Metacrafters

All right, we're live. GM, GA everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So 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 can be an open-source project you've been working on, demonstrating 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 Web3 community. And today I am happy to introduce to you Scott David Meyer, who will be giving us an overview of Metacrafters. Scott, maybe you want to start with a brief introduction about yourself and what kind of got you into Web3?

Yeah, great to be here. GM everyone. Scott Meyer. I'm based in the Web3 hub of Fargo, just like the movie. If you've ever been to Fargo, it's just like that—fewer wood chippers, but still a great place to be. I love being here because it's a perfect example of what I think the promise of Web3 is, which is no matter where you are in the world, you can make an impact. Web3 really gives us the chance to make everywhere the middle of somewhere. A lot of people call Fargo the middle of nowhere, but I think we can make it the middle of somewhere. So I got started in Web3 actually as an educator. My background is as an entrepreneur for a decade, ran a digital marketing agency, and then started teaching entrepreneurship at universities. At the same time, I was interested in Web3, initially through NBA Top Shot, through NFTs, and then started getting into the DAO space quite a bit. I was one of the genesis members of the Ed3 DAO, which is looking at education in Web3. So I really just dove in on what Web3 could do to the education system and started working on that. One of the clients I was working with, Metacrafters, offered me to come full-time as the VP of Learning, which is what I'm doing now. It's a great fit because it's basically reimagining what education can be while also onboarding people and developers specifically to Web3. So I love it because it ticks the box of improving the Web3 space but also providing an alternative to the traditional education system. So that's kind of what I'm passionate about and what I'm excited about with the Metacrafters project.

Awesome. And how long have you been working on the Metacrafters project?

Yeah, so Metacrafters is 13 months old. It started in February last year. I joined the team first on a consulting basis in May and helped build out our first curriculum, which was starting with Solana. Then I went full-time, and now we offer curriculum across chains: Solana, Solidity, we do Polygon, Flow, as well as a JavaScript course to help people learn code if they don't have any background. And then on Monday, we're launching our AI course that's looking at creating custom ChatGPT bots. So essentially, as a developer, how can you use a custom corpus on top of the ChatGPT to make, you know, the Scott bot if you want to talk to me after this session?

Awesome, awesome. And are you targeting a specific skill level with these courses? Are you looking for beginners who don't really know much about coding, or semi-intermediates? Like, what's the target audience?

Yeah, so Metacrafters, we want to take anyone who has a JavaScript or TypeScript base foundation and take them all the way through getting a full-time job as an engineer. So one of the things that makes Metacrafters unique, and one of the reasons why I think it's reimagining education, is we talk to employers and ask them what they need, and then we teach those skills. As people graduate from our courses, we match them to job opportunities. So we call our model 'Learn, Earn, and Land'. So essentially you learn the skills that you need for a job. We actually have a learn-and-earn model. So the beginner course is free, and you get 50 bucks when you finish. The intermediate is 50 bucks, and you get 100 bucks when you finish. The advanced is 100, and you get 200 when you finish. So essentially you're doubling your money as you go. And then the best part is that we match you with job opportunities. And so we are taking anyone who, if you know how to code a little bit, like that's perfect, you can start with our beginner courses and we'll match you up with bounties. If you have a little bit more skills, kind of junior dev level, that's where we can train you up to the senior dev level. So we can—I'll show you some examples of the different chains, but you know, if you have a little bit of coding skills, it's really for you. And if you're more advanced, I would say our advanced courses are probably some of the only ones out there. We partnered with Polygon to launch the Poly Proof course and as far as I know, it's the only course out there that will teach you Polygon ID, zkEVM roll-up stuff, and the Polygon proof of stake. So you know, if you're an advanced dev and you want to get into Polygon or our advanced Ethereum course, those are going to be really unique ones where you can specialize in security or go deeper on some of the unique contracts that are out there.

Awesome. And I guess a great segue to this is, what do you have in store for us today on DevNTell? Are you going to take us through a demo?

Yeah, let's go through a demo and just look at it. And would love questions. I saw you put that out there. So if anybody has questions, put them up, would love to answer them. One thing we really want to do, as I mentioned, is talk with developers and identify what they need to learn. So I think to start, I'll hit the present button here and then I think I'll be able to share my screen. Cool.

All right. So this will—we'll just take a quick look at Metacrafters. I think you can see that okay, Narb. Do you see that?

Yes, I see it. Sorry.

All right, perfect, good. So Metacrafters is at academy.metacrafters.io. And as you can see, you know we mentioned before the camera started, it's very much entering a world. So it's not just what you're learning but also where you're learning it. Our courses are all asynchronous, but we know that community and social learning is essential. And so Discord is a big part of those courses where you actually have support from peer mentors on our team, your fellow students. You're going to submit example code to Discord. I'll maybe even show you kind of our Discord channels and how active those are.

So on the left here, you can see the different chains that we're teaching currently. And Solidity is a great example, probably our most popular courses. You can see how many people are taking this course right now and are in Discord. You can see that, you know, this course is free and you get a 50 reward. We actually get that money from the employers. So employers—our business model is employers pay for access to the talent. We use that money to incentivize students to finish. So reimagining education, I think in a powerful way where our incentive as Metacrafters is to get our students, which are developers, the skills as fast as possible, right, and match them to jobs because that's when we show value to employers.

So we always start with kind of a beginner course. This one really gives the baseline concepts about Web3 and blockchain, Ethereum and EVMs, and then starting with Solidity.

And then as you move into the intermediate course, that's where you really get into the meat and potatoes of Ethereum. So learning about functions and errors, smart contracts, different types of functions and minting tokens. And we always learn by doing. And so as a student with Metacrafters, you're building a portfolio because we know that's what will get you hired. And so you have a project within each module and then you can show those to employers. I think one thing that's really interesting about the courses is that we have students do a five-minute code walkthrough on a video or audio. And that was a suggestion from employers. You know, they said, we want people who can code, but we also want people who can explain their code. And so that's been really interesting for us. So as you complete the module, you're going to do a quick walkthrough of your code, and then that video file or audio file is something employers can look at to help get you hired.

So as we go down to the advanced, if you're an advanced Ethereum or Solidity developer, you can kind of see some of the things we're doing. So using kind of more the security aspects and Solidity contracts. So you can kind of see it's a 100 purchase and then you're going to get 150 at the end. So that's a quick overview, but we could dive into one of the lessons if you want to see what it's like.

Yeah, that would be awesome. Yeah, let's dig in.

All right, well let's go intermediate. I'm guessing more of your audience is probably intermediate. One thing to know about Metacrafters is if you already have the skills, you can just skip ahead. So we don't want it to be a linear education. We think that the future of education is where you go get the skills you need to get where you want. And so if you jump into this EVM course and you say, you know what, I already know all about modifiers, you can just jump ahead to the function section, right? And if you know all of this stuff, if you're a developer out there and you're skilled, you can start the course and jump to the final project to submit it and get the reward, right? We just want people to get the skills they need along the way. So let's go ahead and jump into, let's see, a good one might be, let's just go into about functions and see where we're at here.

So what you'll see with our content is that it's a mix of video and text files, right? So Jeff here is our subject matter expert. We actually work with practitioners. So people who have experience in that chain, in that coding language, and you'll kind of walk through, you know, what you need to do. And we make it really bite-sized. So every lesson is, you know, three minutes or less. And you can kind of see here how along the bottom you can kind of skip ahead.

So if you're like, I actually know all about functions, you can skip ahead to the challenge. We offer everything with a Gitpod, which is sort of like Replit where it's like in the cloud, so if you don't have or don't want to mess with installing stuff, you can quickly launch things. And then you can see here we also have the Discord on the side. And so people can go ahead and jump into Discord and chat right here. So here's our Eth Proof Discord, you know, people talking about the lessons they're doing, sharing their GitHubs here for others to review. So really active community, I think a really nice way to learn where you're being encouraged by your fellow students and kind of finishing all of that. So we'll just go ahead and click continue to the final kind of challenge where you can see—I'll close this one here—and we'll go to function errors.

I'm going to go ahead and go to the final assessment. So if you're someone watching and you're like, I actually know all this but it'd be really cool to get a credential and get a job opportunity, you could jump into, for example, this final lesson and you would jump to the assessment here. So we'll go to the final section here. So we'll have a little familiarity check, no wrong answers there, and then we'll go ahead to the assessment. This is an example of assessment. A couple things you'll notice here that's interesting is that we have an identity verification, so like a KYC, as well as a camera check. So here's our camera check to make sure you know that there's no cheating. And so these are things that kind of help our courses stand out for employers where we have the identity confirmation, we have the KYC, and then we have, you know, the code walkthrough. So really kind of takes our assessment up a level where it's more accepted by employers for better or worse.

So that's kind of how we're walking the line I think between traditional and non-traditional. Giving people a way to learn non-linearly, fast-moving, project-based, but then still having enough of a verification that employers trust it. So yeah, I would encourage people to come, you can click through, all the beginner courses are free. I think my favorite course right now is Polygon and we just launched it last week at ETH Denver. And as you can see, it's very cutting edge, especially I'd say the zkEVM section. What you're going to do is actually design a zk-SNARK circuit on-chain with an on-chain verifier. So really interesting. Most of these courses as you'll see are probably 15 to 25 hours. So not a huge commitment, but it'd be something that I think that the people here would probably enjoy.

So I'll take a break there and see what questions we have and hopefully share more as people are interested. So yeah, Narb, kind of looking through, what questions do you have and you know what kind of stands out to you?

Yeah, so that looked really awesome. So the—so it looks like there's a bounty that's paid upon completion of each course. So is that something you find has incentivized people to go through the whole kind of the whole course and finish it all the way through? Did you guys experiment without having bounties?

Yeah, we've tried it kind of multiple ways, definitely experimented. What we've found is the bounty is best for getting people to finish in a quicker amount of time. So what we do is we say 30 days, which honestly for 15 hours, you know, if you're not going to get it done in 30 days, we find people aren't going to get it done anyway, right? So it's like, how do we get them to finish? And even if it feels like it's a little artificial, you just want the skills anyway. But for just a little bit of money it forces you to prioritize it. And I think we all have, you know, Udemy courses sitting 20% done that we never finished. Like, we know the data shows roughly 8% of people finish online async courses. So we needed to add a little bit of a timed element to that. So between the bounty and the social pressure, having the peer mentors check in on you on Discord, like we've seen higher completion rates with that.

And it seems like you have a nice residual effect here where the platform kind of looks like a pre-screen interview or maybe an interview part of the interview process where people are actually getting paid for their time. So one of the big complaints at least in the Web2 world is the fact that you go through all these series of interviews to work for a company and then you don't really get paid for that time. But like this kind of looks like there's a nice little aftereffect where even if you don't get the job that you're looking for, you at least will get—you will learn and you will get paid.

Yeah. And that was kind of one of the problems we set out to solve is especially like one of the markets we launched in first is the Philippines. And a lot of students there go to school and then they drop out to work so that they have enough money to go back to school. And you have what, you know, educators call the yo-yo effect where people basically come in and out without just finishing. And we know that, you know, by finishing our courses you're going to have a big jump in pay. Because if you're able to go from being a Web2 dev to a Solidity smart contract developer, you're just going to have a lot higher pay. And the fact that you could get there in 30, 40 hours, you know, we really want to push students through because once they get there their quality of life increases. And so that was kind of one of the incentives and you know, we really based it on like in the Philippines if you made 50 to 100 bucks, that'd be like a month's salary, right? So instead of having to work a full-time job and then come back the next month, you could just do this instead. And so there's no limit. You know, you could take multiple courses. If you already have the skills you can jump through different ones. If you're already a Rust developer and you want to jump into Solana and grab those and then learn Flow, you know, or something like that, you could. So yeah, I think there's lots of potential and what we've found is that there's a lot of demand, right, with employers. But the trick is it's hard for them to hire and trust what they're hiring. So roughly a third of the employers we have talked to have done interviews with candidates who weren't real. So they get on the interview, the candidate doesn't turn their camera on, they hear someone in the background or they hear almost like a call center type sound and you know, this person is being told what to do by someone behind them. And so that's a big waste of time because you know that company's awesome, their senior dev is on this call interviewing someone who obviously doesn't have the skills and they might even hire them for a while and then they don't do the work.

So I think there's a big demand for developers who can communicate and be a real person and so we're just trying to speed that process up and so I hope that, you know, anyone listening here if you're looking for job opportunities, this might be a way to get connected with employers.

And I actually have a special promo code, Narb. We created it for ETH Denver, but I think it's close enough to the event.

Sure.

So I'm going to put it in the chat for you. I don't know how I can share broadly but if anyone listening here, you can, with any of the paid courses—the beginners are all free—but any of the paid courses you can use the promo code 50forETHDenver, and we'll just count you as ETH Denver attendees by association. So that'll take the cost of that intermediate course down from 100 to 50 bucks. You'll still get the full reward. So for example, I think on the Ethereum course, you know, you could pay 50 and get 150. So hopefully that's a little incentive to get started. So I see some questions coming in the chat, so I can jump into those.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah, so Harpreet asks, what are the internship opportunities for college students and expected time to get one internship?

Yeah. So I think you know what we focus on—we actually have a lot of college students. We've partnered with 12 universities across the Philippines and a number of universities in India right now. And we actually think of college students as employees, not interns. So I would actually think if you're a college student, you don't have to wait to get paid, right? Like you can take a course like this or build a portfolio and actually make money and not think about it as an internship but actually as a gig or a short-term employment opportunity. So for students who come to us, we treat them just like skilled developers, right? We say, here's the skill of this person and maybe they only want to work 10 hours a week or they can only work during the summer months or something like that. But I think that's a great opportunity to think about yourself as a professional. Because if you have these skills you are, it's in high demand and it doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, right? Like people just want good work done.

So hopefully Harpreet, if you are a student, like take one of these courses and just start. You know, I think hopefully you finish school too, but you know a lot of people get started and all of a sudden there's opportunities from what the skills they've developed already.

Excellent. And then Nate asks, I've seen other platforms similar to this one (learn to earn) and a lot of them fail in the long run. Thoughts on that? As well as why is Metacrafters different?

Yeah, I think the biggest difference is we're getting the money from employers. So the model for us is all job placement. It's not just money coming from say venture capital or, you know, it's not our marketing budget paying for the learn-and-earn model. And also like the learn-and-earn part is only for the intermediate and advanced courses. Because we know the beginner courses, like you're probably not going to be able to do a junior dev job. Beginner courses essentially prepare you for maybe a bounty in a DAO, something like that, whereas an intermediate would be roughly junior dev and advanced would be roughly more senior dev. So I think the difference and what we're trying to do is take the employer investment and basically use that as a pull-through, right? Because if we get people placed in a job, we get a percentage of that placement fee and then also like we have a subscription from the employers. So that's kind of our business model. So hopefully that's what differentiates us. We're learning of course and like feedback from developers is incredibly helpful. So if the bounty is not motivating, if it's something else, it's access to tools, if it's interview support, you know, we're open to anything to help people get jobs and get opportunities.

Excellent. And gang, if you have any other questions for Scott, please post them in the chat and I will ask on your behalf. And I guess a question from me is, what do you see as the most popular track of all the tracks you offer? Like the—in terms of level. Is it intermediate just because of a lot of people are just learning Web3 or do you see more so for like the beginner or advanced?

Yeah. I'd say—I mean we have more people do the beginner probably because it's free and because a lot of maybe people don't have the background. I think the—yeah, I would say it's beginner in terms of number, yeah. I'd say once people finish the beginner almost all of them go on to intermediate. And so once we get people started, if they can get through that beginner because the beginner one is mostly non-technical, you know, so really you can take it without being a developer but once people hit code, that's where you kind of see that separation of people who have experience or not. Yeah. So I think I would yeah, probably beginner is where the most demand is.

And do you have or have you at least thought about introducing a track for say grade school kids? So maybe this person is like between 5 and 10 years old and their parents are kind of looking for them to start coding but don't know like where to start. Have you guys been thinking about that?

Yeah. We haven't thought about the younger age but you know I think there's something I think about having kids myself is like when to start, how to start. So yeah, right now our content is you know it's kind of the game feel so I could see it being appealing. But we do because we are doing KYC and video, like I think there's some issues going younger than 18 for us. So we're probably going to focus more on young professionals and I think there's a big opportunity with universities where you know universities can't move fast enough to teach this content. And so they can bring someone like Metacrafters in and the curriculum will be up to date taught by practitioners and they can send their students into it. So I think that's a big opportunity as well.

Yeah, excellent. I asked because I got this question recently and yeah, didn't know exactly how to answer. So—but I mean I think it's a big market a lot of especially nowadays with the popularity of tech it's just like going to be my hope is it'll become part of the grade school curriculum somehow. Essentially it just comes down to problem-solving at the very bare fundamentals, but yeah. Anyway, a couple more questions from my end. So as you've started in your consulting role with Metacrafters and found your way in and full-time, like what would you say is one of the most rewarding moments of your time here in with being the VP of Learning?

Yeah. I mean I love it when people share what they've learned on social media without us knowing, right? So like you see a tweet or a LinkedIn post and they talk about what they learned or the job opportunity they got. Like that's the most rewarding, just to see the outcome from all the work we put into the curriculum design. You know, we're trying to make these courses follow this format curriculum designers call 'I do, We do, You do'. So essentially quick instruction and then a collaborative demonstration, like we're going to write this code and you do it on your screen while I do it on mine, and then the student does their own version, their own project, and kind of follow that over and over. So as opposed to university maybe where you get a lot of information and you might do a project at the end or you might not, this is the iterative like learning on demand, right? Like you learn what you need when you need it. And so I think that's really fun because even if you don't finish our course, like you're immediately getting skills and building a portfolio. So you take you know of the first three modules, you finish one or two of them, like you already have stuff that shows where you're at.

And one thing we're also doing is giving credit for experience. So if you've taken courses from other course providers or you have background as a developer, like you can bring that in and get credit for our courses. So like in the university you would transfer credits, right? It's the same idea where—but in this case you're transferring skills because we don't care if it's from a university, obviously. It's basically can you show us you already know functions and then if so you don't have to take that course, right? So I think that's really important. And we're excited, we're actually expanding that, you know, into the AI world starting Monday. So we're launching our AI curriculum and that's going to be a lot of fun. So we're launching it in India on Monday. Our team's on the ground there now. And it's basically going to walk through understanding ChatGPT, using Midjourney for design including design for projects and consistent images, and then using coding to create custom ChatGPT. So layering in custom data onto ChatGPT. And we think this is a really good marriage. Like in my mind Web3 is going to be increasingly important as more and more content's produced, right? How do we verify that something's created by a human or something is the original? We're going to use Web3. And like as AI creates all this curriculum and all this content I should say, like Web3 is going to be really important. So we're excited to see this kind of marriage because we see employers asking for these skills and asking for coders who know how to use AI to code faster, right? So that's what we're thinking about is how do we expand our AI curriculum to help our Web3 devs actually become faster, more accurate Web3 devs. So that's kind of an interesting world that we're seeing.

Yeah, 100%. And in my mind at least, the Web3 umbrella always included AI just because like it there is like that natural like not only the for like the ChatGPT stuff but just like improving productivity overall. Now there's always the ethics and morals, like what's the line and how far do we go but I mean who wouldn't want to work faster and get more time? Yeah, and work on more interesting problems, right? Instead of creating boilerplate code like build the cool stuff and let the AI build the boring stuff.

Exactly, exactly. And I guess one final question for me to contrast the last one, like what has been like one of the more humbling moments in your experience? I'm sure there must have been a point where you're like oh man this is this is more than I thought but yeah maybe you can speak on that.

Yeah, I think it was—I mean obviously we've ridden kind of the bull and bear markets and so like for us like we've put a ton of time and effort and built really good Solana curriculum. I think our advanced Solana course is like the strongest one you'll find. But we launched it, you know, right after massive crash and so all of a sudden the demand like really dried up. And so it's like we have this amazing thing that people weren't exactly asking for it. So I think that's humbling to think about how do you iterate quick and respond to, you know, the market. That's something that we're really focused on is talking to employers, seeing what the demand is. That's why AI came out and why we're doing it so quickly. Same thing with Solidity, you know, like we just saw so much more demand for Solidity and it was like okay we gotta go deeper, right? Like there's a lot of ways to start learning Solidity including our course, but how do we learn about fuzzing? How do we learn about Slither? How do we learn about like these pretty technical things that employers want but you might find random YouTube videos but it's not really curated in a way that makes sense most of the time. So that's what we're trying to do is bring the expert in being like here's what you need to know, the other stuff is nice but this is like the core if you're going to be a, you know, write secure contracts.

So it's really exciting to kind of respond to that. And and I saw you just put it in there, you know, would love people join our Discord, see what's going on there. When you when you start a course, you'll get access to a channel for that course, right? So you'll get access to the Ethereum channel or the Flow channel or whatever and then you can kind of actually see the projects people are building because we want to show our classmates our code, we want to learn, you know, from each other. And so you're not doing it on your own. A ton of support from our peer mentors and your colleagues and really a space that we hope everyone can come in and learn.

Awesome. And I believe that's a perfect way to cap—or end things off here. And I guess one final final question, how can people get in touch with you if they have follow-up questions or are interested or yeah, the follow-up questions for yourself or Metacrafters?

Sure, yeah. You can always check out metacrafters.io, but I love chatting, I'm pretty active on Twitter. My handle is @mrscottmeyer, so @mrscottmeyer, and I just sent that to Narb, he'll put it in the comments. So just reach out, my DMs are open. I'm also on Discord. So if you join the Metacrafters Discord which is just /metacraftersio, you'll find me there, Scott David Meyer. So I'm totally totally doxxed and available. And you know, I think we love feedback. So you know, even if you go and you're like, I don't want to do this, tell me why, right? Like I want to know what are the courses you are looking for, what style, what format, because we're really trying to just build the next, you know, million builders of the future internet. We need people who can build this stuff that we're dreaming of. And if we can get you connected to jobs, you're going to stay with it, right? We find that we need developers within 30 days to get an opportunity, otherwise they're going to go somewhere else in terms of coding, right? Like if you can code, like there's lots of places to go to find opportunities. So if you don't get an opportunity with Web3 or with Solidity within 30 days, a lot of people will just say, eh it's not as successful or not as promising as something else, right, as Rails or something like that. So so what our goal is is get you that first opportunity so that way you're going to stay and and be one of the builders of the future.

Excellent. Love to hear it. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you taking the time to come and give us that awesome overview of Metacrafters. And gang, so great to be here. I'll be here if you sign up. Jump in today, reach out to me, you can use that promo code 50forETHDenver to get 50 off if you do a paid course, but a lot of the good stuff's free so just jump in and test it out and reach out. Got nothing to lose. You're here for us, yeah. And just want to leave our audience off with a note about our operators and our fundraising operators in Developer DAO. So did you know that Developer DAO's fundraising operators Chuck and Wekust are here to help you fundraise for your projects? So in their fundraising hub on Discord, you can find support in writing grant applications, learning about fundraising, budgeting, pitching, and they can even introduce you to grant leads from different protocols. So if you're interested, be sure to drop by their office hours inside the Developer DAO Discord twice a week or schedule a 1-on-1 with them. And with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and we will see you back here next week. And I will be dropping the links to the POAPs in the chat here as well as in the Discord. And yeah, have a great one everybody. Cheers to the next one. Keep building. Cheers.