Exploring the latest with Ceptor Club

Hey, GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So, if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project they've been working on, demonstrating unit 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 platform to share it with the community. And today, I am ecstatic to have back on the Ceptor Club team, but with some new faces in the mix. Welcome, gang.

Thank you, thank you. I'm sort of hearing a little bit of an echo, so I'm going to plug in my headphones, and hopefully that will fix it.

For sure. I guess while we wait for Tippi to fix his audio, Alan and Danjo, would you like to give a brief introduction about yourselves to the crowd?

Sure, I'll go first. My real name's Alan, I go by Verinta as kind of an online presence. And yeah, I've been with Ceptor Club for about half a year now, and it's definitely been a great experience as a new developer.

Excellent, welcome on. Danjo, did you want to go next?

Well, if he's trying to get his sound connected... I figured out what the problem was: I was watching our own stream on YouTube!

Ah, getting ahead of yourself! All good, all good.

All right. So, sorry Danjo, we can't hear you. But as I go through the intro, there'll be a spot for us to have more in-depth. But let me take over a little bit. I'm Tippi Fifestarr. I am one of the OG founders of Ceptor Club. I was on the last DevNTell with Tim. And, you know, not a lot has changed... oh wait, actually a ton has changed since the last time! So, I'm super excited to share the story of where we were and where we are now. Let me just share my screen. Oh, Danjo, nice. Say hi, Danjo.

Hello. Oh, all right. Hi, I'm Danjo. I'm a developer. Tippi and I have been friends for a very long time, and we started this project... what, how long ago was it now? I don't even know.

Over a year.

Yeah, wow. And we kind of just started building out stuff. I kind of built out the beginning of it and sort of handed it off to all these other brilliant people.

Yeah. So, here we are at DevNTell again. That's our brand stuff. Who are we? The kernel, the first idea was playing D&D with our friends. Everybody has to make a character sheet. That can take hours, and you play the game with your friends for a year and maybe you don't even really know in detail what your character looks like unless you're an artist. Luckily, I have artist friends. And maybe I'll just fly all the way to show you Risto, my buddy, drew my character Dusty, and that was his character Pashad. And the moment that I got that sticker was just a game-changer, and I went: what if we could be faster than Google in giving someone a picture, and use AI? And that's the basic concept. What's a picture worth? Well, what's a character sheet worth? Well, can you look at that character sheet and know exactly what you're seeing if you're a first-time player? Of course not. But if you look at this, you can be like, 'Oh, I'm a dragon dude, kind of artsy too, maybe.' So that's the basic idea. And the most important thing, of course, is that we are a community—a worldwide community. About half of us are in DevNTell at this point, and we'll talk more about how all these new people joined recently. But if we were to draw the curve of Ceptor Club, it looks like something you should get in early on, if you know what I mean. So, let me just pause right here and give Danjo and Alan a little bit more time to share about themselves. And specifically, I'd like you to talk about: where are you based in the world, what do you do for your day job or whatever, and which of these words—art, tech, and games—brought you in, and what are you into with them?

Before we get into that, I will also mention we have another guest, GigaHerz. Welcome! Welcome onto the show.

Amazing.

Yes. So, the more friends, the better. So, please include yourself in these introductions as well.

Sure, hi everyone.

Yes, start us off, Lena. Tell us where you're based, what do you do during like what's your day job, do you have any news about your job? And then what brought you in?

I am based in Portugal right now. I'm in Germany for Christmas. It's very rainy and gray. And I am a developer, I love hackathons. And then I also am a DevRel, so that's how I met Tippi in the event space of DevRel Uni. And then he mentioned the Chainlink hackathon, and I was... I have a friend who's like very into the Chainlink ecosystem, who did all these courses and stuff, and I was like, 'Oh, we could join.' And then we joined, and it was a lot of fun. I think it was really amazing, it was like the first time I could put my project manager hat, take it off, and Tippi put it on, and he did an amazing job. And yeah, I think I've never played Dungeons and Dragons, but I know I have friends who do play it, and I created a lot of very amazing characters. I should actually post them, they're really cool. You can see them, I think, in our demo. There's a lot of other ones that I created.

In a few minutes, we'll all do some live demo stuff, and I'm so glad you made it because you can demo your things and explain everything. And we can talk... and one thing I want to talk about here, even though it's like sort of a public retrospective, we haven't really had a chance to see each other since that crazy weekend where we worked like 36 hours over that weekend. So, feel free to share your goals for your feature and what you wish was unfinished. We're all devs here, so, you know, full story. Alan, or Verinta, would you like to take the question: where are you, what brought you into Ceptor Club, and what do you do?

Sure, yeah. So like I said earlier, I'm Alan/Verinta. And I'm based in Chicago, where I completed a bootcamp last fall to spring. And then I came to this, what's called Code and Coffee meetup, which is where I met Tippi and he was talking about his D&D tech stuff and everything. And I said, 'Hey, that sounds interesting, give me more information.' And that's where I started with Ceptor Club. And currently, I am a math teacher.

Awesome.

A man of many trades. Excellent, love to see it. Danjo, you want to share a little bit more about yourself and what sort of attracted you to this idea, and maybe even share your vision?

Yeah, I mean I guess I'm a nerd at heart, like completely in all aspects, you know. I like programming, I like gaming, been enjoying the new season of Discovery World of Warcraft thing if anybody's a fan. And I never actually tried, I never had the opportunity to play D&D growing up really. And so, while I was traveling and stuff, a lot of people my age were playing and stuff, still never got the chance. And Tippi and I both came back to America after our worldly travels, if you will, and kept in touch and sort of got into this... and I guess there was a lot of Jason—you're friends with Jason, who's a hardcore guy. And so we kind of just fell into it and were like, 'Dang, this is really cool, and so is Web3, and so is all this stuff. How can we make it all smush together?' And yeah, I mean like kind of the big idea in my head, I mean, is that it's sort of this like home base for all tabletop kind of games and creation of games and things like that as well. So, my day job is I work as a Web3 developer for a game studio called Aether Games. I don't do like the Unity stuff, I do like smart contracts and mostly back-end stuff. Nerd.

Danjo's actually really cool. He plays the banjo and he skateboards and was like going to be the next Beatles, but his band broke up because of China.

We're going to beat the Beatles.

Beat the Beatles! In Vietnam. Let me take back over here and keep us moving because time is ticking. Here we are in the infinite screen. Can you see my screen share, 'Who Are You? Share'?

Yes, sir.

All right, nice. We did it. So last time on DevNTell, this was us. It was like three months ago. We talked about how to keep your project alive after a hackathon. Key secret is: don't be snooty, invite people in, be inclusive. This is actually one of the keys to our growth. How to join a volunteer community like Ceptor Club? It's kind of about being real, and it's very simple: you fill out a form (we'll share that later), you come to an onboarding meeting (which is actually the first obstacle of a hero, is like you have to come to the game and play with your friends, you know what I'm saying? And that's not always easy to make happen). So you come to the onboarding meeting, and then you say you're going to do something, and then you do it! It's like, if you do it, you're in. And even if it's just like adding a tool tip or doing a vulnerability scan on our codebase. So being real, and then it's really a place where as a DevRel, I wanted to be able to give back and mentor people in a codebase that I'm really familiar with, rather than... as like not the best developer in the world, it takes me a long time to learn a new codebase. So here's this thing that I've been watching grow for the last year, and it's quite fun and easy for me to help new people. But in the last weekend of the hackathon, watching Lena (GigaHerz) spend like hours getting people unstuck, I was like, 'This is a 10x developer, I can't believe it.' She's only been in our codebase for like a week and is helping everyone. And I was able to focus on my work because I was sacrificing a lot of my own dev work to be a bridge, a cross-chain bridge between three teams. And we'll talk about that crazy experience in a second. But yeah, as a slime mold, what really keeps it moving is love—the love of art, the love of tech, the love of games. And everyone here at least loves like one and a half of those. Like Lena's not a gamer, but she's really artistic, even if she won't say she is, and a great designer, great frontend skills. And she's a techie, she's a big tech nerd with a heart of gold. So what are we going to learn in this one? What's the difference? I just covered a whole 20 minutes in like one minute, so obviously go back and watch that one. I know Narb wants people watching the old episodes. But let's give some new content for the people, and we're going to be more technical this time because we have some amazing technical things that recently happened. But the agenda here is: obviously, we'll go in a little more detail of what is Ceptor Club, we'll live demo what's currently working. We're going to talk about how Ceptor Club sponsored a hackathon, ETHChicago, and what went wrong and what went right. Maybe I'll just say it right now. What went wrong was our bounty was too specific and difficult for... it was not abstract enough, and it was not open enough, and we didn't have enough documentation. So a lot went wrong. The thing that went right was nobody went for it, so we got to keep the money and reinvest it in the next hackathon, which I actually was the spearhead of—the Cyberjam. Five, six weeks later, it was a whirlwind. We put together this artsy, techie hackathon, and I was like, 'Well, of course Ceptor Club, that money just rolls on in.' And as a result, we got a lot of engagement and got new devs interested, and Alan got excited, remembered how much fun Ceptor Club was. And so he was actually in that hackathon, and that's how we got a bunch of new members because Developer DAO, being amazing, totally supported us, sponsored the Cyberjam, and is giving out code tokens to like everyone, all of the awesome hackers. And so that was great for them and great for us because we got new hackers. And as a result, we were able to go into this Chainlink hackathon and kick some ass with three teams. And it's a whole story, and I don't know if it's worth telling the whole story now. But lastly, we're going to really cover about how joining Ceptor Club as a junior dev, even if you're a badass dev, come and join us, but for a beginner, this is a place where you can build your career and your credit and get mentored and provably contribute to a codebase. And I'm going to hand it over to Alan to talk about, because I've watched this guy go from very hesitant to literally kicking ass and taking names. And the last thing, of course, is community and playing together, and I've started as my pre-New Year's resolution, I'm running games for Ceptor Club as a game master. I bought a book, and I'm like, 'I'm doing it.' So, that's what you're going to learn. Really quickly, for anybody who's like made it this far and doesn't know what D&D is... maybe I should have had this slide earlier. But basically, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, it's a tabletop role-playing game, and it's all about story. And obviously, I'm telling stories here, and that's what DevNTell really is. But Dungeons and Dragons is you tell a story together, and the game master is actually helping the story emerge in as linear a way as can be, but it's not linear. They may have a dungeon for you to run, but the players, if they want to go back in town and take a nap or get some pizza, who are you to stop them? We're all volunteers. It's kind of like how Ceptor Club, the story of our one plus year is really dependent on who joined us. And when Lena joined us, that skyrocketed our frontend, and we got a whole like three features got built in two weeks. And that's amazing. She's like a high-level wizard or I don't know what your class is, Lena, but we'll figure it out. So, what we did over the year and what I sort of was the onboarding guy, so I've been refining what we do, but it's really about seeing how our differences and our diversity is actually what makes us strong. If you have a party of all Dragonborns and they're all wizards, just like one sneaky person could stab them all in the back and it would be over. And that would happen to Ceptor Club, but it didn't because of diversity and because of decentralization. And as you know, like when you're running an Ethereum client, you don't want everybody to be running the same client. And if there's a bug, then you lose your whole network. And certain networks are not decentralized in that way, and certain networks are more decentralized, and those are some of the tradeoffs. So, what are we building? This is it. Last time, we had some great screenshots, but not everything was working. But luckily, your boy has prepared and we've got art teams from Cyberjam, Artours, they went on and they sort of took ownership of the art and brought our GPU back online. And the games team, which were bit... some they were called Bitbenders in Cyberjam, which included Alan, they updated our quiz, which Alan built, and I'm going to let him share some nitty-gritty details in a second. But basically, let's try to make a character together. So, a they/them, we're multiple people, we'll start at level one. Are we good with Samartite as the name?

Sure, sounds good to me.

All right, what weapon do you think Samartite uses? And anybody shout out on any answer and I'll go with what is said first.

Crossbow.

All right. Is it okay to steal from the rich to feed the poor?

Yes.

Yes! Which activity is the most fun?

Performing on stage.

Yeah, that's going to make a good image as well. Where are we in the attack? Front with the crossbow like an idiot, in the middle, or in the back?

Probably in the middle.

With a crossbow, you have to be in the back, no?

Well, you could be in the middle. You might want even crunchier people in the back. Which quest seems the most worthy of your time?

I say defending helpless villagers.

Oh wait, did you fix all these buttons? They all highlight! Alan, you fixed it.

No, that part wasn't me.

That was Ayo.

Oh, it was Ayodele. Where is Ayodele? Anyways, are we a human or strange creature?

Let's be a strange creature.

Not a centaur, not a centaur.

Let's be an Aarakocra.

Oh god, it's going to be bad. Let's try it, we'll try it, we'll try it. Okay, and what's our background?

A hermit.

The hermit, meditating in a cave. All right, so we, Samartite, generate the character. I take a screenshot because there's this fun thing that we can like upload, I'm going to just like put it in somewhere for fun. Paste. Okay, anyways, yes. So we go save the character... oh no, we got the error. Alan, why are we getting an error saving it?

Oh, that I don't know.

Okay, whatever, it's fine. It's technically... it says it's an error and when it doesn't error another button appears, but there's a workaround which is you press the create button and it still remembers all your information. There the Aarakocra, it's a fighter. Let's wear some Gucci robes, and what color is our Aarakocra going to be?

Purple.

Green.

Purple and green. I'll just add green to it, and let's... let's hope. Okay, so while it's generating that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and let Alan take over and show us if he can. Oh yeah, so it got the image. Am I still sharing? There you go. Alan, take over.

Oh, there's my infinite loop. All right, so first I think I know why the quiz didn't actually do anything. Because in my testing, we do have to connect to the wallet right now. And so if I just come over and quickly just pop through, I can show that character saved successfully. We get this new button that takes us automatically back to the page. But yeah, so I'm the one who put the original basis of the quiz here onto Ceptor Club. I was given it as a PHP document, and I converted it from PHP into this React component so that way we were able to use it. That was like my first task that I did with Ceptor Club.

Yeah, shout out to Danjo, the wizard, for making that PHP nonsense that we love.

I'd say the other big thing is starting to get our back-end up and working. And so just helping to create all of our different interfaces, creating all of these different endpoints or functions to be able to figure out what all is going on with the different ways to get all the data everywhere. And some of the things that I did was... okay, here we have our cloud base, where we have our MongoDB, and if I come over here, we see that it was 68. Well, you saw that I was able to save. So if I come over here and click refresh... now it says 1 to 20 of many. But if I click over, click over, click over... now we have 69. Now we have 69 characters in our database, yes. And then if we come over here, there are some things that are still working right now. Saving the characters is the main one that works as is. But if we see right here, here are some of the users that I've kind of put in as a test. Well, let me come over here, get this Developer DAO user in...

Well, that shouldn't have happened.

It wouldn't be a live demo, it wouldn't be a hackathon if there wasn't an error.

There we go.

Oh, it worked. It was users, but I put it as user. And if I come back over here to the cloud, we now have Developer DAO as one of our users.

Show the prompt of the week and let's get Lena... Lena, are you down to demo your page a little bit?

I have nothing prepared. I can, I like... I can talk about it, but I think...

I could share screen and let you talk while I share.

Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, thank you, Alan. Alan, and he was like debug stuff and getting the scheduler hooked up for the games team and all this great stuff. So, I'm back sharing. By the way, we did get our Aarakocra. How do we like this they/them Aarakocra? Do we like?

And green and purple, wow.

I like the one on the left better personally.

It looks very, very thinking.

A hermit.

Wise, like a wise, wise hermit.

I'll save this, I'm going to save each one. So if you want to save, it does this cool pop-up. Wow, my computer... I'm too slow. And Alan, I'll get yours saved. And we realized most people don't want to mint an NFT at this point. So this was actually something that we were... Danjo and I were like, 'What do we do here?' And Danjo came up with this idea of: well, what if we let people buy and then burn their dice, and the dice started a timer countdown?

You need to, you need to connect the wallet first, no?

Okay. But yeah, Lena, tell us... so you took the Figma design and... uh-oh, why is... okay, let's not let me connect my wallet. But what's going on here? Challenge of the Week. This was the big thing we did because we wanted to make our app sticky and fun, like a game. So, tell us about the frontend of this at least.

Yeah, sure. So, the fun thing about Challenge of the Week is that every week we get a new challenge from like our Prompt of the Week contract, and this will be generated, I think, also with Chainlink Function, VRF Chainlink Function, kind of the random specification. And then we also get the timestamp from our contract. This is why you can't see it now, right? Why there is not a number, because I think the contract has... something has been updated and now it's not working. But yeah, and then you have like this countdown that lets you know until when the challenge works. And you get this prompt, and it's kind of like not really a prompt, it's like a challenge. It kind of gives you an idea of what you should build your prompt around, and then you can create like your own prompt, like a really fun thing that relates to that challenge. And you generate that, and then, and then people can actually like vote on that. And this is just connected to our... like the likes is just happening in our database that Alan built, and then when the week is over, so like the code is just in the smart contract, we get the winning NFT, and that winner actually gets a bag of free dice. And now we can also show... like kind of like how... this is like... you just get that. It's like, but like maybe we can just show the free dice and the burn dice.

Yeah, we didn't get these merged. That was one of our great regrets.

No, you didn't know, it didn't get merged?

Yeah, I think she had her own page, didn't she?

But I merged that, no?

I don't know, it was the last day of a hackathon. We all have to forgive ourselves. Anyways, yes, I'm going to keep us moving. But it was like, tons...

So when, when the user signs up, they get a bag of free dice, and they need to burn a die. So, you need to go to the burn dice function, and you can only burn one die, and then when you burn that, you get access to all the different pages. And of course, it's deployed on like Avalanche Testnet and also Polygon zkEVM Testnet. And yeah, and then you can create your character, and you can also go to Prompt of the Week, which is actually only enabled when you burned a die. And this is the fun things.

Yeah, we got to clean some stuff up, the games team is like our first attempt at making a thing to make it easy. But yeah, that's the basic gist of all of this here is we got something that was half working. This is what the quiz looked like before, if you can see, like this white... you know, first draft hackathon thing. And now we have this beautiful quiz, and it's connected together. So, this is sort of... this is the idea, how we take art, tech, and games and make the experience of playing with your friends more beautiful, more smooth, and more fun. As you can see, boom, bam, bang. That's basically it. Except I do have to say, six months ago we did a hackathon, we got attacked by the scope keeper, we over-scoped, we did too much, and half of it didn't work. And we got a little prize, but we didn't win a big prize. But then Lena joins the team, and fellow Chainlink developer expert Iman joins the tech team, and Air and Amy show up, and there's a games team building the scheduler, and the art team gets the art online, builds an AR experience for session zero, and tech team, we were trying to merge everything. And Lena was really like... don't be hard on yourself for missing one merge. There were like missiles coming in from everywhere and we did great. So anybody who wants to see more about our hackathon can scan this QR code. This is the Ceptor Tech winning one. But what we did was totally unique, was we had three actual different interlinked teams making projects in a hackathon. And the double awesome thing was we had also sort of gotten a head start because the Cyberjam happened during the first few days of the Chainlink hackathon, so we were all actually sort of building a prototype without even thinking about the Chainlink hackathon, and then everybody took a break. And I was like, 'Hey, let's keep going, we got another three weeks.' And Lena and Iman, everybody was kind of busy and exhausted, and so we scheduled it, Lena put together this to-do list which kept us moving and on track, Iman made sure that we wrote this clear document that tracked all of our ideas before the last minute, so we knew what pages we were on, what the other teams would be doing, writing our user journey. This is what Air built, was the CCID. That was sort of my feature. Me and Air built a thing where a user comes in, uses price feeds to pay $5, and they get their CCID, which lets them receive cross-chain messages from art team, because art team was building like a loot maker and the games team was making a stat roller, so we just incorporated it all as best as we could. We used Tailwind, somebody used styled-components, things are crazy. Nadina built a 3D die, this isn't it. David from the Cyberjam made a GPT-4... it's been like a crazy few months. And I really want to encourage everybody who's watching this to, if you're interested in getting mentored, joining, and building some stuff together, come on in. If you're an artist, draw for us, draw for our games. That's your way in, and then maybe later we can be paying you for this. All of these arts were paid for, but then we ran out of money, so now artists have to, like the rest of us, have to contribute your time for free. And then once you're in, and we're making money, now we can talk about it, and we'll put stuff on Threadless, split it with you. The AI had problems, but like the magic of tech is it keeps moving. Stable diffusion out of the box is now able to draw Dragonborns, where we had spent weeks training it to draw good Dragonborns. So, yeah, if you're... if you're an artist, scan that QR code, pause it. If you're a techie, scan this QR code... it might actually be the same QR code. If you're into games, talk to us, like we're going to make games inside of games, animal companions, maps, asynchronous games... I'm building this egg thing that's really stupid and fun. But yeah, join us. Join Developer DAO if you're not in Developer DAO. I'm going to pass it back to Narb, and I'm sorry we may have gone a little over time, but I think we covered everything, right? We talked about ETHChicago and the Cyberjam, what it was like sponsoring something, and the positive aspect of getting new devs working on your tech, how we won the hackathon—I just give credit to Lena and Iman, but it was actually all of us coming together and having organization and planning things, and communicating really well in the beginning. And you can see how much Alan has grown in the last six months, taking a PHP character quiz and then taking ownership of the back-end. And you can see that we're a community that likes playing games together and building cool stuff together, and likes pretty pictures, and more pink, if possible. So, yeah, that's it. Thanks again, I'm just going to scroll this because Jason made some cool stuff, and I wanted you to see it. But that's it. There's Jason, the wizard hat. Thanks again, everybody. Hoody doody.

That was awesome, gang. And, that's spectacular to see how all of this kind of came together, you built a community around it where everybody is very passionate, eager to learn, and the synergy is like out of this world. And, you just comparing what you had the first time around to what you had here... to me, that looks like a whole year's worth of work. You guys compacted into like three or four months or whatever it was. Hackathons, man. Yeah, this is the way. But, yeah, this has been a wonderful way to end off DevNTell for the year 2023. This is the last show of the year, and I wouldn't have wanted it to go any other way than to end with a bang with such a wonderful project and a status update from you all. Thank you so much for coming on. But before everybody leaves, I just want to show you the thing... sorry for covering your face there, Tippi. But the QR... the QR code for you all to scan to claim your NFTs for being an attendee here on DevNTell today. So, what you want to do is grab your QR code scanner, regular QR code scanner, scan this code, and fill out the form, on the form, to claim your NFT for being an attendee. Once you fill out the form, you will be airdropped said NFT within the next couple of days. And as Tippi mentioned, if you're interested in joining their community... I know we went through a whole bunch of different QR codes, but we'll provide you that information on how to join their community as well on our YouTube description. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very Happy Friday, happy weekend, happy holidays, and happy, happy early New Year, and we will see you all back here for another great series of DevNTells in the New Year. Happy building, and happy chilling, everybody.

Yes. Hey, Narb, can I read a short passage from this book?

Yes, go for it.

All right, this will close us out. This is one of my favorite books, 'The Timeless Way of Building', Chapter 6, 'Patterns Which Are Alive'. And the reason I am choosing this is because Developer DAO, DevNTell, this is a pattern which is alive. It's a pattern of relationships and stories that get told and elements. And a website and an app and a community, this is another set of patterns which are alive. And here's the intro text. It's a beautiful book, like it has italics, which are the things you're supposed to read, or that you must read, and here's the italics: 'The specific patterns out of which a building or a town or an app is made, may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free. But when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict.' Happy New Year, everybody.

Happy New Year, beauty. Peace.

Bye.