place.

DAY 0

I was so excited and planned a lot on what events to attend and how to interact/network with people and get some benefit(JOB OPPORTUNITIES) out of it. Which didn't happen as exactly as planned, but in the end, everything went fine so, follow along till the end and see what happened.

DAY 1

Attended WEB3 UX unConference("A participant-driven meeting").

Met many great people in this space like Tom from Tokyo, Taha from ChainSafe, Raffiq and also SAM and discussed the user experience on ONBOARDING people into WBE3 with as a working group. That was a great talk with the group and also with Sam.

My personal takeaway from the event:- Maxis in this space wants everything to be as per the web3 principles, But the technology still didn't reach that advanced stage where it makes even non-tech people hop in without any friction/bad user experience. I personally think the future would be WEB2.5 where people take leverage of WEB2 to bring more people onto WEB3 and both technologies will co-exist.

DAY 2

Attended "Build an ETH Dapp in 7hours" by buidspace

I know this is a beginners event, but I went there to meet Farzaand the team behind buildspace IRL. I had a great time there and did a mini hack "Token gated file sharing" tool with a great teamGeorge, Pedro, and Jason.

Also, a suggestion for buildspace would be to try to have some in-hand building experience in-person in these types of events, I know the majority of people would be coming for networking but since this is a beginners event there will be people attending there who would be willing to learn something in-person.

My Personal Takeaway from this event:- You should be very strong at the fundamentals be it a normal tech stack or web3 tech stack. This will help you build something faster than it takes when you google something.

DAY 3

Attended "Oh! Snap It's Metamask!" by MetaMask

Man, this was such a great workshop! got to know that metamask has a development version metamask(FLASK) and wrote a snap for a password manager. People who attended there are soooo technically strong in this space and the team behind metamask were there who are also really at another level, where at a time I felt it was over my head but two other people(Steph and Alex) from developer_daohelped me understand what's happening there :P

My Personal Takeaway from this event:- Don't think you know many things, especially in WEB3, You know just a drop in an ocean.

Also attended a party "Filecoin & Friends Social!" by IPFS& FILECOIN and met another incredible person MICHAEL MORAMI from Certora and had insights on formal verification in Smart contract security.

DAY 4

Attended "Secureum TrustX" by Secureum

People who attended are really really knowledgeable and very strong at what they know/speak. Security is one of the most important aspects of any protocol or application being built especially in WEB3 because if you want to onboard more people you would make them feel that the tech here is safe enough to interact with. The recent rise in hacks, bugs, and scams scares the shi* out of people. Also, meeting Rajeev in person is really exciting

My Personal Takeaway from this event:- Security in WEB3 should do a "LEFT SHIFT" in the development process. While developing always think from a security perspective as well.

DAY 5

ETHAmsterdam

I actually have registered for the hackathon but unfortunately couldn't stake the required eth to reserve my spot. So, they withdrew my application which I came to know lately. But, somehow I wanted to be there and have that experience of meeting people and sharing knowledge and meeting the companies in WEB3. Looked at all possible ways and finally decided to volunteer for the ETHGlobal team that is organizing ETHAms. Got into this space and spend as much time as I can there. Met really great people here and legends out there in this space. Also met people who are budding into this space which is really inspiring and motivating to stay strong and stick to your journey in web3.

Met great people like Huichi, Andrew Dunscomb, Kartik Talwar, Naomi, CheeChyuan, Luke, Shaka, Emily, and Anna.

Also met the great Evan and had a great talk. Thanks for the suggestion to start contributing to opensource, I will start doing that.

My Personal Takeaway from this event:- Don't worry about how much you know in WEB3, just stay in this space and take your time and keep on building. Eventually, you will learn a lot and gain a lot of knowledge. We are soooooooo fuck*ng early into this there will be a lot of ups and downs in this journey, just take inspiration from the community and stay long.

Developer_Dao members-only Happy hours

Also attended developer_dao event sponsored by coinbase happened on Saturday(23rd April 2022). This is where real networking for me happened I met people whom I am following from the start of my web3 journey. Thanks to Nader, Vitto, Albert, Josh, Rahat, Alex, Kay, Sil, Ryan, piablo, pedro, Aakansha, kempsterrr, George, Cami, for making this happen, for hearing me out, giving me suggestions.

MY LEARNINGS FROM THE WHOLE WEEK:-

STAY STRONG, KEEP LEARNING, KEEP BUILDING, KEEP NETWORKING, BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, and CONTRIBUTE TO OPEN SOURCE. You will eventually land in a good place that is designated for you.

I will be trying as much as I can and let's see what will happen. I AM ALL IN.