My Farcaster journey
I studied piano music performance and composition at university. I planned on how to get to the country after passing my entry exams. However, I didn't plan on how I was going to survive there for 4 years. My real life wallet only carried 200€. Totally clueless about anything, I managed to survive despite the hardships. No doubt about it being a challenging journey, but through it, I built resilience, software development skills, and a profound gratitude for the gift of life itself. Hardships, after all, are the fuel for shaping wisdom and strength.
How did I end up as a Senior Software Engineer, aka, a dev?
Whilst at uni, I had the opportunity to start a company as a Co-founder back in 2016. To make the story short, it didn't kick off; but I learned a lot from it! They always say, the best way to learn is by doing/building. This is 100% true, it's where I picked up a lot of business, life and software skills.
I developed an ambition for iOS since this was the first coding language that opened up many opportunities for me in my early development career. This was something that I had to learn practically over night in order to build a product over the course of a weekend. Now, I know what you’re thinking… that couldn’t have been a good idea. If you think that, you would be right; though I managed to build a working product, I had to do a lot of patching and rewriting the code later on, which wasted so many hours that I could have used for something else. This life lesson helped me a lot, since I was able to learn more and gain more skills in front and backend development. You could say I'm a bit of a Full-Stack dev.
After that, my focus was on mentoring and teaching software development during Covid times. I was in the right place at the right time, as everyone was locked in their houses with a computer.
It wasn't until I was a contractor that I started my first wallet project in 2021. It was super exciting and we were building a clone of Coinbase that integrated with other exchanges and hardware wallets.
A few years later, me and my now wife, were expecting a baby. This is when I moved to full-time employment and I had to do mentoring as a side hustle. Luckily, I was allowed to do mentoring during office hours. This was a huge change for me, as it was my first time being a dad. I still remember, one night when I had to take care of our newborn, I continued my "Smart Contracts" course from Udemy, and to this date, it's still something on my list to learn! We decided to have two kids, and it was best to have them earlier rather than having a bigger age gap between them.
The priorities are the babies and my wife. I needed to make sure that my wife had the needed time to recover. Being a mum is a 24/7 job and it's sad to think that not many women get the right support from their partners these days. I get the right support from her in my personal life and career as well, and I am the luckiest one to have her. We support each other and that's what makes our relationship work well. I still feel I need to improve on certain areas, but it makes it easier when the right support is in place.
Projects
Moving on, here are the projects to date that I have worked on Farcaster. Starting with frames, widgets, a ZK client and recently, Moxito.
Tip O' The Hat (TOTH) - a Farcaster frame that rewards pooled $DEGEN tips to a winning nominated cast, voted by participants. Initiated by @0xen and eventually built the frame with @papa. You can read more about the first version, which happened manually, everyday, here.
We have distributed thousands of $DEGEN already and the number keeps going up! We have lots more work to do to improve it, including a new design and new partnerships in line!
Here are some articles from @papa to get you all informed about TOTH:
Find out more about the total amounts raised and the history of TOTH:
https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth/funding-the-future-on-farcaster-and-beyond-with-dollardegen
Season two rewarding users that wrote guides:
https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth/tip-o-the-hat-season-two-dapp-guides
TOTH frame
Who did I tip frame ($DEGEN and $TN100X editions) - a frame that showed you your daily allowance
Who did I tip $DEGEN frame 
Who did I tip Ham edition frame
Le ham widget - a Scriptable iOS widget that show your ham allowance
Rumourcast - a Farcaster client that allows anyone with a wallet, to cast to Farcaster and X/Twitter (soon!) anonymously
RumourCast, a client that uses ZK proofs to make anonymous casts to Farcaster Moxito - a mobile app showing fresh $MOXIE stats via widgets, and fitness rewards
What now?
It's nearly the end of 2024, and I have a lot of motivation to keep building. I just need to manage my time more efficiently. There are lots of opportunities and lots of growth within web3. Collaborations are going to be key in order to create meaningful projects and services. The value and communities that can be created are much more valuable. Moxie allowed me and other buildoors to build frames, apps, projects that extend both Farcaster and Moxie, through their Moxiethon, Moxie Retro 1 Grant, Gamesathon and lots more.
Another example of communities that help buildoors, artists, developers, etc., are Purple and Nouns. These are headless brands, which are decentralised, and anyone can take part of it. Purple is focused on extending Farcaster and funding innovation. The current amounts raised exceed 64ETH! With Nouns, they have raised around 32,000 ETH. You are reading this right.
To read more about Nouns, you can check this article by @papa:
Nouns.WTF
Brands typically became global juggernauts by turning simple ideas into meaningful identities. To understand the Nouns brand, and their DAO, is to witness a reversal of this premise: meaningful identities constructed via open-source experiential participation where the playbook isn't top-down control but bottoms-up creative autonomy. This model, by classic standards, is a radical one.
In conclusion, family always takes a priority and will focus more on quality rather than quantity for 2025. The key is to collaborate. Collaborations are key to success and moving forward together will create better communities, projects and opportunities for everyone.
