Hey everyone!

I’m Aaron, a software developer who has been getting into the web3 sphere over the last 6 months. Follow me and my journey as I talk about my thoughts and what I’ve learned about web3. It might be a bit monotonous but, before I talk about anything else, I wanted to talk a little bit about myself first.

For basically my entire life, I’ve been a builder and a doer. I loved Legos when I was a kid, I loved how you could build an entire world out of little blocks. Maybe it was my parent’s influences of the Lord of the Rings and Narnia book series but I’ve always been a visionary off on my own, creating my own worlds.

When I was about 11 years old, these interests quickly turned into interests about the now quite popular Minecraft and Dungeons and Dragons. At the time, Minecraft was a small indie game - still in alpha - that I found out about from some early Youtube videos.

Minecraft was huge for me, I quickly got into modding the game which - at the time - involved editing .jar files. I became very interested in computers as such and began learning out how to make my own video games using programs such as Game Maker. I started to teach myself the basics of programming and soon moved onto programming in Java and making mods and server plugins for Minecraft. I became quite successful at plugin development, my most popular plugin had over 350k downloads and I later moved on to selling my plugins to server owners (either as a private developer or selling my plugins publicly). In total I made about $2,000 doing this. For a high school student programming in their freetime for fun, I don’t think that’s bad at all.

I also started getting into D&D, something I would later stop doing as I started getting into high school theater instead but would eventually get back into college.

At this time, when I was about 13, I would also be growing my interest in other computer-related topics. Minecraft really sparked my interest in computers but it would eventually grow past just that game. I started learning Python, making Android apps, and I would eventually find myself stumbling across something called Bitcoin. I remember watching a video, it must have been 2011 or 2012, about something called Bitcoin and how it just reached being worth $100. The video briefly talked about blockchains and, for some reason, the topic really caught my attention.

I remember looking up Bitcoin after the video and seeing how I could buy some. I wanted to buy a whole Bitcoin, I didn’t want a third or a half, I wanted a WHOLE Bitcoin. But I also didn’t want to spend $100. I was like 13. I didn’t have that kind of money. However, Bitcoin required being a lot more technically inclined to buy back then. I quickly concluded it wasn’t worth the effort. But the idea of blockchains and their utility stayed with me. I watched the few videos I could find on how they worked and began mulling over the thought and potential. Even at 13-14, when I was learning about blockchains and how they’re inherently trustless, I thought about how the same technology could be applied to other areas where trust is a major concern. Like governments.

Skip by a little while later. I’m finishing up high school. Still doing stuff with Minecraft, been picking up people skills as a server and then network admin, owner, developer, etc. Been working on my own projects in game development, app development, and been really getting into math and AI. I’ve also been taking programming courses at my local community college (since my high school didn’t offer any). I’ve also been thinking about the idea of a digital government. Basically the thought experiment that if we were to build a government today, with the full utility of the internet, how would we do things differently? The academic name for such a government is known as an E-Government and Estonia and South Korea are some of the closest E-Governments in the world. For a little while, I even considered getting my master’s in E-Governments.

I ended up going to college at Southern Oregon University - a fine college and the only option my parents could realistically afford without me needing to get too many loans. I ended up graduating in 3 years, I would have been 2 if SOU would have let me. Not to boast but I had enough credits from taking AP and community college courses in high school that when I came to the school as a freshman, I was already qualified as a junior.

While SOU was a fine school and gave me my degree in Computer Science, its CS program wasn’t very large and I didn’t make many friends within the program. Instead, I made most of my friends through playing Dungeons and Dragons - or specifically, Pathfinder. On the side, I started to work on my own projects like usual. I further enhanced my skills in C# and Go by making small games or fractal generation projects. I also started to learn about the newly emerging idea of web3 with WebAssembly and Rust. However - mainly - I started to learn my favorite programming language, Javascript (I say with complete irony), as I worked on web2 web development and all the various frameworks / tools that are involved: NodeJS (Express), React/VueJS, jQuery, Sequalize, HTML and CSS (obviously), Socket.io, Prisma, and Bootstrap/Bulma.

In college I began working on my largest personal project to date, Wanderer’s Guide: a semi-automated character manager for Pathfinder 2e. While I’ve learned to despise Javascript (what the front and backend are mostly written in), through Patreon it has become a nice part time job for me. I learned numerous practical skills through it like knowledge about how to set up cloud computing (AWS, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean), relational databases (MySQL and Postgres), programming languages (I created my own programming language, WSC, and compiler for WG), and security protocols (I implemented my own OAuth2.0 protocol).

While doing this, I also began mulling over the two topics I am most interested in today: abstraction and decentralization. These are topics I will discuss in further but, to me, I think these are some of the most interesting topics worth thinking about today.

Around the time after college - with COVID and the state of the global economy, I began to get concerned with the state of the US dollar and rapid inflation. I found myself coming back to the crypto side of web3. Bitcoin was now worth $40,000, a whole lot more than the $100 I once knew it as. I started to invest into crypto projects and coins that I thought had good teams and good ideas behind them. I began doing this in January 2021, just before the bull run of May. As a result, I ended up making fairly good profits. I also learned about DAOs, something my younger self would have loved. My idea of a decentralized, digital government would likely follow many of the same attributes we see in DAOs today.

Since that time, I’ve learned a whole lot about finance, cryptocurrencies (and the tech that supports them), and web3. I think there’s a huge amount of potential but there’s also a huge amount of over-hype. Filtering that out and looking at things from a visionary but also practical perspective is something I will be talking more about here.