Welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special bonus episode of gossip about gossip. We are coming to you live from Atlanta, and I am joined by another one of the world's labs team members. And this is Nana, a selfie konda, who is on our development team, our software engineering team. And Nana, what first of all, what brings you here to Atlanta today? Yeah, I guess just taking advantage of, you know, distributed working styles and being able to see family and friends during this time and also getting to see. Absolutely so today we are going to talk about dearest journey to ABM compatibility. I know this is something that has been an ongoing progression or something that has been started a number of months ago. But tell us, how did we start on that. And where are we today? Yeah, so I definitely have to give props to Liman and everybody else that started from the very beginning and I believe there had support for our smart contracts. We used a tool, an internal school called the BMJ, that gave you support for the theory of a virtual machine, but that had its limitations. But also, I think then as a company we grew focused more on hardware itself and given the additional value that we saw on top of Bitcoin. But you know, as Le'Veon like say he wants it so that you can sort of cop your own space out in the world. And what that means is that whichever way you do it, we want to be able to do that. And so we started the journey where a couple of key players, you know, I call out Richard Baer and Daniel Farah came in and were able to look at the situation and say that, you know, we can reach scale with smart contracts. And so we had a revamp from a smart contract version 1 to 2, and we brought in that new even we moved from Ethereum J over to Hyperledger space, and we were able to get to the point where we can say, you know, when the clients upgrade on the Ethereum network, we can also take in those same upgrades and provide smart contract developers, you know, the same experience that they would expect on other EVM compatible chains. Yeah and then obviously opens up a much larger pool of developers, right, who are experienced and know what they're doing there. And like you said, they may want their certain flavor of it. They may want some of the benefits that Hedera brings and obviously make that ramp up for them much easier. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're still on the belief that, you know, that there are native scenarios where it's better, for example, to do token management on the native side. So there are tokens are is still gives you a lot more feature functionality. But for many practices, it might be useful to somebody to start off or continue a certain flow through smart contracts and even in some cases utilize the native abilities. But you know, if you just want to do smart contracts, you can do smart contracts. But the additional feature functionality is always there for you through in our token service and other services that are not here as well. And what's the feedback that we've gotten from developers so far? So how easy is it really to say? Yeah, I'll definitely say that we haven't got it perfect yet, but we're working on it, right? The nature of the field is it's complex already. And so you would imagine that it's not there's not five ways of doing something. There's almost 500 ways of doing something right. And so I think we've gotten good feedback in the sense that developers have highlighted that we were able to cover the basics, get you run in really quickly. I think we turn around with feedback quickly as well. And we're, you know, we're making progress on all the things that the EVM does offer. And we have our roadmap, we have our goals, and we're trying to put that in line with community feedback. And can you share anything in terms of what is on the roadmap? I know our community is very engaged and very vocal. Are there certain things that they've asked for. Now that sort of the basics are in place? Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's the concepts of Ethereum compatibility and equivalence the community has asked for if you have equivalence. And really what that means is whatever happens on the EVM that say if your home can do whenever they're using the event on hedera, they want to be able to do the same. And so whereas we may have done things and, you know, blocked it before, we need to open that up. And so what's in the pipeline is, you know, pushing from Ethereum compatibility to equivalence. So, you know, at the low levels, if there are all codes that are supported on the EVM that we didn't before, we're now, you know, upgrading the system to be able to handle those things. And like I said, to be able to get to the point where you can take any smart contract from it and bring it over and you get there. I think we've also provided things like the json, RBC API, which basically allows any developer tools that are sort of conventionally used to be. In space to be able to point to hit as they were before and to continue to be used there. So that's in the pipeline. We've made some progress, know we have some support for things like, you know, hard hat and truffle and we know we're working through those that we have examples on the open source for people as it's making progress there and those are coming through other API. And is it really sort of driven by the entity is asking for first it feels like there's 500 things to do. Yeah, I think this is a unique cluster as well. Right we have our governance council, we have our community team, even have our internal engineers. And I think finding that consensus as to where it's been, all these priorities is what's important, as in where there's an overlap. And of course, we have big partners who will highlight what's most important to them. And so, you know, our product management team does a really good job in terms of figuring out what the right sort of combination is, what the schedules look like there. But all of these sources are incorporated, community feedback, the council memberships and also our partners as well. Yeah, Yeah. I think it's important to get that diversity of opinions right. Otherwise, you know, the critics that down the road you realize, wait, perhaps it doesn't either scale as an enterprise would need or perhaps it doesn't meet the needs of certain kinds of developers. Exactly Yeah. Yeah, it takes a little longer, but it does. Yeah in some cases, it doesn't. And you know, sometimes you just have some brilliant ideas from the community where it's like, oh, we thought this would take two months, but it actually two weeks based on this person's idea. And so that diversity and also comes through, I think the entire improvement proposal flows are also really good there where, you know, like other chains were able to both internally put out, you know, propositions as to what we should do, but also take requests from the community and say, hey, you know, the network should do this. And how do we all, you know, distributed across the world? Think about this idea and got it. Yeah and what are some of the ways that you engage with the community? I know we've talked to projects and they talk about how we engage with Adira. What's that like on the other side as you engage with community members? Yeah, I'd say there were multiple avenues. Some of them are technology and some of them, you know, from the people themselves. And so because we are open source also, I think as an engineer, I get to engage with the community just through our tickets, right? Express themselves or be issues that get opened up. There's also Discord. I know we have, you know, Overflow as well, but also we have a lot of developer advocates that are doing amazing things and, you know, the developer team as well. And so they bring in a lot of that information as well as our product teams. And so when it's necessary to get on calls or get together, we'll do that. And, you know, I think we're using technology in the right places to open these doors up or communication. Yeah and you know, as you look well before I go there. You know, give us a little peek into sort of day in the life of you and your teams and, you know, what you end up doing most of the day. You know, we know that a lot of calls. We've had to figure out a time in the time that you're here to even schedule this session. But what is most of your day like? It's definitely not the same every day. So our team focuses on, I like to call it smart contract development experience, highlighting that it's not just one product is the experience overall. So it's the Thinking Ahead for what does it look like for a developer to create and adapt of the network. What does it look like for a user using that was created on? And so every day is sort of a mixture of whether it's the, you know, the consensus node itself and how it manages smart contract execution or whether it's, you know, the Jason RBC really and how it interacts with other tools that are extracting information from the ledger or whether it's just, you know, at the end. On when I point my wallet to an area and I wanted to, you know, see the results of this execution, what does that look like? And so every day is either, you know, staking, you know, feature development, figuring out the issues with bugs, but also just I try to get the team or think about it as a moving away from a reactionary place into sort of anticipation space where we can anticipate what customers and the community will go through and get ahead there and say, you know, if they even do hit an issue, it's like, yeah, we're on that, we're getting there or his the work around or no we're good you can go ahead. You don't have to be worried. So I know I'm trying to I'm trying to answer the question, but it's a little different each day. Yeah Yeah. I think that keeps things, you know, that keeps your mind excited. Right? you don't want to go to work on Tuesdays and definitely haven't had a boring kundera's world laughs et cetera. Yeah Yeah. OK speaking of so during your interview process, did you interview this woman? I did. And what was that like? I was amazed. And actually it was so I've interviewed a lot at different companies before and also being on the opposite side of interview. Right it was just different even. You know, people say he's a teacher, but he really is a teacher at heart. And it's so weird within an interview to see that flip in mindset from I'm not just trying to throw a hard question at you, actually, I'm interested in what you're thinking about. And then he does this flip within the interview sometimes. You know, I think in hours it went like that where he hears you say something and he starts to ponder on it and then it becomes sort of a constructed thing. And I think that's really powerful because you felt heard, but also you it kind of gives you an insight into the company itself and is constructive man and management of ideas and thoughts. And, you know, everybody's thoughts are welcome and what does that look like? So yeah, that was really interesting. I think I played with that DAGs early on. But in that question that was kind of interesting, even sort of asking the mathematical side of it, but also just the application within the network as well. And your experience before this was all in, you know, in software companies, but mostly left to companies, right? Correct and so what Drew you to that? Yeah, I think for me, so I come from different places. I grew up in England and most of my family's originally from Ghana. So I've always had this diversity of thought. But I've also seen within whether it's the financial system or not, that, you know, they're the key players. And, you know, for some scenarios, it makes sense to come together and, you know, put the rules here. But then how do you bring in everybody else's style? And I think that was what was unique about whether it's DLT or web3, just this idea of where it's useful, remove some middlemen, but also bring visibility there, but also just enable the average person. And I think that's what I saw when I came across Hedera and it just felt like, you know, it was different. It felt like it had looked at a problem and didn't just look for what is the financial outlook look like. It looked at the problem and felt like, OK, how does this help people? And then, you know, how do we let them do what they need to do? Because in many cases, you're not always the best person to solve the problem, but you may be the greatest person to enable somebody else to solve that problem. So, yeah, that's, that's what I felt and that's what I'm doing it well. And it's amazing to me to see the diversity use cases that people have built on top of the platform, but things that you I personally would never have thought of. And so, you know, and opening that up so that anybody can build their dreams and build their ideas on top of it is really fascinating. Yeah anything else you would like to share with our community as they have here today? Yeah, like I'd say, just like the people within the company. The company itself is very open to thoughts. My team is hiring. So if you know anybody who's sort of interested in both the smart contract side as a refers to you so that. And web3, but also the Java protocol side. Send them our way. But also, we're open minded to lots of thoughts. So the company overall what is the feedback from the community through issues but also just your next idea that your next carved out idea in space that brings bringing a we to look at that and work with you on that. And I know you have some openings on your team. What kinds of roles are you having for senior engineers, mainly. And then you can kind of bump up or down based on the experience. But like I said, our team focuses on the experience. And so some components of that are focusing on the service and the protocol itself. Others are that you, Jason, are really within the Web3 aspect. And, you know, some of it is just some of the development as well. But Yeah. All right. And maybe they, too, will go through the learning process with the interview with women. Yeah all right. Thank you so much for joining us today. Folks, if you have any additional questions. We will continue to have these discussions with members of the team. So we appreciate you joining us and we hope you enjoyed this bonus episode and learn something today.
