How Open Source Can Supercharge Your Career

Transcript

presenter. Now, please welcome our next presenter, Mr. and Adrian Lee. The floor is yours. [Music] I know. Um, so I'm going to speak in English for

most of this because I'm not Japanese, but uh I do live in Tokyo, so please find me if you like. Um today we're going to talk about how to supercharge your career with uh open source and I think it's a a very important topic that sometimes uh especially I find in Asia we don't really talk about as much. So let's get into it. So you know 90% of the code that you write basically already exists right um especially in this world of AI and everything you know we are actually writing a lot of code that you know be before the age of AI we've been basically doing a lot of copy and pasting tweaking making things work I think a lot of the people here can understand what I'm saying about this um

so you know how can you set yourself apart you know why is this important and you know I would say I would argue that you know in the world of uh today with all the LLMs and everything um you know it's even more important to focus on open source because the the missing part is really the human element rather than the actual code that you're writing at this point. So the human connection that's what we're talking about here. Uh this is um you know does anyone recognize these two people? It's um well maybe not because these are not recent pictures. Um it's sir Isaac Newton and Galileo Galile. These are two

people that actually come from very different places, right? Um they are, you know, from different countries, speak different languages, but they were able to um you know, collaborate with people with different languages and different cultures, right? So this is actually the original um kind of open source. I mean, you can argue it was even older than that actually, but but this is one of the um more early um examples of open source, right? science in the 1600s, scholars like Newton and Galileo shared ideas in Latin, right?

Latin was kind of like their github, right? They were able to share things um you know, across different cultures um regardless of you know what language and what culture they lived in every single day for their day-to-day lives. Um you know and this was the common language of European academics. Of course, there were actually earlier examples like Arabic for example or Chinese um you know way back but like I think in terms of differences in languages and being able to communicate really quickly uh with you know the Renaissance and all this is a really good example. Um and this of course led to the enlightenment because when people work together across cultures across different um ways of thinking we lead to much better ideas

and much more productivity as well. So, you know, the most important idea is that collaboration accelerates innovation. And this is always the case. This has always been the case because I mean, to me, I I feel like it's it's just a fact of life. Um, it just makes sense, right? It's better that we work together than not work together. But what is open source? Let's talk about that, right? Wikipedia defines it, of course, and this is a moving target. Um, Wikip Wikipedia says open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution, right? Um, that's kind of the three tenants that are quite important. Um, and if you think about it, that's also the case with uh,

academia as well, right? Um, well to some degree anyway, like in terms of scientific papers, technical papers, those are things that we want to publish in the public and be able to read. Of course, there's, you know, Elvier and all these different payw walls that make it a little hard, but um on the most part, we we try to have things that are available that we can share what we discover about the world, right? Um so, this is a brief summary of the topics I'm going to touch on. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get that get over all this in 20 minutes, but but we'll try our best. So, why open source?

Why should you do open source? I'm going to go a little bit faster here, uh if if that's okay. um skill building, portfolio building, and career network building. It's really just I mean, if you think about it, it's kind of a little bit of all about career as well, but you know, I'm trying to break it up a little bit. So, you know, you know, working in open source allows you to learn from real world code bases, things that are actually, you know, working in the real world and actually mature. Um, you can also work with some of the ind industry's top experts. You know, I remember with the first time I went to a programming conference, it was, you know, I meeting people that I I thought was really amazing because they pushed out code that I thought was, you know, things I've never seen before. Very

novel, very interesting. And of course, you want to stay updated with industry trends, right? Um I think working and I've worked in a private company before. Um it's very easy to be stuck in your own stack and then you go to a conference and people are basically speaking a different language because you know the industry might have moved on to different techniques and and uh technology stacks. um portfolio building, right? Um in terms of career, if you are earlier in your career or even if you're later in your career, um a great way to build yourself your your career is to have a portfolio. And I think, you know, programmers are very much like designers, especially with the AI these days, we're basically in the same boat,

right? We want to create um a personality for ourselves that is unique when we you know try to interview for the next job or even you know maybe even not jobs but in terms of uh what you were able to do for your startup you know and for your clients for example these are it's really important right to be able to show people exactly what you're able to do exactly what you pushed out right that is something that I think is really important because you can demonstrate real impact in there and you can highlight diverse skills as Like for me personally, I remember like doing putting a lot of um program like functional programming type of things into my code. Not because I wanted to show off, but like I I just really like those things and sometimes I would point

to that and I think people um can relate with me on c some of those things. Um career network building. Um of course we're here today at a conference, right? Uh Friday morning. This is actually more people than I expected. I'll be I'll be honest. Connecting with the global community is really important. I do live in Japan but um you know it's it's always nice to see people coming in from different places. Uh professional opportunities many people start their speaking speaking careers due to open source. You see me here right now right? Uh mentors and mentees of course that's just you know in general you can meet a lot of people that can help you and you can help others. Um here are some projects actually that are you know quite famous. I would say most

people know mo most these projects. I hope you guys know what Ethereum is. Um, but you know, if we I don't know if you ever had this thought, but when you were a child, did you ever think maybe like one day I can work on the uh the Windows uh source code or like the Microsoft Excel, right? Well, you know what? That's not actually possible, right? Because it's closed source. It's proprietary. But you can actually literally right now today you can actually um you know of course there's an approval process but you can actually push code to potentially things in Ethereum. You can work on TensorFlow.

You can work on Firefox. You can work on Linux and you can actually make your mark on on some of these projects. And I think it's something that we don't value as much as we should. So yes, please take a picture. These are important things that I think you know if we don't put ourselves into the position of pushing code then you know who else, right? So this is my personal journey. This is one of my first open source contributions. I was originally a front-end developer after law school. That's a whole other story. But um basically I wanted to create a website that used certain icons. And at the time this is about 15 what 12 years ago. Um one of the most uh popular libraries was called Font Awesome. And it basically it was a bit a bunch of CSS that allows you

that gives you quite interesting font-based icons. And there was an icon I wanted to use and that icon was not available in 4.2.0. And I was using actually the MeteorJS framework at the time. So it it had its own package system that wrapped this uh this CSS file, right? Um you can see it's really quite simple actually. Um but then there's this library that didn't have the icon I wanted. So, I went in there and I I changed one character. I went from 4.2 to 4.3. That was my f one of my first uh open source contributions. But you know what? That was great. I didn't even write anything for the issue, right? And he just gave me like a thumbs up and that's it, right? So, you know, like honestly, I don't even know how

many keystrokes all this was, but the fact that I was able to do something that was valuable and that other people thought was valuable, you know, really gave me a a huge boost in terms of my confidence and also my ability to to kind of engage with other people. Um, uh, has anyone here heard of the book, uh, Mastering Ethereum by Andreas Antonopoulos? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Um, so my name is in that book. Why? because I added a sentence, you know, it's hilarious, right? Well, more than one sentence. I think it's uh three sentences, but I basically when uh 721 came out, I added a definition for what is an NFT. This was way back. I I think maybe even like

six, seven years ago now. But like I I just I was like, hey, you know, there's this new thing called NFT. Let me just put a paragraph in there. I put it in there and now I'm on a list of contributors. And sometimes I remember actually going to a bookstore on a first date and I and I hey look this is a book where my name is in and I opened a book and my name was in there because they listed all the open source contributors right um so you know there's like sometimes it's not doesn't have to be that hard just make small changes that can help people right you know here is something that native English speakers you know make a lot of mistakes on you just add apostrophe re I mean to be honest this is like 3x as much of effort

as uh as the pre previous um one where I updated a number, right? Cuz I'm taking that's like three keystrokes. But anyway, so really quick briefer on this, right? It's I was I was a mechanical engineer, you know, I I fell in love with Ethereum early on, did the law school thing, didn't like law, so started programming and um I actually got into uh professionally working on, you know, so-called web 3 or crypto. Um in 2017 I wanted to in 2014 because that's when I read the white paper but there were no jobs right um and the way I got started was actually I um truffle at the time was one of the larger um smart contract frameworks and I was able

to contribute to this open source repository of example projects. It's kind of like a hello world project like just very basic template projects and then you know through that I was able to um uh basically talk to people at consensus um and I was saying hey um let's get on a call can you give me maintainer privileges because I wanted to make contributions faster and and not have to wait for them to approve my PRs right um so then uh I got on a call with them and actually they just offered me a job for more money than I ever um made at that time um because you know I was just a freelancer doing this out of my own passion, right? But that's how I got my first uh professional career in in blockchain essentially. Um so yeah,

eventually I I did a couple DeFi projects etc. and then I joined the Ethereum Foundation and now I'm working on the founder success team. Um I'll be honest, this presentation was made for actually um a bunch of PhDs in uh Hong Kong's polytenic university. So, I actually walked them through how to make GitHub contributions. I'm going to go really quick through this because I only have 20 minutes and that was a 45m minute presentation. Um, what we want to do is make an issue. We copy the repo so-called forkit and and download it locally and then you, you know, I use terms like PR for example. What is PR?

It's basically pull request. You want I'm requesting for you to pull in my changes, right? That's what pull PRs are. make the changes, you know, get there's also like different things you should be be aware of. Sometimes repositories have read memes, contribution.mmds. These are ways of, you know, how to respect the repository and be able to um make contributions that are, you know, more likely to be accepted for example. Um, you know, this is just going through the specifics even giving you the I mean, you don't need this now with the LLMs, but uh what we got here?

Yep. Okay. So, a good poll request is also in some ways I I think this is something that um maybe in in Japan people might appreciate more, right? How do we write something that uh makes sure that the other person will be will have an easy time to to take care of of your pull request, right? You want to have a good title. You want to have a good branch name, right? You want to link to specifically what issue you're trying to fix. Describe what changes you made and even give other people like the instructions how to test it, how to make sure, right? how to give the other person the confidence that this is something that they are able to merge in. And of course, you know, add any context or screenshots as possible. The key is to make the reviewer as comfortable as possible. And and this is

actually sometimes I feel like whenever I go really deep into this, there's a kind of like a hint of like you know PR. So that's how you can how how you can get started. You can see I make a lot of use of emojis here. They do the heavy lifting. Um there's something called the good firstisssue.dev. So if you've never made an open source contribution, like I said, it could be just spelling changes, right? It could be grammar changes, could be anything. Um you can go go to goodfirst.dev and then there's a whole bunch of different um things. You can filter by different things as well and get started doing that. Uh this is when I was working at on the ZK side of things. Um you know privacy and scaling

explorations um at the Ethereum Foundation. We actually create a specific tracker for good first issues. And um I was also telling I I use this particular slide for our students as well. Our students by the way are now uh the founders of ZK Tokyo. Uh really great group and I'm very proud of them. Um, you know, one thing that I I really encourage people to do is like if you don't like something, don't just, you know, you know, just like if you think it's not good enough, make a change, right?

Change the world so that it becomes better, right? That's how we can win together. So, if you don't like the UI, please make a PR for anything as long as open source of course, right? um contentbased repo sometimes. I think way back when this is a maybe like seven years ago I was just comparing different libraries right this is basically blog post but it I put it into GitHub and then people many people liked it and many people upload it on Twitter so like sometimes it doesn't have to be code right it can just be something that you think is valuable and people can enjoy that as well and also contribute to it too so start your own project improve what you use you know kind of look at what you're already doing what are you using and and really think about that right uh what about Ethereum

um talk about why Ethereum is important. Institutions are already here. A lot of things going on. Um I don't need to tell you guys this. I think this is pretty out there already. um in terms of the developer space even though like I think last year Salana had higher developer growth but that doesn't mean um that actually I mean Ethereum still has the biggest developer pool despite the growth being um a little bit lagging behind a certain other place because obviously there you know it's you know of course it's asymtoic to some degree right um toolkit and if people are just getting started in uh building for Ethereum Foundry hard hat Wagmei that's probably what I'd recommend right now. Not truffle even though I was on the team for like a good two three

years. Um um you know these are foundry if you're if you just want to um get started with solidity hard hat if you're more of a JavaScript type of person and on the front end Wagme does u most of the heavy lifting. So here's just some screenshots from these things. Um that's not that important. Where to start? Ethereum.org. So, I I'm on the Ethereum um founder success team. Well, I lead the team and uh basically we have um ethereum.org/founders that that's probably like if you're a founder and you want some support, that's where I would encourage you to go um or just like hit me up after this talk. Um for people who are really new to um coding uh Solidity or just getting

on the blockchain, the Bit Ghetto is pretty good. Um you know, that's led by Austin Griffith. uh rare skills if you want to get into some zero knowledge proofs and that kind of thing pro crypto um rare skills is a great great place to start as well. Um yeah and they have they have actually nonzero knowledge proof stuff as well. Rare skills is a great project that um my friend Jeffrey started. So taking action is another um I think I only have two minutes but so I also started the Ethereum Vancouver meetup because I lived in Vancouver for 5 years thanks to co um so um you know when you create a meetup when you create a community and sometimes it's quite hard to find a place and get started and it seems very overwhelming right but we actually started the Ethereum Vancouver

community on the beach in February which was like very very cold it was like 12 degrees 10° right but 20 people actually sat outside and and We um we just talked for like two hours and and one thing that I want to you know kind of make sure that you guys know is that you know it's you know we can always start things. We can always start things. I can start a meetup right now by asking you guys to chat chat with me outside and be like hey let's call this a meetup and let's meet again next week. And that's exactly what we did for Ethereum Vancouver. And now it's been running for three years and uh people are running it without my touching. I to be honest I haven't even been there for like almost a year now but like you know I think we

were able to grow new leaders and make it sustainable. So I think taking action is really important and you don't you can always do things much simpler much quicker and easier than you think. I think that's really important. Um okay so this is like one of our things sometimes we don't even have a good topic and we just look at memes right because sometimes like just coming out being a community that's the most important thing. You don't have to have like the most mind-blowing presentations every time. I mean this my presentation today is not that mind-blowing, right? So yeah, living my living example. Uh so yeah, conclusion open source is important. You can start building everything is matters even if it's small, right? Um you know open source is really important for collaboration,

skill building, career, all that stuff. And uh thank you so much. Um I'm Adrien Lee from the founder success team and thanks for listening and coming out here on a Friday morning. Thank you very much.