Q1 2022 Review

What's up guys.

It's the 30th of March and we're basically done with Q1 2022. I've just finished up with a medium sized coding project, so I'm taking a second to pause and reflect on how things have gone in the last few months.

I started off the year basically throwing a lot of shit at the wall, saying yes to everything and just trying to get any kind of traction going. The first thing I tried to build was something to listen (via arbiscan) for people buying options through Dopex, to post on Discord. The idea was that it would be cool for people in the Dopex Discord to see when and how people were using the product, and good for the protocol to have an extra source of totally automated content marketing. However, after maybe 3-5 days of solid work towards this goal, my hopes were dashed when it emerged 0xCanova had beaten me to it with his Dopex Alerts Twitter bot. Though I was bummed about this, I took heart from the fact the idea I'd had was a good one.

It wasn't too long after this I got my first paycheque as a crypto-related dev, as described in 'How I got my first job in crypto'. What I'd built was essentially the same thing, this time for ZigZag Exchange. I was enthused with this idea, and basically my plan was to replicate it for a few of my favourite defi protocols - this is what I've been doing the past few weeks, and while it hasn't led to any cold hard crypto, I've been getting a heap of positive feedback and I've been learning a lot, which is the important thing at this stage of my new career.

Though I had dreams of being a solidity engineer at the start of the year, I've realised this maybe isn't the best path for me at this stage. This quarter has seen massive exploits to the tune of well over $1bn - I'm not yet confident enough in my skills that I'd feel comfortable building something which was going to interface with real money out in the wild. Plus I've realised just how much value I can add just using web2 type coding skills in the web3 context.

So in terms of the goals I set for myself at the start of the year, I'd say my building skills are up a comfy 3x already - I've gone from being unsure whether I can contribute anything of use, to able to deliver a meaningful contribution to the vast majority of emerging DAOs in a 1-2 week timeframe.

Journalling is going well - I'm currently on a 73 day streak, most days twice a day. I'm in a nice groove where in the morning I make a little to-do list, and in the evening I review the day and practise gratitude. The phone time goal I smashed pretty quickly - last week I used it for 35m/day on average which I'm happy with.

My ETH stack is down 5-6% compared with the start of the year, which is not ideal but also not bad - my Dopex farming positions have carried the rest of my portfolio, I'm sitting at just 16% stables but I've moved a meaningful chunk of my ETH over to Arbitrum in order to sell call options through Dopex, so if we finish April meaningfully higher I'll be rebalancing a bit.

My plans for Q2 are to continue down the rabbit hole, building whatever I feel like building that day and hopefully learning as I go. In particular I have been thinking about:

• Relaying on Across bridging protocol - (yes, there will be another guide if/when I get it working :D )
• Reworking/extending my ZigZag market maker helper tools, perhaps with some means of automated, passive rebalancing.
• More Twitter/Discord bots to provide automated content marketing for DAOs.
• Forking mainnet and approaching solidity via adversarial mindset - learning how something works by trying to break it.

That's about it, keep building and GL out there!