Corigis.xyz

All right, we are live and we are recording as well. Okie-dokie.

All right, well, GM, GA, GE, everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell, now live from YouTube. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they've been working on or passionate about.

So this can be an awesome project you've been working on, unit testing best practices, smart contract goodies, so on and so forth. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share with the community.

And today, I am excited to reintroduce to you, Drew, from corgis.xyz. So if you recall, when we started Season 1, Drew was actually the first person to present. So I'm happy to have him again, kicking off Season 2 series of DevNTell for us. So take it away, dude.

Yeah. So my name is Drew, from corgis.xyz, and I'm trying to create a product. If you want to know a little bit background about myself, I am an engineer, but also an instructor.

So I teach across the, around the states, globally, and then I provide, pretty much, taught at like elementary school, middle school, high school, university, and then boot camps.

And then I try to be more into the EdTech space, but provide something really interesting for a lot of users and try to be a little bit more innovative, because I think innovation needs to be a lot more accessible in this age.

So I'm going to have a really, pretty cool presentation about like what my product was from Season 1. So then now you can see in Season 2, what I've been up to and then what are my plans. And then maybe I'll come back in Season 3 if needed.

So let me present and then let's see how this goes. So let me share my screen. Sweet.

So as you can see, just for verification Narb can you see my screen? Just making sure.

Oh yeah, I can see.

Sweet. Yeah. So pretty much, I'll do a recap from Season 1, and it was trying to, my goal, pretty much, from the years was like make code cute and informative.

So over the years, these were kind of like my logos. I was a really bad designer. And then as, I think people will, I have like a quote like, people will not, they won't talk about your failures.

They will talk about your successes. So for me, I had a lot of failures. So I started drawing and then, and then started thinking like, well, I need to make a really good brand, so I use corgis.

And that's kind of like the company and what it stands for. Just a furry animal, a compassionate dog that could be your coding friend or assistant.

And over the years, it's been like four iterations for kind of going through. I was trying to refine the product and to try to see that can I make a brand for coding a little bit or sigil for coding a little bit more digestible.

So this was the outcome. So I started going kind of like very terrible and started improving along the way, and that took some time and figuring out that I wasn't a designer at the beginning, but I tried to learn as I go.

So that was kind of like, it was called coding corgis and it was code with corgis and now it's corgis.xyz. So names change, but the concept and the pretty much meaning started becoming a lot easier for people later on.

And then I started thinking like, well, and I spotted stuff like every technology that you learn, there's always going to be a mascot.

So I wanted a mascot for coding to provide people with just, a lot of people have imposter syndrome when learning this stuff. So I wanted them to be like a pretty much guide to help them out.

So for example, started making like small products. And these were just stickers. And I didn't think that people will buy stickers that are cute.

But a lot of the female devs would love it and they buy it. And a lot of people who wanted to learn it, they would just buy it just because it's cute. And then underlyingly you could see the curly brackets or the parentheses, they will see that it's a sigil for coding.

Yeah. So if you're going through that, you could see that later on, I wanted to provide a mascot. And that took some time. That was not like when learning from like computer science, it didn't teach me how to brand stuff.

It didn't teach me how to market stuff, so instead I had to learn on the go. So kind of like the roadmap to the pretty much beginning of the story was that when I was a elementary school teacher for programming,

a little girl pretty much asked me a question. And the question was, am I dumb? And the reason why I asked that question shocked me was that for me I said no, but I don't know why you'd think that way.

She actually said that her parents bought her a book. And that book actually was Coding for Dummies. And she internalized it really badly.

But the book right here provided things that like, well, it sets the standard. What is it going to be your culture and what's it going to be is based on like Beginning Programming for Dummies.

I don't think people would like internalize it that way, but little kids do. So as an example we want to make sure that we could be inclusive as well as very open and transparent that like you are, you're not dumb, but you could actually do this.

And a lot of times you can see later on we have like a very skewed data of like how many guys to girls and you want to make sure that you have like a 50/50 split, right?

Because then people, we won't have a lot of people into the table and they will not, they will create the decisions going forward. So I started thinking and coding. And this is me actually and I'm always in the mascot suit.

So I try to be a CEO but also try to think like this is like a Iron Man suit, but it's extremely hot. And my diet in there. So I started thinking of an idea like, okay, well I'm going to create some mascot and the little girl loved corgis.

Because once pretty much it's a really corgis mean dwarf in Welsh and dwarfs build stuff. So if you're kind of curious like why, and then also another question, a follow-up question is people would ask me, like do you have a corgi?

Yes, I used to. Passed away. So I used to have a corgi as well. And the debate was should I buy another corgi or buy a suit to like or a mascot suit.

And I bought a mascot suit because I think later on this year I will be making video content in that suit. Kind of weird though. But so I started thinking of maybe creating a content and a brand.

And what happened was I started posting in Medium, do like interview questions and try to make it more interactive. These were all animated GIFs and comics.

And then it started becoming more like, okay I'm going to do Instagram and try that out and see what if people like it. And then it started becoming interesting enough.

So it was like okay I wanted to start doing animated comics and see that go. And then I started thinking like well what if I try to build like a a giant mascot suit and started asking like can I 3D like can I build something like very similar to this, right? And see how that would go.

And everything I tried was trying to scream up in the air and say I'm significant up to the clouds and say like is this even worth it? But it seemed that like as I progressed through, I think it did.

And the kind of people think of pretty much corgis.xyz like it's like a Duolingo not for language like people don't understand that programming languages are now kind of like in this modern age a language.

And as more things like AI tools gets through, we need to make sure that we understand it before we just like kind of scary that people will trust more about AIs than they will trust their humanity and other humans.

So optimizing humans is really hard, but optimizing kind of like your process or AIs are just pretty much seamless as more data goes through. And I think we need to be a little bit more transparent and figure out that later on we need to like trust people.

That's a little bit more ethical for me. So then later on I thought thinking like well I wasn't in the web3 space but now I think it needs to be more of a general type of company where we need to learn as many languages as possible.

Because people will be just like in this age, people are more multilingual in multiple languages, human languages too, so try to be like more of like a crypto zombie.

But there is one book and it's discontinued but it's interesting enough that like there is something called Manga Guide to Databases. I really love manga.

And what was interesting is this was kind of like a like really good materials in college. And I actually bought this book and there's a lot of series like they do like stats, data analyst.

But they were discontinued but it was only in 2012. A lot of times I thought that was weird because this was really great. And a lot of people here if you're curious that this book was actually more digestible during this time.

Where a lot of times people had visual devices, phones, they would be more acceptable to this type of material. So I thought this was great in 2012 or 2009.

But it was now it should probably like probably should buy it it's on Amazon too but as it goes it later on these comics was kind of like a safe haven.

It made the pretty much information digestible just by just reading the panels. And I thought thinking like well if this is kind of like my season 1 why not I just make a mobile app.

And I tried that and this these are the screenshots and they were kind of going through trying to explore the wonders of Web3 using comic books step by step. And then I thought maybe I need to be more public about it.

And I really wanted to make sure these characters can I make a identity to a programming language and make it into a adventure game or story. I think everyone can see like pretty much this is Python can you actually provide a personality like Monty.

And I started doing also YouTube videos and making code with corgis cute and informative try to do shorts and my goal was to make as much assets as possible.

And then start this is kind of like the Season 2 what is what what have I done over 2022 and what I'm going to do now, right? So hope you this is pretty interesting.

But in the new year 2023 the coming soon is that I created like a site. So this is the URL where it's corgis.xyz and I've been extremely busy over the year because I have like a bunch of students.

So I started thinking like maybe make a platform so this isn't what I've been building. It was pretty much like learn JavaScript in the cutest and most informative way and making it easy for newcomers to learn and think like a coder by converting challenging concepts in comic book like lessons and playing interactive puzzle games.

So I wanted it to be a digital and non-digital product and it's kind of very similar like learning languages or wallets or any type maybe concepts, data structures, algorithms.

And try to make something like a pretty much panel. So this is what I've been working on throughout the year trying to make a PDF of just a comic book and tell a story, right? So like how you set up your MetaMask in a comic book way.

And as I go through I'm still building maybe more in the web view. Season 1 people ask like is there a web application and now there is it's just I'm adding more content as I can.

And I started thinking maybe if I can give it things to kids physically I can also provide it digitally as well. So created learn how to create QR codes and actually make these interactive comic books more digital so they can play like games on their phone, right?

So if you're very curious these are kind of the, I'll also will give you these slides if you're kind of curious. These will have all my socials but as we go through like there's like a quote like learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

And as I tried this out I started testing it on like a bunch of students and see like if they really like the visuals. And they did. And these are people who are in their careers and they have no expectations and they figure out that it's better to be visual and actually learn it through kind of like animations or kind of like as a comic book.

And this might be a quote like learning is definitely not mere imitation, nor is it the ability to accumulate or regurgitate fixed knowledge. It's just a process and discover the process without an end.

And I want to try this to make sure that later on these are what on display would be some snippets of the samples of the comics I made which was like how you do make JavaScript, how you display it step by step as much as possible.

Or using analogies like how you break the problem down. I know that it seems like beginner level but a lot of times we're not in like a lot of people are beginners when they're in this field and this is kind of like the code that that I should tell or DevNTell, right?

So var like you can see here that I try to break it into smaller pieces and step by step. And I think people need to be handheld first so then they can grow, right? So as an example here there's more to these comics but it actually helps a lot of students go through.

And I also will demonstrate that this is the site. And we also have our socials so if you just go corgis.xyz you can see here that we will later on will have levels in Python where you can actually play comics and shop and you could connect your wallet if needed.

But we wanted something more of like later on maybe sign in email if needed and then we'll have levels or games or puzzles through the future.

So I hope you enjoy this. I I'll probably it's hard because then I would probably give you guys the comic so I'll give that through a link and then if you want to learn more probably try to follow us on pretty much corgis.xyz these are all our socials.

So take a look at those as well. And we're trying to expand it we're on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter as well as Discord if needed. So I think that is I think that's it.

Any questions?

Uh yeah, that was awesome Drew. Uh yeah, gang if you have any questions please do comment in the chat on the right hand side and I will ask on your behalf.

But I do have a couple. So you mentioned that you shared this content with students. Like what age range were your students?

Okay. A little bit more background. So so in this and maybe my students will be watching this I'll probably share it in this class. Currently I am, these students are ranging as kind of no background.

So they're around probably in their early twenties to their like probably forties. So in this window I I stress tested enough that it was like around 150 students.

And how do you keep them? The problem with with me was giving slides and just showing them like just instructions does not count. So in giving them a guidebook and a manual actually did.

And some of them had no experience and some of them barely they did tutorial hell and they wanted more of like a better like better process.

So for me I wanted to make sure that I provided a visual guidebook. So just like if some instructor will give you a textbook I give them a comic book. Right? And that gave them a better sense.

But later down the road I will be making, so if you're curious of like what I'm going to be doing next year or this year is now just making something like a video game speedrun.

I'll tell my students to build ask me what you want me to build and I'll speedrun it through of how to build it and in the corgi suit. I don't know in this thing right here. And then they love the video.

But they use the comic books as supplemental comics. And that's kind of like the goal was to create something like that. The hard part was I wasn't in a physical classroom with them.

But to actually see that I created a a guidebook and I'm teaching online so my zoom is like 150 students. So it became like I'm a CEO to a class that I did not expect.

So I thought like a smaller size but I I tested it and see it fit the market fit them and they seem like they pretty much love it because I don't have any complaints from my inbox.

Nice. Always a good thing.

Yeah. but it but it yeah and then they would actually they are also parents and they would probably give it to their kids too so that was kind of a very very very interesting thing and they said that the brand the brand was pretty good and set.

Interesting. And the are the comic books both digital and like physical or is it only digital copies at this point?

So so this is a good question right here is that they will be both. So a little bit more interactive so you would think of it as kind of the comics would be digital products that I would just sell as PDFs.

But they will have QR codes underlying. So then when you scan them they will just go to the pretty much web app and you will see that it's just like oh it's interactive there's puzzle games.

So I wanted a bridge between it because making the content and no product you just make a lot of content and then it's like it doesn't verify a lot of things.

But if you have both like you have a non digital and digital so the goal would be like pop-up books. Make the pop-up book and then have a QR code and then go from there and scan the QR code and then you have it on your app and you play around with it.

Or just go online and you could see a digital pretty much go through the web app and look watch the comic itself. So similar to like if you have like a manga you can you can read it physically or you can read it online.

Right. But they're both the same content yeah but the web would be more interactive that you can click interact with it. Probably interact in a way that it would be very beneficial.

But I see a huge problem because a lot of people are not in the space so they they feel very they have a lot of imposter syndrome that they cannot do it unless they figure out like a certain niche of their learning.

So there's times where things have to be broken down to like their elementary school level but some people do not go that far because it's a really difficult to to visualize everything. It just doesn't happen often.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah often people love that synergy of having like visual content as well as like hands-on so yeah I'm not surprised that this thing this type of thing is taken off with people.

And do you foresee yourself strictly focusing on just like teaching people to code or do you foresee like an opportunity kind of go beyond just like coding and then introduce like perhaps teaching younger students like math or something something like this with this type of approach.

Yeah so it's kind of very similar in my like I already thought about that and like as an example like teaching math would be fine but I'm not like math. Like I'm not like I could.

But as languages grow and I think I I really rather hit that market where like even the creator of Python will say Python will be legacy code what is the next thing.

And I think I also need to provide like other topics there's a lot of concepts that people need to break down and understand like how things work under the hood and also like why they they work as well.

And later down the road I'm focusing on like programming languages and that's kind of my big hurdle and then after that I start thinking like okay data structures or algorithms because some people ask about that.

And then there'll be more into these off topic things like like kind of like flashcards like people want to learn like about data. So it's kind of like more of a general sense like you need a general knowledge.

But my reasons why comic books will work is that my original goal from the beginning and these were years back was I had a I had a idea like we all use documentation in some way in some form.

And how how would it have been like how would it have been like how much would it be worth if I converted all that into a comic book? Right? Like Python documentation or JavaScript documentation it's very just like it's very overwhelming.

When they see a manual and then you convert it to a textbook and you're like um nope so if you went into like a comic and it's like a I don't know 16 series comic then yeah like the full Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts or even Marvel Comics series from start to finish they provide and then you would just re update the issues right.

And I think that provide and tech always will grow in increment and if I if I do math then I I could but I think it's better to just go from that technology side.

Because I think maybe as a base maybe like an intro or basics then I would do that but for me like programming languages come and go they get updated they get refactored and then you add new issues.

So that's kind of for like I thought about that like wow it's like a ongoing marathon series of your childhood yeah it never ends never ending comic book yeah so it's like a ever ever ending comic book so it's very endless.

And I keep thinking that well well I wish I wish like for me I was the like I didn't have any intent to even go through making my own company. I didn't really. I just wanted to just like work do my side hustle and but I found out that this just takes one person.

One user and they just really want it. So back then like in my when I'm selling stickers off the street and I said like you want to buy a sticker? They'll buy it. I'm like really? I'm more shocked but they're more happy.

And then and yeah and you're like oh okay like they're willing to pay like money for this I'm like okay I might have something. So you don't validate yeah validating your ideas unless you have like a person that would have intent to say like oh they really love the product.

And then then I figured that looking at it I'm like well how far can I go and how and for me like testing it on like my own sandbox a bunch of students and then seeing like they would work.

So like the next maybe in 2023 I will be creating you probably will see a lot of content where I have like a speedrun of building stuff in this suit and then have a platform where it's just learning all the supplemental platform where people can just go and just get the information. So yeah.

Yeah, yeah, like that totally resonates is just like as soon as you have as soon as you see somebody benefiting from your fruits of labor and it's just like it makes a difference in their life you're like oh wow this is pretty pretty neat and it gives you like a whole new drive to kind of like keep pushing forward.

And yeah, I mean it it's that same kind of feeling is what keeps me coming back to this field of software development and technology as a whole. It's just like the impacts that you can make on people's lives is very inspiring and like it continues to kind of push I would say probably everybody in this field to kind of keep doing what they're doing and like stay afloat.

Yeah. I think like um personally like we have a generation that and this is more of like like a observation you will have a generation that could be really good at looking sharing a lot very transparent.

So you'll have a generation that would just use like TikTok to share a lot of things and then you have a generation that's like more conservative of like these are the instructions this is what you're going to do they're really good followers right.

And I I see that later on that when you're going to be working with them so there must be for example comic books didn't work when I was in college everyone was able to read and comprehend and we didn't have YouTube or videos.

But now people use YouTube and videos as a learning supplement. And then now they're more visual so the if you give them like a a new generation a textbook they're not going to comply. Right?

So then even a teacher he was teaching so he was teaching math and I saw this was pretty crazy was he was making comics when in for millennials they did not like it they'd rather just read the book read the concepts and follow the instructions and go through.

And then when he had a new generation they were more prone for devices and his comic books was a good hit. And you can even see factors where like even the best top box movies are comic books. So then they became more mainstream.

And and you can see kind like people are now more visual than they ever thought um and that's their that's their supplement for because they've been exposed to that much like textbooks was one but now videos you can just search and find it watch it and then that's how you digest information.

And I needed something like well I don't want to be like a traditional computer textbook in this is it read the docs that's fine but it's not going to be scalable in the next couple years 10 years or 5 15 years because everyone is going to be like what's the video oh use ChatGPT, right?

Yeah, yeah 100%.

So so like okay like I have to adapt to times of like how you optimize people to learn and make the right choices if they're going to be in this field yeah.

Yeah, yeah 100% and I mean there's there's a whole like slew of opportunity in this field and like you said most people now are visual learners like I I've even run into instances where I presented people documentation with like a whole bunch of text and like oh this is too too much in one shot.

I I don't know if I'm interested in a topic before I like watch a quick YouTube video on it and then I figure out if I want to deep that so it's a yeah total shift in um people's perceptions on how to learn for sure.

Yeah and then that perception hasn't changed since the dawn of education and it becomes a point where now we have to find better innovative ways of just making sure that people can learn the stuff. So that's kind of like corgis.xyz.

And I'll be like experimenting throughout the year for this 2023 and seeing that what can I offer and what do people like. A funny story is that when I did code with corgis I was making so much content that when actually when I was at this hackathon I met a person.

But she knew my brand before she knew my face. Ah nice. And that was the same hackathon me and Narb actually went and kind of shocking I was like they knew and then two actually female engineers or developers actually came up to me.

They knew my the corgi sigil more than they knew actually me in the red hat. So that was kind of very eye boggling saying like wow people actually like know me and it does take some time just for a little bit of just it just takes that one person to see like yeah you're on the right track.

100% yeah and I mean it it's hard to miss a fellow in a big corgi suit.

Yeah I only had corgi patches when so they just yeah yeah that's right so it was pretty funny so when I just came and I wore a corgi patch and people were like I know you.

And then when I go to other hackathons they'll look at my sigil and like oh you're the guy who gave me this sticker and then they'll they'll know me based on those memories and those were like very disconnected to what I saw I'm like really they'm memorable.

But it just takes that little like icon that will make sure that like oh you have something there so.

Power of branding man. Yeah power of branding yeah definitely took a while all all great things take time.

But yeah so unfortunately we are at time um but this has been wonderful Drew thank you so much for coming on and giving us that update and recap of all all the things corgis.xyz.

Yeah so I will be dropping the the links for the POAPs in this chat here so I don't know how this is going to work maybe the bots will have their field day with the spreadsheet um yes but we'll see.

But um just for the audience and and perhaps yourself as well Drew I just wanted to make you aware that um the Developer DAO has fundraising operators in Chuck and Wickist who are available to assist anybody who is looking for advice on budgeting, applying for grants.

And they'll even take they'll even schedule one-on-one time with you to go over your budgets and grant applications and help you refine until you're ready for that next step. So um there is a notion doc that I will also drop in this link but I suggest that everybody who is interested in any type of grant funding definitely check them out.

And they have a bi-weekly or weekly I forget the cadence but um they have a session for people that is open to any and all in this server. So definitely check that out if you have the chance.

And um with that I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday happy weekend and we will see you here next week.

Yeah thank you Narb for having me.

My pleasure. All right.

Yeah thank you so much.

Yeah no problem all right.

See you all.

See ya.