First published: April 23rd 2023
Hi everyone,
Join us for another edition of Coffee With Calyptus, where we bring you captivating perspectives on the ever-changing terrain of web3 development and top web3 jobs.
This week, we interviewed Jackson Kelley, a resident auditor for yearn.finance's yAcademy, smart contract auditor at Oak Security and Spearbit, and a software engineer for Robinhood's web3 team. He shares insights on what it takes to be successful when beginning your journey as a web3 engineer, his views on emerging web3 use cases, and misconceptions about web3 development, and ultimately how you can land a top web3 job.
Jackson, what advice would you give to someone who is just starting out as a Web3 engineer with no experience? (but has experience as a software engineer)
If you want to land a top web3 job, pick a niche and become the top 1% in that niche. Whether it’s DeFi, NFTs, Security, Yul, Huff, or anything else, it doesn’t matter. Pick something, go as deep down the rabbit hole as you can and learn more about it than anyone else in the world.
What are some of the most exciting use cases for Web3 technologies outside of finance and gaming?
ZK Proofs (or Zero-Knowledge Proofs) play an empowering role in many of the upcoming use cases in web3. An interesting use case that comes to mind is the image verification technique mentioned in this blog post where we use ZK proofs to verify the provenance of online images.
(Using ZK Proofs to Fight Disinformation: By Trisha Datta and Dan Boneh)
What are some common misconceptions about Web3 that you often hear from developers?
I think a lot of people assume that most of us are working in this space because of the money. That may be true for some percentage of developers working in the web3 space, but I would say the majority of us that have been around and building in the space through multiple bull markets are doing it because we believe in the ethos of web3 and not because we’re trying to get rich. In fact, rent seeking behaviour is usually frowned upon in the web3 community. A top web3 job is not just monetary, it’s about getting to build cool, impactful products.
