Report by @kozel.
- date: 14 Jan 2020
- location: Brainly HQ, Kraków, Poland
- event: GoCracow #7 Meetup
- announcements: meetup, twitter
- Twitter: @CracowGo
- visitors: around 30
- attendees: @kozel
The main goal was to familiarise the audience of Go developers with the basics of cryptocurrency and specifics of both the Decred architecture and the onboarding process and work culture.
Due to the time constraints (ca. 45 minutes) for the speaking slot some generalisations had to be made, particularly in the area of the Decred hybrid consensus mechanism, which was later explained in more depth to those interested after the presentation, in order to make room for the details of Decred dev culture and collaboration.
The audience was attentive, even though those, who self-described as familiar or enthusiastic about crypto were in clear minority. After the presenation, both during the Q&A segment and postpresenation networking questions about PoW's energy consumption and impact on the environment, places to find outstanding issues in Decred to be tackled, as well as the history and motivation behind Decred's creation were asked and addressed.
The audience was well impressed with the amount of effort and the level of detail the Decred contractors and community members put into the creation of Decred newsletters, publications, and the Decred Journal in particular, which, as they said themselves, rarely exists even in the world where people are very well compensated for their work.
At the risk of putting forward an unpopular opinion I am beginning to wonder if addressing and reaching out devs directly has the impact we're expecting, seeing as most of the engagement came from those self-described crypto people, and the reasons for this are, amongst other things, in my opinion:
- the fact that most skilled devs are not necessarily hurting for money, therefore unwilling to risk experimenting with something as nebulous and not time-tested as crypto, at least in comparison with compensation with fiat
- the talks tend to be relatively light on the dev side, especially when compared with content presented by other, more technical speakers, whose topics appeared to have piqued the audience's interest much more, probably due to the audience's already existing familiarity with the underlying subject and shared nomenclature
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see if the response was any different given enough time to dig deeper into what makes Decred more cerebrally interesting and challenging from a technical standpoint. However, it also appears that a crucial indicator of whether the audience member will get interested enough to engage and investigate further is their relationship with crypto, which poses the question if it is better to look for potential DCR devs amongst those devs who are not familiar with crypto, or reach out to crypto audiences in search of interested devs.
- Event photos are available at the meetup even website here.
- https://twitter.com/Decred_PL/status/1219598013896646658