Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Gabriel. Gabriel is a developer advocate of Cartesi.
Cartesi is an app-specific roller protocol with virtual machines that run Linux distributions. At Cartesi, Gabriel is delivering proof-of-stakes, taking systems and is also working on developer relations, fostering ecosystem for developers in Cartesi. He holds a degree in computer engineering from Rio and since 2017 has worked as a software engineer focused on blockchain technology.
He specializes in Ethereum as well as DApp development, previously having worked on Terminal which was rebranded as Fleek and ConsenSys as well. So that’s a little bit about him. This was a very interesting conversation because we really talked a lot about how to foster a new ecosystem and get developers more excited about building on it.
So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Gabriel, thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me today.
How are you doing? Oh, I’m pretty good and pretty excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Likewise, I am looking forward to this wonderful conversation.
So for our listeners, Gabriel, would you like to tell us a little about yourself and your journey into the blockchain space? How you became involved? I’m a computer engineer out of Brazil and as I was graduating, I got recruited by ConsenSys. So I’ve been working with blockchain since 2016. It was really fun because I got this invitation to participate in some interviews with somebody for ConsenSys and mid-interview it turned into how blockchain is actually coming to be and how it’s going to change the technology future.
And it became kind of like a lesson and since then I’ve been in love with blockchain honestly. So I worked with different protocols and eventually I ended up at Cartesi. Okay, so this is somewhat of a similar experience that I think people have once they start getting into decentralized tech and blockchain technology.
They understand a little about it, they read a little about it and then there is no looking back once they journey into the space. That’s true, that’s true. And I love so much about how things are being restructured with blockchain, like how people are rethinking basic concepts that we took for granted.
Things like, I don’t want to mention culture itself, but there’s some aspects of culture that we just take from our parents and we never question them. And I feel like with blockchain, we’ve been questioning a lot of the things that we took as a generational, how to say… It’s about perspective, right? Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much.
Yeah, it changes a lot our perspective on how we can do things as a society actually. Right, yeah, I think so too. I think that decentralized tech has changed some very foundational structures in terms of how people approach certain subject matters or certain problem statements would be perhaps a more correct way of putting it.
And it has given a different way for us to perhaps look at solutions. So that makes it very, very interesting. I agree, I agree for sure.
So how did you get into Cartesi and what exactly are you guys doing there? Oh, it’s funny because I participate on DEF CON for a while now, participating in several editions. And in 2019, I was getting ready to go to DEF CON Osaka, right? I saw one of my friends posting something about going to Japan, I entered in contact with him again. And it’s one of my university friends, but you know how life is, right? You kind of like lose touch from time to time with people.
And I found out that he actually was going there for work as well to DEF CON Osaka. I’m like, what? You’re in blockchain space as well? And he’s like, yeah, I work at Cartesi now. And we’re going to do some small side events, going to talk about the project.
And that was my first contact with Cartesi. I had no idea that many years later, I’ll still be working with him in this project. It’s such a weird thing, right? Like how life can take us to places that we never imagined before.
And I joined Cartesi then to work on the protocol itself, to help them adapt things to Ethereum and because they developed this machine. And since then, we’ve been trying to foster the community and the ecosystem to understand what are the cool aspects and perspectives that Cartesi brings into blockchain. Okay.
So can you tell us a little about the services that you guys have as a platform? I guess backtracking a little bit, you can think of Cartesi like Ethereum itself or any of the other networks that are building the base for dApps. So Citrus Ableton, Optimism, all these ZK protocols. And in this sense, it really is just one more tool that you have on your arsenal to use to build new things.
And the things that Cartesi promotes is basically the ability to have this OS. In our case, we promote the use of Linux as the base for the construction of your dApp. And that changes the whole scenario when it comes to the actual development process.
Because so far, we’ve been dealing with these new technologies and we’ve been rewriting things from scratch. You can take the Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually has a mini virtual machine itself.
And then later, EVM was developed. And it’s really cool. There’s lots of cool things about it.
I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere anytime soon. But as we bring more power to blockchain, I think we need a higher level of abstraction that will actually allow people to do cool stuff with all this newfound power. Yeah, that is absolutely true.
So for our listeners who may not be familiar, can you give an overview or a macro level view of the unique features and the app-specific rollup protocol with the virtual machine running, as you mentioned, online? If you had to explain it in a simpler way, how would you do it to the users and how can they get involved? Well, sure. Just going to application-specific, really interesting take on how to do rollups. I think it’s complementary to the version of rollups that we see most often nowadays.
And in simple terms, it’s basically the difference between having a shared network and have a dedicated network for every application. So when we look back, we see some instances, and the most famous ones is CryptoKitties, where one application or a new segment of applications becomes really, really popular, but also really, really profitable. And what happens is it takes all the space from the blocks of the network itself for it or towards this segment.
And what happens is it hurts all the other apps that people were dedicating their times towards, they were developing or playing with. And that’s really sad. It’s some kind of gentrification.
And normal rollups, they basically are sort of a mirror of the ones in the sense that they are also shared. They have more freedom to expand, but there’s a limitation to that, right? Because it needs to be as secure as possible for every application. It needs to be very generic.
And application-specific means that you’re going to have one rollup per dApp, and that gives you a lot of freedom to improve and change the protocol to make sense for that particular application. So in the case of CryptoKitties, for instance, if CryptoKitties out of the blue became that successful overnight, they could have changed parameters of the network to make it possible to hold the new found adoption and to really adapt to the necessities of the application. So what was the second part of the question? How can the users get involved? Oh, there’s many ways.
Specifically with Cartesi, you have one simple way to get started, which is the Honeypot app. So Cartesi went mainnet this year with a proof of concept application that also ensures the security of the network itself. What we did as core contributors, we developed this application called Honeypot, where the foundation would be depositing money there in order to attract the attention of white hackers or black hat hackers to try to steal the money.
And that’s open to everybody. We actually invite people to take that money away. And because in doing so, they’re exposing some security flaw that we can address early on.
But as time goes by and nobody can take that money and the pot goes increasing, it is some sort of a proof that the system is very, very secure. And we believe it is. And that is a very simple way to get started because you’re going to go through the documentation.
You got to learn more about the technology. And you have some sort of a reward at the end if you find something was done wrongly. But as you want to get more engagement and you want to develop your own application, you want to understand how to do things with it, my biggest recommendation is to join Discord.
We have a very active community and it’s such a rewarding experience, actually, because early on as I became part of the developer advocacy group, we were answering all the questions ourselves. We are engaging with the core contributors to help answer the questions of people. But nowadays, we have so many people who ask for help before actually helping the newcomers.
And it’s so nice. Then as you’re ready to do more interesting stuff and you need some sort of seed fund, developer advocacy group itself has some discretionary funds to help these people. And eventually, if you’re ready to graduate to some sort of more long term project and it’s more serious, the foundation also has the grants program that goes for larger grants.
And the good thing about this is that you’re going to have people ready to give you advice, to help you structure your project, to take you forward. Sometimes it’s not just about the money itself, right? You have to have this whole group coming together to build cool stuff. You know, you’ve mentioned that it’s not just about the monetary support, it’s also about the mentorship and the community support that is there.
Is there any particular niche that you know you guys are targeting or you are encouraging any kind of particular kind of apps that you want to see in your ecosystem? Not specifically. We are not like closing the scope in that sense. We want to see what people can build with this technology and we’ve been impressed about it.
However, more specifically to your question, we’ve seen some patterns emerge and the things that I’ve seen that most interest are often in gaming. We’ve seen a lot of people leveraging the ability to code in the common programming languages to build games and actually have it fully verifiable, which goes a little bit in a different direction as the x infinity situation that we had before in the industry and also into further developing DeFi products. So currently we have Uniswap and Lightning protocols.
They have like primitives that are very interesting, but they rely on a lot of composability to make something that is actually attractive to users and that is due to the fact that you can only process so much on a VM, right? Also express so much complex thoughts into solidity. But we’ve seen some people in the hackathons and reaching out to us on Discord trying to build more interesting approaches to DeFi that takes the ability of the Cartesi to process things and takes it one step further. One such example is DCA Monster, just so you have an idea.
This guy combined the ability to make swaps, so he re-implemented some version of Uniswap in Python, but also a continuous trading over time. So it’s like if you want to do spot trading like you do in Uniswap, it works, but now you have a new functionality where you say, oh, I want to trade this token for this token over the period of one week and you have a perfect average in the middle. And that’s such a new concept.
I haven’t seen anybody working with this before and that is only possible because whenever there is settlement, he can compute all the perfect averages for everybody that participates in the pool of transactions. Wow, okay, that’s very interesting. So, you know, now coming to your role as your current role as somebody who is heading the developer relations, what are the key aspects you focus on to foster the ecosystem of the Cartesian developers apart from the ones that you’ve already kind of mentioned? I think the things that I’m missing here, I guess, overarching education and reach and some of these are already exemplified, but we are starting a master class in Nigeria for eight weeks trying to foster new communities and bring the concepts of blockchain because we don’t only Cartesi, Cartesi is just a building block.
We are going there to teach people how to work with blockchain and it’s going to be very interesting and we will be expanding this kind of venture further, going into places and holding classes with people who already are developers and just want to join the ecosystem. But also we’ve been doing hackathons, we’ve been participating in podcasts such as these. We’ve been trying to participate in the conversation and also reach to people that are kind of like to the side of the bubble of blockchain currently.
Yeah, I think those are good ways to keep, engage and retain the developers. So, how do you guys actively support the developers in creating decentralized apps and what resources are kind of available to them apart from say the documentation? Yes, it’s still on the documentation side, but not so obvious. We’ve been creating videos, there’s some series that’s going to be released pretty soon with Tech with Team, for instance, and I feel we feel like with time as we teach what we learn as well, right? So, we feel like some people can learn better with videos and smaller tutorials.
We developed a lot of those so people go away from the very crude and cold-hearted documentation. But also as people are trying to build things, we have a very hand-holding approach where people can be sure that we are going to give them all the basics and we’re going to answer all the questions so they feel like they matter actually. Sometimes it’s about the human connection as well.
And then there are smaller initiatives. As you participate in the community Discord, you get NFTs and PoApps and we are always inviting people to participate in online events and the local events as well. And this gives people a new opportunity to re-engage with the subject.
Sometimes you participate on a workshop but that wasn’t a good day or you didn’t have enough time to engage and to build something. But there’s always the next one where you can learn again about the technology and feel like now it’s a good chance, a good opportunity to learn whatever was the gaps in your learning from previous interactions. Absolutely.
Yeah, that sounds very supportive ecosystem basically that you are trying to create for developers. I feel that it becomes like a chicken and egg problem, right? Getting developers to build on a new ecosystem all the while making sure that you’re supporting them in the right way. Well, sure.
And it’s funny what you’re saying because not to brag but I’ve been going to several ETH Global events for instance and sometimes people are already building something with us but these are very curious people, right? If they approach Cartesi at some point, it’s because they are these early adopters. They like to be at the edge of technology invention. So, whenever we are seeing them at hackathons again, sometimes they are still building with us but at the hackathon they don’t want to build anything with Cartesi.
But they still come by our booth, they say hi, they stop for a coffee, they want to know that they still have that relationship with us personally, which is so interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I think everybody wants to understand the secret sauce of being able to retain developers and encourage them and incentivize them enough so that they are building on your roadmap and just keep them retained.
I think it’s easy to perhaps at least kickstart folks and ask them to join a particular ecosystem but have them retained in the ecosystem is a different ballgame altogether where they keep coming back maybe for support or for building further etc. For sure, for sure. It is really difficult and I think part of the secret sauce, it’s some of the points I already mentioned but also really focusing on the people that make sense for the technology you’re developing.
So, in our case we really focus on the people that grasp the concepts of Solidity, that grasp these concepts of how blockchain works but they feel like Solidity is such a pain in the ass honestly and they could have been doing so much more if it was JavaScript, if it were Python, if you’re one of the languages they’ve been building things with for so long and after they have a taste they can’t stop anymore. Yeah, that is what happens when you know you’re able to see I think anything that you know you take on as with perhaps some resistance in your head that okay this is new and you know with some presumptions in your head that it might be difficult, it might be perhaps not that easy for you to get into, then with that resistance comes some sort of unhappiness and you know some you’re able to find joy in it but once you do start understanding it then there is no looking back right because then there is a certain joy in creation like no other. Oh, that’s true, that’s true.
There are two very interesting moments like you described when people are learning Cartesi. First is some kind of like mistrust and a bit of skepticism where they come to me and they’re like so you can’t run Linux, so how’s that? Kind of like trying to smell the bullshit in the discourse. So we go explaining then how things are possible, how it is possible to make a verifiable machine and when it clicks you see a very perplexed face but with a hint of a smile and it’s so interesting and later on as they develop and they see their first interactions with the blockchain actually alive, you see that same moment again.
It’s so rewarding for us who are working with the education part of it. Right, absolutely. There’s nothing like seeing somebody fall in love with what you know you or your team has created and become like a supporter for your vision.
So I think there’s nothing more wonderful than seeing something like that happen. For sure, I agree. So as someone who’s passionate about the future of computation, where do you see most of the exciting developments or breakthroughs perhaps happening in this field, especially considering the kind of work you guys are doing? I feel as a broader community, one of the things that we are waiting so to speak is the availability solution and I speak in broader terms because there might be more than one but this is just the next step, right? It’s the thing that we are waiting for tomorrow and this is gonna unleash a whole new generation of applications for blockchain because now we have access to much more data but that’s what makes it even more interesting for Cartesi and why people should be looking at Cartesi because this is gonna happen the same way we got together and figured out how to have more processing power for the blockchain transactions and as we have this new data availability solutions then you really unleash the power of Cartesi because now you have this machine that can compute hundreds of times more than Ethereum and it has a much larger expressiveness capacity and this is gonna unleash the next generation of applications following this one, the data availability unlocked and honestly what I think it’s sort of gonna happen, not trying to have a crystal ball and pinpoint anything into the future necessarily, is that we are gonna start seeing more of these gig economy applications, things like Uber or Airbnb, be really decentralized because that’s the last missing piece of the puzzle for these applications to be really possible.
We’ve seen some attempts in the past and they’ll always hit the snag in the middle of the solution and I feel both together, Cartesi and some data availability solution is the thing to have gig economy be decentralized and that’s good for everybody, right? It becomes more fair, more transparent and honestly in countries where governments are stopping people from progress, the power of blockchain are gonna force them to progress honestly. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been saying that ad nauseum as well, I truly think that in the next coming year basically we should see more utility-based applications which are decentralized and built on decentralized technology.
Applications that can be used on a day-to-day basis by users because ultimately that is what is going to bring in adoption in this space. Definitely, definitely. I feel we are on the verge of finding out what is going to be the app or this quote-unquote website that is gonna really make blockchain a reality for everybody.
I don’t know what’s gonna be but whatever it is, it’s gonna change everything going forward. It’s gonna be the Google of Web3 in a way. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree.
So, I would again like to go back to the advantages that your ecosystem provides developers. So, you have a concept of app-specific roll-ups and there are virtual machines running Linux distributions, right? And they are working together. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes, yes, correct. So, what kind of advantage do developers gain from this approach and how does it contribute to your goal of providing a limitless design space? So, the first part is something we already touched which is application-specific. Right.
But funny enough, this came in handy for Cartesi itself. So, for a while now, Cartesi has been developing the Cartesi machine which is super applicable to blockchain. So, what it is, it is this emulator that in a way simulates a computer itself and that’s why we can run Linux.
And we do this in such a way that you can verify any part of the timeline of a process. And if you can verify, you can dispute it. And eventually, as we started talking about optimistic roll-ups, it made sense that you can use Cartesi machine at the heart of such roll-up.
So, it’s kind of the opposite direction as compared to many projects. Many projects saw in roll-ups a scaling solution to Ethereum and basically they mimicked the EVM itself or they created some extra powerful version of the EVM and made a roll-up. We were already developing this EVM-like machine and we wanted to find what are the possible applications of that machine to blockchain and application-specific just fits like a glove.
And it’s interesting because it breaks a little bit of this perspective of everything being EVM. I feel like we don’t need EVM at a higher layer anymore. And then, how does it provide a design space? Basically, how Linux provides it, right? So, I call it a lot of solidity.
And as the application grows and you need to do more and more interesting things with the data inside, you have to start developing these data structures and how to connect variables here and there and how to make it very lean and cheap to run transactions on top. This is very cumbersome and error-prone. We’ve seen so many errors throughout time, so many hacks.
And this is due to the fact that we are now leveraging 30, 40 plus years of software development from the software development industry. And you should be using simply SQL. So, if you have SQL databases, half of these problems wouldn’t happen.
And you do that in a tenth of the time. And as you can use databases again, you can use the basic abilities of an OS, which is like your system or process management. As you add all this stuff together, you can really unleash the imagination of developers and entrepreneurs to build all applications.
And that’s all due to the fact that you have an OS again. It’s very encouraging, especially the kind of supportive environment that you guys have created and you’re looking at ecosystem growth. So, can you give us a few statistics? How many folks and developers are actively building in the ecosystem? How many applications have you seen successfully even launched? I don’t have a close number overall, but I know that there are quite a handful of people building things right now.
So, Cartesi as a mainnet-ready platform, so to speak, it’s quite recent. And I feel like it’s a chicken in the egg problem, right? So, as nothing was on mainnet, many people didn’t feel like bringing anything to mainnet. But now that we have, I feel like there’s about three to five projects they’re trying to get to mainnet next year.
And there are many other things being developed underneath it that we encourage people to develop more applications in the coming futures. So, it is Linux, right? Just going back a little bit. So, one of the cool aspects of it is that you can have the idea of devices on the machine, just like as you have your mouse, your keyboard, these are not going to be in the machine, not exactly, but you can have these devices that add new capabilities to the system itself.
So, things like a device that reads Ethereum, or a device that can eventually read another network. And there’s people working with these features, and I feel like these features are going to bring a lot of adoption to the Cartesi roll-ups itself. Right.
Yeah, that kind of fits there, gives everything and puts it in perspective, is like the last piece of the puzzle. So, that completely makes sense. What is the next big milestone in terms of ecosystem growth for you guys? You’ve mentioned a number of applications that you’re kind of foreseeing for the next year, but is there any milestone that you have in mind that you guys are excited to hit? There’s a few things that I want to see coming that will help us a lot.
So, one of the things is Sunodo. Sunodo is this application that, just as a comparison, it’s kind of like hardhat or truffle with Ethereum. And I feel like Sunodo will help a lot of people to build applications with Cartesi, because so far you needed to understand a bit of what you’re doing and build scripts to build the machine, and that felt a little bit overwhelming to people at first.
And then, the whole new initiatives, these education initiatives that DevAd is doing, I feel like they’re really great milestones that will help people further develop the project itself, because I feel one thing follows the other in a way. So, if you don’t have the adoption, you kind of let the development process be a little bit unguided. I won’t say misguided, but unguided in the sense that you’re developing things people think people will use in a way, but eventually find out they’re going to use in a totally different way.
You know, these funny stories of how people solve problems. And as people start to use it, I feel like the project has a more firm shape, a shape that makes sense to everybody else. And this is really one of the things that I’m looking forward for 2024.
Yeah, that is pretty encouraging as a take on the industry as a whole as well, and for your ecosystem. Now, perhaps taking a step a little backwards and zooming out, what is your personal take on the way the market is currently, and what do you think is going to be one of the precipitating factors for the market to start looking up? Honestly, as a builder, well, a biddler, how people want to say it, I stopped looking at these things. I’ve been here since 2016, and it’s pretty distracting if you concern yourself with that.
Sure, you cannot be totally unaware, but if you concern yourself with that, it’s distracting. You take your focus out of the things that will actually sustain the growth. So if we look past, we see, yes, there is the cycles, and there is things that launch the cycle or so the media says, like, oh, it was because of this, it was because of that.
I don’t believe it exactly so. I feel like whatever is the necessities of the market or whatever is going in the macro scale is whatever makes these things happen. But at the same time, it is not what sustains it.
And what sustains it is whatever we built throughout the cold winter, so to speak. And that’s really what we should be looking after, like how we get this new found attention and the new cycle to stay and to really give value back for the effort of this whole community put throughout the years. And we got to earn it.
And I think overall, this community does earn it every time. Yeah, that is absolutely true. I think every time markets are cyclical, I think all markets are cyclical.
And as you mentioned that the people who are actually interested in building and worry over the technology, they are not exactly the speculation aspect of it. And they perhaps, they have an eye on these prices and all because it’s very hard not to get affected by it. But ultimately, real solutions, I think, would be or basically, and by real solutions, I mean, again, going back to what I said earlier, like applications that have a real day-to-day usage or utility is what is going to win this game.
Those are the applications that are going to win. And those are the applications that will live to tell another tale and they will live to be a super success in the coming cycles. Well, sure.
So just to be more specific, I feel we do have some bigger topics that are kind of on the attention of people currently. So real world assets, new device solutions, bridging protocols, like optimistic bridges. And there are like advancements in roll-ups themselves, DEA solutions.
These for sure are going to happen. And it’s interesting because in previous cycles, we would just pinpoint one thing or two. And with time, there’s more and more things to pinpoint, which show growth by itself.
But there’s always that one thing nobody was seeing. It was kind of under the radar on somebody’s garage kind of thing. And suddenly it booms.
And it’s really difficult to predict those new garage solutions, so to speak. Absolutely. It’s very hard to say.
There are two things that are very difficult to predict. One is how would the market behave? And the other is how will the user perhaps, user behavior or consumer behavior change? They’re very hard to predict. They change, they evolve, and you can only really connect the dots perhaps in retrospect.
Exactly. Like Americans like to say, right? Retrospective is 2020 or something like that. If you’re asking me, looking back, I think for this particular year, I think just the learning got, I think, reiterated that people who are really going to be building in Web3, they have to be… There are only two categories, I think.
There are only two categories of people who are building in Web3. One is just the very short term, where the bad actors kind of function. And the other is, it has to be a really, really long-term game.
There is no middle ground in Web3, I think. If you’re building in Web3, you have to fall in either of those two categories. What about you? I think that’s true.
I think that’s true. There’s the things that we know we need for tomorrow kind of thing, and people are going to see the opportunity and seize it. And there are things… I feel like that’s a little bit of Cortez’s story.
The necessity of having Linux to have all this processing power, it’s really thinking forward, and it’s thinking too forward. I remember when I started going to events, I think end of 2021, people were still very skeptic of even the necessity of having this. But nowadays, whenever I go to events and explain these things, people go like, oh, that’s so interesting.
Oh, that’s cool. I feel like they don’t still feel the necessity for tomorrow exactly, but they already perceive how things are moving towards that direction. Absolutely.
I think it’s moving in a positive direction. And that is my perception as well. Yeah, I agree.
I agree. Awesome. And so now, before we kind of wrap up this conversation, let’s talk about some fun questions that I have in front of me, and I would love for you to answer them.
So looking back at your journey in software development, what’s one piece of outdated tech or programming language that you secretly or not so secretly miss and wish had stuck around a bit longer? Honestly, I don’t get too much attached to things like that. I remember fondly playing with Arduino. I know it’s still around, but so far as my career developed, I kind of get a little bit away from this ecosystem.
And I remember fondly of it. But it’s not like I think that every so often. I just realized right now, as you asked, actually.
But Arduino times were fun, because especially five years ago, you’re thinking about home automation and building things and still blinking lights and LCDs. It’s a very nerdy thing, honestly. Right.
Okay. That is there. So, you know, at times, developers put in some easter eggs or hidden features in their projects and platforms.
Have you ever done something like that without giving too much away? Would you like to perhaps share something on those lines? I feel like in my, quote unquote, official software, no. Especially I was working with smart contracts. It’s kind of like pointless to try to put any easter eggs there.
I think with larger projects, maybe you can. But you’re going to be audited. You’re going to verify your contract.
So, it’s going to be very exposed. But personally, I wrote some little tools and scripts to help family and friends. And I love to hide some messages there.
So, whenever people are using, they feel like, oh, something fun and happy happened. It’s out of us suddenly. Yep.
Okay. So, this is something that I ask everybody who comes on the show. And I’d love to ask you as well, considering, you know, you’ve been on both sides from Web 2 to Web 3. I would love to know and understand from you, perhaps, what would be your top two suggestions for somebody who is perhaps, you know, still trying to make a decision about Web 3 and whether they want to get into Web 3? What would be your top three suggestions for them to start living on blockchain? Okay.
If I’m not trying to convince them, because that’s really hard, but they already made their minds, I feel the very basic one, I think it applies to anything in tech, maybe even out of tech, which is to learn the harder topics and the fundamentals first. I think that is undervalued. It’s going to help so much as you go, as you look for the other resources, things starts to click in your head if you understand the fundamentals really clearly.
So, I would start even like with Bitcoin white paper, the yellow paper of Ethereum. And if it is too much of a hard read, you can look for YouTube, which is my second recommendation. YouTube really is your friend in this transition.
There’s so many good people explaining the concepts of blockchain and helping people to get started with the development. And that is, there is no way I could not mention that. And as you, as people move forward in the sense of become professional with it, like looking for jobs and opportunities, I feel like open source is the friendlier as it ever was in the industry.
There’s many repos you can contribute to and people are very helpful and kind as you’re trying to make your PRs. So, I feel like if you find one or two projects that you kind of are interested in and you go to their repos and look where you think you can pitch in, so you can get started and have more of a professional engagement. Yeah, I think that is true.
And that is good advice that, you know, try to go after your interests and go after where you think you would be able to see growth. So, this has been a wonderful conversation, Gabriel. Thank you so much for taking all the time to speak to me.
Are there any parting thoughts that you want to give before we wrap this up? Oh, I don’t know. I love the conversation as well. And I got to talk about topics that break a little bit of my habitual conversation, which was very nice.
I feel like we are living such an interesting moment. We tend to, again, like undervalue our present and overvalue our future. But I feel like in a few years when we look back, we’re going to be proud of being, living this time, honestly.
That’s so exciting. I remember when I was younger and thinking about becoming a developer at some point, looking back in the 2000s moment as like, oh, I wish I could have been like an adult there, one of the professionals that were making the web, right? And in a way, I kind of got awarded this chance to be part of something similar. Hmm.
Yeah, these are very interesting times. I completely agree. I think we would look back and really feel that, you know, we were going through a particular age where technology really changed for the better.
And that is how I like to think about it. Yep. Yeah.
I’m very optimistic about it too. Same, similar, completely bullish. Thank you so much once again, Gabriel, for taking out the time to speak to me.
It was wonderful talking to you and all the best for everything that you’re doing at Cartesian. Oh, thank you so much. All the best for you too.
Thank you.