Reflections of Devcon2 from a Non-Techie

Physical or virtual?

Being part of team EtherCamp, a distributed multi national team comprising of devs, web designers and media (I’m the latter, but more of that to come) I felt our organisation typified the lives of many attending this year’s Devcon2.

On the first day many people were meeting for the first time in ‘the meatspace’ of the ‘Hyatt on the Bund’ reception area, and team EtherCamp were no exception. I don’t know if my thoughts on this are universal or if it’s just me, but meeting someone who you kinda-know and have communicated with over Skype/Slack and Google-hangout for many months, pales into insignificance compared to a physical encounter - every single person I met who I knew from the internet had far more going on than the personality I interact with digitally. By getting to know someone first digitally, rather than physically, really highlights ‘the spirit/soul/life-force’, call it what you will, that we all exude when you finally do meet face to face for the first time. I think we should preserve that at all costs moving forward, and it highlighted one reason why these conferences are important, real world human interaction. For me, not coming from a technical background my opening lines to these formally virtual friends were always of a social nature but this didn’t seem the norm to the average attendee, who often originally greet each other by their username and work “So this is Fred-underscore-to-the-moon, loved the solidity work you did on Harmony” was the sort of thing I heard countless times outside the conference room.

Nerd Fanboy

My reason for being at Devcon was primarily to interview attendees who have signed up to be judges for our hackathon <hack.ether.camp> later this year. Now clearly the blockchain world is not Hollywood, but it does have its celebrities, and fanboys. Now I’m a total fanboy of those making strides in the distributed ledger space so being required to identify and approach these people is great, be that the ‘Augur Boys’, Jack Paterson and Joey Krug, to the coolest man at the conference Erik Voorhees, everyone one of them were open and receptive. The only one that I thought that I might struggle to identify was Arthur Falls from the Ether Review, I shouldn’t have worried. Admittedly I had walked past him twice before on the third occasion it coincided with him talking. Arthur really does have a great distinctive voice and the minute I heard it I knew who he was as I’ve spent many an hour listening to the Ether review… Later on in the week I would briefly hear him interviewing Griff Green on all that had happened during the DAO launch and subsequent hack, 25 minutes into me earwigging the interview my phone rang just as Arthur asked “so what was going through your mind the moment you realised how bad the situation was?” this was exactly what I wanted to know, but had to the leave the room and take the call. This room, was our media room, and at the beginning of the week it had doubled as the war room where Vitalik and the core developers had set about fixing the geth node issue that we had all woken up to that Monday morning. So I literally found myself in a room with some of the major players of the foundation as they tackled the issue and created our next slice of history.

To be honest, there was one person on my list that I thought might be problematic, Joseph Lubin. To get some time with Joe at an ethereum conference isn’t the walk in the park you might imagine, he is permanently surrounded by people, not necessarily his people, just people. I took my opportunity to introduce myself to him as he was leaving the restroom, well, you have to grab these moments when they arrive. To my surprise he was very approachable and agreed to give me 5 minutes when he could. When the following day he did have 5 minutes we set off to do the interview, the 30 second walk to the camera set up became a 15 minute stop and start procession as person after person came to introduce/ reintroduce themselves to him, prepare a time that he could be pitched to, asked him into another meeting starting now… It reminded of the occasions I’ve spent in the company of the ‘Famous’, but this seemed like just another day to Joe, he would later confide to me that he enjoyed coming to conferences as he had more time to himself as he could just listen to talks and catch up with people. It never fails to amaze me how the truly busy can always make time to fit something or someone else in.

My other role during the conference was to man our EtherCamp booth from time to time, we had a great spot. The two most popular questions I was asked were: ‘are you part of Consensys?’ - no we are not part of Consensys, and ‘where are you based?’ At the beginning of the conference I would answer, ‘all over’ to the location question, but by the end of day 3 I would answer ‘we’re distributed’. Sounds simple enough, but the recognition that we are practising what we preach seemed to gain the respect of those I encountered. It also made me realise why we are in such a great position to host our virtual hackathon later this year, we want to take ideas and turn them into distributed startups in 5 weeks and although this might sound pie in the sky, we are an example that it can work and more importantly that it can be sustained.

Best day

Without shadow of a doubt day 2 was my favourite. It began with me interviewing Vitalik, always a great way to start one’s day. By mid-morning it was time for EtherCamp’s founder, Roman Mandeliel, to take to the stage. Among the many announcements he made, it was our collaboration with Santander and the imminent promise of Cash ETH that actually got whoops from the crowd (a feat which hadn’t happened before, and I don’t think got repeated). After 5 more interviews the day ended with the EtherCamp party at Bar Rouge, a fabulous venue which by 11pm was packed with over 300 attendees. Amongst the many conversations I had that evening, chatting Erik Voorhees was my highlight not least because he echoed something Arthur Falls had said during our interview the day before, that he had not come from a technical background. I found this immensely reassuring. It made me realise that maybe a slow shift is taking place, no longer do you need a computer science degree to be part of this movement, although it would help, maybe all you need is a passion to see this technology succeed. I will never be a ‘techie’ but I do feel part of this and I’d encourage anyone else who wants to see blockchain technology and all it promises succeed to get involved. If you’re reading this and not to sure how to get started may I suggest you do the same thing that I, and many others have done, take the plunge and attend a ‘Meetup’, better still if one doesn’t exist in your area, organise one and who knows, maybe we can have a chat at Devcon3.