I want to first take a moment to celebrate the launch of the Catalog contract that went live on 4/20. This project started in November of 2021 and represents months of collective effort. Brett Henderson (COMPUTER DATA) joined the team that month and hit the ground running, immediately demonstrating strong initiative and autonomy around a mostly-unscoped project: “plz gib contract”. He led the foundational EVM-related efforts around the contract development before the whole team united and swarmed to get it integrated into our product and launched. In a space that moves so quickly, where people often talk about one- or two-week iteration cycles, I think it’s important to explain a bit of the backstory behind this multi-month effort.

By December ‘21, Catalog Engineering had evolved into a small (yet mighty) squad of four full-time engineers: Hvdson, Ryan, Brett, and myself. To ensure we had the time and space to mature into an autonomous, healthy unit, a few immediate things were done:

• All short-term contractual engineering projects were ended.

• Our DevOps process matured from one that bottlenecked getting code into production for days to one that enabled shipping on a multi-times-per-day basis. (We fixed shipping.)

• We took a hard pause on technical recruiting & hiring. This focused bandwidth internally on ensuring the existing team was being set up for success.

Once we took care of this basic organizational housekeeping, it was time to narrow our focus on fine-tuning our product development process. The MVP was built by a co-founding trio in an innovative burst of rapid-fire development. It’s hard to emphasize how important this zero-to-one moment was. While this shoot-from-the-hip style of development worked to get this project off the ground, I was nervous about this propagating as the de facto engineering culture; we had zero test coverage and lots of hard-to-follow dependency chains, which I thought had to be proactively tackled to prevent product reliability and maintenance nightmares down the line.

The team debated quite a few different product development styles; we experimented with and quickly abandoned a “traditional” scrum two-week sprint process, which seemed far too heavy and meeting-oriented for our needs. We got close to fully committing to what I called the “Seibel process” which seemed like scrum without the meetings but abandoned that as well after recognizing that it didn’t seem best suited to orchestrate larger, more bold product visions we had in mind. We ultimately aligned on running a trial cycle modeled closely after the one outlined in Basecamp’s Shape Up.

• We held a single Product<>Engineering meeting at the beginning of the cycle to align on the project’s goals and requirements.

• Project lanes were established with clear owners.

• The team set and committed to a deadline.

• Engineers were left to self-organize and autonomously work towards the project goals.

And then we did it.

To everyone’s credit, we launched on time. This excites me for several reasons:

• We’ve established precedent for setting internal deadlines and taking them seriously with a newly-formed team.

• We’ve made tangible progress in establishing an engineering culture that prioritizes each person’s time and trusts individuals as autonomous parts of a larger collective.

• We have evolved from an “outsource” to an “insource” orientation. We build & own our shit. We don’t contract out one-off tasks. Humans at Catalog are the experts on Catalog, through and through. This is an immensely important point.

I’m incredibly proud of this whole team and what we’re doing. There’s so much more to build, and I’m excited to watch Catalog grow into the best place for music lovers to work in web3.

Onwards. ❤️

There are other places you can go for those things. If that’s what you’re looking for -- and that’s okay -- this is not your place.

If you are looking for connection, if you are looking to support my work, if you are looking to take a peek into my point of view, one snapshot at a time -- then this is your place. I’d love to have you as a collector. If you own an NFT by me, you support me in doing the one and only one thing that’s helped me survive this world: to create.

I started writing music the summer after eighth grade. I lived with my family in Dhahran Aramco, a small, gated, residential compound in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (الشرقية). It had all the characteristics of a small colonial project: by-design racism, class and nationality-based hierarchy, exploitation of immigrants, a privileged minority (at the time many white, many American) maintaining and exerting a disproportionate amount of control over the environment around them.

If I learned one thing from my upbringing, it’s that I’m some small person in some grand, suspicious scheme.

It was also the place where I wrote my first song, experienced my first kiss, tried my first sip of alcohol (moonshine, also eighth grade), snuck out and got caught, was made to swear on the Quran at two in the morning that I did not lose my virginity that night. It was a transient home of permanence -- and it is this very contradiction I seem to carry with me, silently, forever.

A huge part of my journey revolves around acceptance of what has come to be my work -- to express through small acts of creation. Usually, my medium of choice is music. This is by no means an easy thing for me. It’s not a “hobby” or something like that. It’s more like a war, a constant struggle, which keeps me continually anxious, restless, dissatisfied. I’ve reached that life stage where, when I glance backward, I see flickers of what I was either too preoccupied to notice or too preoccupied to preserve. I’ve lost relationships to this shit, I’ve lost entire periods of time to this shit, I’ve lost my sanity to this shit. Yet it is this and only this that persists. That fact, I have come to accept. I know that I will live with it and that I will die with it. The art is what happened, what remains.

If you got this far, I want to thank you first and foremost. I plan to release my genesis Catalog record this Friday, March 18th. It’s called “Two Suns”. The drop microsite, designed by 10 High Design is live now. Reserve price is 0.5 ETH. The first collector will receive a one-time-only physical care package created by 10 High Design and yours truly. Details to come.

Thank you. Salam. Peace.

--Reef

Hey. Thanks for taking a moment to be here. I’m a software engineer working at Catalog, a web3 music platform where artists sell one-of-one, canonical versions of their work. Catalog launched in March and has since helped artists earn over $700k through sales on our site. As of this post, we are a full-time core team of five working alongside passionate friends in the community. I joined after three years as a full-stack JS/Rails developer at Privy, where I helped develop their core product as an individual contributor and tech lead.

Among the most exciting aspects of joining Catalog is that I get to participate in the product design and development process at such a formative stage. We’re in the early days, building a platform that gives artists the agency to determine -- for themselves -- how they’d like to do their work. I’m continually impressed with how much this organization’s founding team has achieved with so few resources. Consider the following milestones, all achieved within months:

• 3k+ members in our Discord community.

• Over $700k in artist sales.

• 150+ onboarded artists who now have full agency to mint & sell records via Catalog and generate the kind of earnings once reserved for a prohibitively small set of recording artists.

In addition to all this, our architectural footprint is still relatively small. We are (mostly) a serverless Next.js app deployed on Vercel. We use Postgres for persistent storage (when needed) and our auctions are built atop the ZORA stack. We run a single server-side application that handles async transaction processing. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, this architecture is bound to evolve and extend to support the needs of Catalog artists and fans alike. Celebrating successes and treating pitfalls as opportunities to learn, may this be a place where you can peek into the journal of a founding engineer at Catalog.

Onwards. 💽