🟩 WTF is Devcember? 🟩
My advent calendar for crypto mini-projects 👨💻
Devcember mini-project repo: https://github.com/jaimindp/Devcember
How did I end up here?
In 2017, my coding experience was confined to writing shitty MATLAB, effectively using it as a glorified calculator #AeroEngineering. I was crypto curious, getting up to speed by reading blockchain books, getting phished for the first Bitcoin I owned on-chain was a highlight too. Nice start Jaimin 🤝
Fast forward through a few years of intense coding, I focused on machine learning and data science with a stint into TradFi as a quant coming back to crypto in 2021. Crypto, coffee and coding was 24/7, obsessed and relentless, I mostly leveraged my status as a $PYTHON maxi. I built algo-trading bots, CeFi / DeFi arbitrage strategies, portfolio trackers and my own Telegram trading bot 👀 (bit early I know). It was a relentless solo grind but also incredibly rewarding. It granted me financial independence, enabling me to leave the TradFi world and build Caddi to tackle the largest problems in crypto I came across.
Devcember: Tech and reflections
December is usually a time for reflection on the previous year. In a way, this blog and the efforts I'm writing about are both a reflection on our endeavours with Caddi and a way to keep myself curious, staying close to the tech. I've always found that engaging my curiosity increases my desire to build, In crypto, it's an ever-changing arena and there are many ways to do just that. The industry moves at light speed and with Caddi its been a non-stop year, raising, company building, growing and shipping 📈. In the last couple of months, I began to realise that I'm more distant from the tech underpinning the industry than I thought.
Last year, I attempted the advent of code. I've never found programming algo/data structures challenges interesting, even though I've spent more time grinding Leetcode than I'm proud of... because Leetcode means Gud Job 👍 (or so I and all my CS friends thought). The advent of code simply wasn't engaging enough for me to see it through, it felt like a waste of time. As someone who gets bored easily, I jumped ship thinking my time was better spent on Caddi. This year, I thought about the concept and concluded that I'd much rather build mini-projects, experimenting with tech that genuinely excites me and build proof of concepts for Caddi. That's what Devcember is about!
I've always been most motivated when working on exciting and challenging projects, this is why I love building Caddi every day. Following my curiosity as a developer was what got me deep into crypto in the first place, but ever since raising, it's not something that I've been able to keep up with.
Environment matters: Hacker Houses & Hackathons
I've been lucky enough to stay in hacker houses (I live at Origin, a permanent hacker house in London, hackers welcome!) it's a breeding ground for creativity and the perfect environment for ambitious founders 🏠. Also getting the chance to travel across the world to crypto conferences, sharing Caddi's mission, meeting passionate builders and investors is nothing short of a blessing. Each time I travel, I come back energised and inspired. 🛫
Hackathons have been a chance to get my hands dirty and work on interesting projects, somehow ending up as a finalist at two EthGlobal Hacks: 🛠️
EthGlobal Paris 2023 with Grandma Leveraged Swaps 🥳 (personal favourite)
It's beyond just coding, getting to brainstorm and build with talented developers is great fun, getting to work on projects I'm interested in with cool folks. There's usually a special kind of energy about pulling caffeine fuelled nighters that takes me back to university days. I've also felt like a LARP in this arena, leaving smart contract work to developers more proficient at it.
Why code, don’t you have a company to run?
I jumped headfirst into crypto without exploring the fundamentals through the lens of a developer, I've noticed there's a depth of understanding in development and it's itch I haven't had time to scratch. That's why I'm diving straight into the deep end this month with Devcember. Being realistic, I won't be able to explore all my curiosities but I will learn a tonne in the process! Sure, learning through scrolling Twitter and clicking on questionable links (thanks Caddi for protecting me from phishing scams) is cool but there's no substitute for the hands on experience of shipping. 👨💻
At Caddi, we've been moving fast lately as a lean and passionate team of hackers, shipping our browser extension in May with our meta-aggregator extension offering the best price for every on-chain swap with scam prevention. The dev team is currently a gigachad developer & me (we're hiring!). I'm aligning Devcember with Caddi and my curiosities, so there's plenty of overlap with what's on the roadmap and what I'm building this month. 🤝
So what am I building?
The above was a rather long winded way of getting to this but... what am I actually building this month? 🛠️
This Devcember repo is my advent calendar: https://github.com/jaimindp/Devcember
We're now about halfway through December, it's a good checkpoint, although it's been hectic ahead of an upcoming launch with Caddi. I've dedicated time to code and learnt a tonne.
I've upskilled myself in Solidity using Node Guardians, shoutout to the team and Sam who I met at Devconnect. Their challenges have given me a much better understanding of the EVM with challenges across a range of skill levels. Smart contract development is starting to seem less "scary". I've got the chance to use services like BlockNative to explore the transaction mempool and MEV. I’ve built dApp frontends, browser extensions and integrations for Caddi, it's been good to jump back into python and exploring the latest development trends: building server/client architectures outside of AWS with Modal and Heroku and Brownie for smart contracts. I built a cross chain swapping dApp, explored API's to help with portfolio tracking, simulated EVM transactions, minted NFTs, tested on-chain Perpetuals apis and upgraded my development stack with new AI tools like Cursor. I know none of these projects are insanely difficult or mindblowingly technical but that's not really the point, it's giving the understanding as well as breadth that I have been craving.
My key takeaways
Software development in 2023 is easier than ever, with AI superpowers it takes half the time to spin up a new project, with a helpful friend you can ask all your dumb questions, shoutout to GPT4. If you're not upskilling yourself in the rapidly changing tech landscape you will fall behind. 🤖
For seemingly scary fields: MEV, gas optimization, smart contract development, they first appear scary because I hadn't taken the time to dive into it (action conquers fear), although I haven't had a crack at Zero Knowledge yet 👀
There's still plenty more to do, nothing I've developed so far is production level code, but it's been a valuable nonetheless. I want to go deeper on smart contract development, deploy 4337 wallets, 6551 Tokenbound accounts, understand bridging and intents and actually operate some simple MEV strategies. Looking forward to this in the second half of Devcember 💪
And our roadmap for Caddi is looking fun with these ideas, it's going to be a hell of a 2024 ⛳️
Feel free to reach out if you're interested in what I'm building and check out Caddi!