Ceptor Club

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody! Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project, testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. Today I'm ecstatic to have on Tippy and Tim who are going to be giving us an overview of Ceptor Club among other awesome little tidbits about how to be an awesome developer. Welcome boys, happy to have you on. Would you like to give a brief introduction about yourselves before we get into the meat of the presentation?

Sure, I'll start it off. I'm Tippy. Everybody can hear me, say hi in the chat. I've been a member of Developer DAO for about a year, and I got in because of a friend of mine who I did a hackathon with like two-plus years ago. He was having a baby—Mox Zero, if you're out there, thank you again. He was like, 'I don't have time for this stuff, take my NFT.' He just sent me his NFT and since I joined, I started volunteering at the mentorship team and it's been really fulfilling. I've met awesome people; I'm going to see Billy Jitsu live next week at ETH Chicago, which I'm helping volunteer to build the hackathon. But through that connection is how I met Tim. Maybe Tim you want to say a couple words?

Sure, yeah, my name's Tim. I met Tippy and joined up and been doing a lot of work with Ceptor Club and everything like that. Having a great time. So yeah, I'm here to contribute and see who else wants to contribute as well.

Excellent. Yeah, I'm really intrigued to hear what you guys have been doing with Ceptor Club and kind of how all this kind of came together. So in the interest of time, let's get right into the meat of the content.

Oh yeah. Is it okay if I share my screen? All right, here we go. Can you all see the beautiful slide deck? Okay, nice. So first of all, I am really excited to be here. Ceptor Club is something that started in a hackathon basically 10 months ago. It was like Chainlink Fall 2022, and I wasn't going to do a hackathon—I have a bit of a hackathon addiction problem—but this idea came about. I've onboarded about 20 contributors so far. So who are we? Ceptor Club is a community and we're about art, tech, and games. How many words is a picture worth? Our answer is that it could be a lot of words. What this is, is a character sheet in the game Dungeons and Dragons. When you're starting a new game, you make this thing; it's kind of like the resume for your character, and it doesn't have any pictures on it. But we figured out a way to make pictures fast and get you playing your games faster, better, more inclusive, and more accessible. For the people watching, who are you? Share where you're based and which of these words—art, tech, games—got you into this. What about you, Tim?

Yeah, I'm really interested in tech and games. I'm not that big of an artist, but I know there's a lot of people out there that are very good at it. I'm based in Chicago. I've done a lot of different things with my own projects and side projects, and getting involved with Ceptor Club has really helped me hone my skills on the tech aspect of everything and also the games aspect as well.

Yeah, for sure.

Thanks! Let's see some GMs out there. So what are you going to learn in this talk? Well, I'm going to tell stories and through the stories I hope you can get a sense of what we're about. We're going to learn about building community, contribution, and career growth. I'm going to share these three points: if you just did a hackathon, how do you keep your project alive? How can you grow a community of contributors? And then, how can you join a volunteer community like Ceptor Club? We've made it easy. And then the last thing is tips about growing your career. So what are we building at Ceptor Club? Who here has played D&D? If you played D&D before, write it in the chat and share your experience. Narb, Tim, have you played before?

I haven't actually, no, but I've always had it on my bucket list. I think just because it takes so long to play that I've kind of been scared away from it. But yeah, I'm really into that action-fantasy RPG kind of vibe. A lot of the great video games that have come out have been inspired by D&D, so I have to do it once at least.

I have not. The reason why is because I am into video games and I enjoy playing them, but I just don't know if there was a way I could get involved on the digital end of things. Dungeons and Dragons is very personal, you get together around a table. I have a gist of what goes on but I have no idea how to play it. I've been meaning to play but just haven't found the right group of people yet.

Well, you have now! So thank you so much for that. My background is I tried playing it in high school once at a nerdy computer camp, and we only got as far as building our characters. It just took so long that I never even got to play as that character. Many years later, I was an expat in China and I had a community of friends and we started playing together. It was so good to just be a nerd with your friends. Then during COVID, playing online D&D with my friends was the social outlet I had as I was teaching myself coding. So for people who haven't played, D&D is a TTRPG—a tabletop role-playing game. What it's really about is stories, telling stories together, and emergent storytelling where your friends are playing roles different than they are. One of the things it does is unite people's talents. You want to have a diverse group of people in your 'party,' just like in a tech company. You've got people working on front end, back end, design, product, code. In D&D, you have archetypes like archer, warrior, or wizard. Tim, you mentioned playing first-person shooters; is a diverse team important for that too?

Yeah, absolutely. I've played a lot of Overwatch. It's a team-based shooter game, so it has classes of different heroes. There's an aspect of being able to really work together with different classes and play your role the way it's designed to be played. So it does require a lot of collaboration and team effort.

Totally. It's kind of universal stuff. So for me, it's all about the characters. We are a group of characters; all of us are different. We've got a lot of Developer DAO people. Tim hopefully will be joining Developer DAO soon—if any of you have code tokens, send it to Tim. What will you do for them, sing them a song?

I'm not a good singer, but I'll definitely collaborate and work on a project together.

Let's be friends. I don't have time to go into everybody, it's just too much. But let's talk about art and the original idea for Ceptor Club. These are characters drawn by our artist. We want to use this art to help your game-playing experience be better, faster, and more fun. After a year of playing, that feeling was incredible. I thought, how can we give this to people? Well, you can hire him to draw for you for 50 bucks, but it'll take a week. Then the idea clicked: what if we could build something that uses AI to replace the way people have been getting their own character art? I went on Google, typed in 'elf archer,' clicked through pictures, stole someone's picture. We figured out in a hackathon that we could make a picture in like seven seconds. We are a place to make unique fantasy art for gamers, artists, and developers. Tech-wise, we have hit some problems. Obviously, AI cannot totally replace artists. It can't iterate, it can't make a sketch and then understand what you want to develop. It can't add a sword when your character levels up. And it's 'always on,' which costs us money, so we had to stop running our GPU all the time. We've got a mission that we've aligned on.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm just going to hit our central calls to action right now. We are looking for more artists to join us. Ideally, when we're done building the artist feature, this will be a way to use blockchain and AI to get passive income and co-own the model. You work directly with our AI developers, and when you give the thumbs up, we put it into production. You can use this as a way to get commissions. For techies out there, if you're a developer, we need help with our back end, optimizing the AI. We're all volunteers. Tim, could you talk a little bit about what enticed you or what was beneficial about contributing as a tech person?

Absolutely. I've been getting involved with full-stack development for the last two years. Being involved with this was able to get me in an environment where other people were writing code that they're used to writing, and me understanding how they're writing that code. Contributing a little bit here and there and being involved with other developers and figuring out how they think opens up my mind a little bit more to continue learning. That's one of the base aspects that I'm really enjoying.

For sure, and building your portfolio up. Once you're a core contributor, you can add it to your LinkedIn. So how did we do this? It's a simple five-step process. Step zero is fill out that form. You're now a level zero in the club. You'll get the Discord invite, you verify, and you can see the general chat. I could probably share my screen real quick. You get access to our feature threads for people working on their first mission. We have secret things for hackathon people. Then there's the core team channels. You have to prove that you are able to do what you said you would do. Come to the meeting, we do a Scrum. What have you been working on, where are you stuck, and what's next? You decide what you want to commit to. When you do that first mission, boom, you're in, you're leveled up. Tim worked on the tooltips. Tim, could you share a short version of how to contribute?

Sure, yeah. I decided to get involved with the front-end website and make a few changes that would enhance the UI to explain things like tooltips and make it more user-friendly. That's one of the ways that I contributed. There are many different ways you can contribute; if you have any sort of idea, you can always jump into Discord and bounce that idea off other people.

Account abstraction—you've been meaning to learn how to do account abstraction? Well, we have a 'Dice Connect' and all this stuff. You can see some of the stuff that has been minted. If you guess who this artist style is that we used here... hint, it starts with the letter M. An impressionist painter... Monet! Rick and Morty is another possible option. So that's that. Working in public—that was something that we kept on going back to. Don't just work on your feature privately. Post 'Hey, I'm working on this, does anybody have any feedback?' And the last thing is this three-step formula. If you want to level up, have a personal project where you don't depend on anybody. You've got to have that. Team project: you have to understand teamwork makes the dream work. You have to be able to contribute with other people and do the things you say. And study: learning new things. Synergy is leveling up yourself, leveling up how you work with others, and growing being interested and curious. So that's it! Did you learn something? Hopefully, you know that you should join the signup sheet and come to our onboarding meeting. Was this career pie chart helpful?

Yeah gang, and the best way to let them know would either be reaching out over Twitter, joining Ceptor Club, coming into the Discord, or pinging Tippy in Developer DAO as he's very open to discussing things and a great contributor there as well. But unfortunately, we are at time here. Tim, Tippy, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you guys taking the time. Ceptor Club looks very interesting and a promising project that I'll be looking out for. But before everybody leaves, I want to share the QR code for coming on as an attendee today on DevNTell. If you scan that code, you'll be presented with a form to fill out and you will be dropped an NFT for being an attendee today. Tim and Tippy, you're free to fill this out but I have another form for you that will get you a special build NFT for being presenters today. Happy Friday, happy weekend, and we will see you back here next week!