GRTiQ Podcast: 17 Nader Dabit

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Nick (00:20):

Hi, this is GRTiQ. On July 8th, 2021, The Graph officially launched its curation program along with The Graph Explorer and the Subgraph Studio, forever changing the landscape of how the world collects and organizes data. This achievement is the culmination of countless hours spread out over many years of a community of individuals fueled by the shared vision for how a decentralized data economy can change and improve the world.

(00:51):

In the months and years ahead the full promise of blockchain, web3, DeFi, and decentralized applications will spring from the efforts of The Graph community and its participants. Never before have people from all across the world, no matter their circumstances, their gender, their race, or their status, been so freely able to contribute and participate in the building of the future. This is a revolution of a different kind. It’s not about rulers and kings, disputes over land and borders, the wealthy versus the poor, or Black and white, but the democratization of data with an open invitation for all to participate.

(01:34):

The GRTiQ Podcast tells the stories of those helping to build The Graph, and I appreciate being a part of this community.

Nader Dabit (01:51):

I turned down, I would say, a lot higher paying roles at companies that I feel like aren’t as fun to work with, but also don’t have, in my opinion, as much of a future as what we’re working on. I feel like what we’re working on really is the future. It’s something that I come to work every day extremely, extremely energized and excited, and I’m already an energized person.

Nick (02:42):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Nader Dabit, a developer relations engineer at Edge & Node. Nader is an incredibly accomplished and well-respected voice in the developer world with an impressive pedigree to match.

(02:57):

Prior to joining Edge & Node, Nader was a senior developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. He’s also worked as a trainer and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, including names like Microsoft, Visa, Warner Bros, and American Express.

(03:13):

Nader is a very active voice in the developer community with a huge following on social media with nearly 65,000 Twitter followers and tens of thousands of views on his YouTube channel.

(03:24):

Our conversation was very broad, ranging from how he got his start as a developer, his departure from web2 to join Edge & Node, the publication of his recent book, and his vision for web3 and where The Graph fits into it all. I started the conversation asking Nader about his educational and professional background.

Nader Dabit (03:46):

My education is actually not much to speak of. I was someone that never really excelled in school at all. I actually dropped out of high school, got my GED, and then dropped out of college. So didn’t really get into software or writing code until I was in my really late twenties or early thirties even.

(04:05):

I started writing code just by teaching myself building out an application that was an e-commerce store on top of WordPress, which really didn’t require a lot of code. It was more of a plugin type of system so you could get up and running without being a developer. But during the process of building that, I did start learning HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little bit of JavaScript and really fell in love with coding and enjoyed doing it. So at that point in time, I really decided that that was what I finally wanted to do with my life and pursued that.

Nick (04:42):

As somebody that didn’t excel in school then and took a non-traditional path to where you are today, I’m curious if that experience informs the way you think about career or the way you’ve made decisions regarding your own professional track.

Nader Dabit (04:57):

I think everyone has their own path and they discover the things that they want to do in different ways. But for me, having worked in so many careers that to me were not nearly as enjoyable or as fulfilling as what I’m doing today, it really made me appreciate the work that I get to do on a daily basis.

(05:18):

So if you’ve ever worked in retail or the service industry, working mall hours, like eight or nine or 10 o’clock at night, minimum wage type of jobs, then coming into tech and seeing the opportunities that we get to have and the amount of money that we sometimes get to make is really, really something that’s a big paradigm shift from what you might have been used to. So I think appreciating that, having lived through and worked through jobs that we’re not as good, really made me appreciate this. So it’s the combination of I enjoy what I’m doing, but I also appreciate the opportunities that come out of it that really make me excited to come to work every day.

Nick (05:56):

One of the questions I was most excited to ask you was about how much content you produce and create. So you’ve spoken to ETHGlobal, you’ve recently published a book, you create YouTube videos, anyone that follows you on Twitter knows that you’re very active giving advice and helping out members of the developer community all across the world. So the question’s actually pretty simple, how do you do it? How do you create so much content?

Nader Dabit (06:25):

I think that being in a role like developer advocacy allows you a lot of leeway to actually create stuff because it’s almost part of our job is to investigate things, understand things, and build documentation, example projects, and things like that to make people have a lower barrier to entry to build things with the software that we’re working with. So for me right now, that’s The Graph.

(06:56):

But I think in doing that over and over again, I’ve been doing this type of work really for about seven years, because before I joined AWS or The Graph, I was actually running my own company and I was doing similar content marketing for my own company, creating blog posts, opensourcing code, and things like that. So I think with experience, with time, you get comfortable doing it and it becomes a lot easier than it would’ve been maybe at first.

(07:22):

I’ve written two books. My first book, React Native in Action, took me over two years to write actually, or I would say two years to get published, and most of that was writing. Whereas my second book took about six months. So I think that showed me how much practice can make you more efficient. So I think it’s a lot easier now for me to come up with ideas, create things, and show them.

(07:46):

So as a developer, there’s a process of creation let’s say for maybe open sourcing code. You create a project, you build out something, you make it look nice, you document it, and then you talk about it. So that process, you do it over and over and over, and it’s a lot faster now. So I can build a project maybe in a day or two, something that’s good enough to maybe implement an idea, and that’s not that much effort or work in my opinion compared to maybe a few years ago when I was still learning just how to write a single line of code.

Nick (08:21):

I’d be surprised if anybody listening to this podcast isn’t already following you on Twitter. But if they’re not, I want to encourage them to do so. Part of the reason is it’s very informative as to what developer advocacy actually means. So in other words, following you is a study in what a developer Advocate does. You’re highly engaged with the community. You’re helping people find jobs. You’re congratulating people when they find a job. You are creating content and training videos, all of these resources. I know that’s a lot of work and so I’d be very curious to know what drives you, what’s your personal mission when it comes to being so involved in helping so many people within the developer community?

Nader Dabit (09:07):

I think, again, going back to the role of developer advocacy, it’s really cool because we actually get paid to do that. It’s like, this is the work I’m doing that I’m doing right now with The Graph and Edge & Node, but it’s also part of my job, which is so awesome to me. So I think this role in particular suits me really well because I really do like to teach and I do like to help other people, and mainly it’s fulfilling.

(09:32):

Anyone that does this probably really feels the same way, but for me, I think it’s especially fulfilling because, again, coming from someone who was self-taught, I moved from Mississippi actually to Los Angeles to actually get my first job as a developer because there were no jobs here, especially for anyone that was brand new that had no education. So when I got to LA, I’d never learned anything from anywhere other than maybe finding tutorials and stuff on the internet. When I got to LA, I was introduced to meetups and conferences and developer communities and things like that, and that really, really got me excited and energized because I was like, wow, there’s people that actually are going out and putting on talks and taking time out of their own personal time. Because this isn’t part of their actual work. They’re going after work and they’re giving these talks and they’re helping other people and their networking, and I thought that was just cool as shit. So I was like, this is awesome.

(10:32):

So when I came back to Mississippi, we didn’t have that. So I started a meetup and I ran a meetup for over three years here. A lot of the time I would just give the talks myself because there weren’t a lot of people at first, especially to give talks. I also started a coding school here called Code South Labs and I helped co-found a coding bootcamp that’s still running successfully today actually. But doing all that is really exciting and fun to me. So it’s like the developer relations and developer advocacy roles are literally that same thing, but you actually get paid for it.

(11:09):

I think early on, if you want to get an opportunity in this space, you’re going to be less picky because you’re probably just going to want to land that first foot in the door. But when you get to a senior level, I would say, like in my position I’m lucky because I can probably choose from a lot of different opportunities, you’ve got to get to choose not only something that is fulfilling for teaching and all that, but is also something you’re truly interested in.

(11:36):

I think the combination of being truly interested in something and excited about it but also working to make it better and more widely known, is a really, really powerful and deadly combination because you’re truly interested and inspired and excited by the technology, but you’re also maybe good at doing that, so those two things combined are just going to be often a lot more effective than one or the other.

Nick (12:03):

Before we turn our attention to your role at Edge & Node and this departure from web2 to come help build web3, I want to ask a hypothetical, and the question is knowing what you know now and having the vision you have for the future, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Nader Dabit (12:21):

So I think I waited a little too long before getting involved in the communities and getting to know people and things like that so I think for the first maybe four years I would say I was just watching and really just consuming and not actually giving back in the form of communication or things like that. I would just say if I could go back and do it over again, I would start very early the first day trying to get to know people and build relationships. Because those relationships have been the most fun part of this job really and the most fulfilling thing is getting to know people and building connections and stuff.

(13:00):

So I would probably start off a little early being a little bit more outgoing. But I really used to be extremely introverted, so this job forced me, and then my experience I guess in this industry forced me to become less of an introvert.

Nick (13:16):

I want to turn our attention now to your departure from AWS and joining Edge & Node. I remember the day it was announced, it got a ton of pickup and buzz on Twitter. A lot of prominent voices in The Graph community tweeted and retweeted the news. In fact, I remember interviewing Tegan Kline around this time and she referenced that a senior member at AWS was making the move to Edge & Note. So again, a highly visible acquisition for the Edge & Node team, and frankly for the web3 space.

(13:44):

So my question is what compels someone like yourself, who seems to be on a well-established career track, you’re having a ton of success, you’re holding senior level positions at very large companies, why do you leave all that, enter into crypto, and go to work at Edge & Node?

Nader Dabit (14:02):

When I joined Edge & Node, I was at a point in my career where I was a senior level person at AWS and I was actually on track to become principal, and it was the type of job where you literally probably could just stay there for the rest of your career and continue leveling up.

(14:19):

I was also considering a couple of other opportunities. So I did consulting in the past. My last year of consulting, I made over $400,000 and I blogged about it, and to me that was a ridiculous amount of money, and it still is. I mean, it really is. But my experience in consulting showed me I would be very successful doing that and I was continuing to do better and better. So I was really considering now that I’ve had even more experience with cloud, going back into consulting and I was of thinking I could probably break that half a million or more mark probably going back and doing that.

(14:54):

I was also interviewing with Coinbase. I was getting to the final steps with a couple of companies like Coinbase and Goldman Sachs and Bridgewater, which were all financial companies. But I was interested in finance, I was interested in FinTech, but I felt like going to Coinbase or going to Goldman Sachs, I was going to be leading these new global developer relations teams at a pretty senior level. Even then it was going to be almost a lateral move where I’m going from this old school company, I wouldn’t say it’s that old school, AWS, it’s still a tech company, but it’s a corporate behemoth to another corporate atmosphere. Just wasn’t that exciting for me, to be quite honest. So I was not that excited about doing that and so I was really just looking for the next thing, like what was I going to really be excited to do?

(15:44):

I’d been keeping my feelers out for a few months, like I mentioned, interviewing and things like that at different companies. Then I stumbled upon The Graph because I am and I was a speculator in different cryptos over the years, and one of the ones I was looking into was The Graph and I’d bought some GRT. Looking into the tech behind it, I’m a GraphQL developer, one of the technologies on my team that we helped build and also continued to maintain and improve is called App Sync, which is a managed GraphQL service that a lot of companies are using in production. We serve massive companies like Ticketmaster and Aldo and BMW and Disney and stuff like that, so we had had years of experience building out really sophisticated GraphQL APIs. So I really understand I think The GraphQL space and I really like the technology.

(16:40):

So when I started looking into The Graph and I saw that they were using GraphQL, that sparked my interest enough to start diving in a little more. So like you mentioned I think when we talked, you also were looking into The Graph at one point, but for me, I was watching the videos from Yaniv Tal and some of the other founders, reading their interviews, diving into some of the white papers and blog posts that they had written, and then that got me interested in the entire space as a whole. So the whole web3 and the whole decentralized web and Blockchain space.

(17:11):

So I think over the course of a couple of weeks, I started diving into all the different parts and understanding how everything fits together and where The Graph fits in, and I had this really aha moment that I can’t really explain that I have had one since I learned coding and I realized that the future was code. I think I had a similar aha moment with The Graph and I was like, okay, I want to work in this space, this is what I want to do.

(17:41):

I went to their jobs page and I found that Edge & Node had an opportunity for developer relations, so I was like, you know what? I’m going to submit to this job even though I’ve literally never written a single line of solidity. I don’t even understand at that point what Ethereum was past a very, very basic level. I was like, let me just apply for this because you never know. This seems like it would be a lot more fun than anything I’ve ever really done in the past, maybe.

(18:06):

So I did that and I got the opportunity to have an interview. During the interview process I met a bunch of people from the team. They gave me resources to check out, to learn more about the coding side and the developer perspective side, which would be what I’m working on now. One thing led to another and I got the opportunity. I turned down, I would say, a lot higher paying roles at those companies I feel like aren’t as fun to work with, but also don’t have, in my opinion, as much as of a future as what we’re working on.

(18:41):

I feel like what we’re working on really is the future and it’s something that I come to work every day extremely, extremely energized and excited. I’m already an energized person, so to me, this is just a dream come true. I’m having fun. I’m doing really cool stuff. I’m hanging out with great people. I’m learning from really smart people. I’m really having a good time.

Nick (20:33):

You referenced that you had this aha moment, and I’d just be curious to know more about that. What can you tell us about that moment or what the insight was?

Nader Dabit (20:41):

Yeah. I mean, I can give another explanation on my previous aha moments. I’ve had two or three of these in my life and I remember them because they were almost like these moments in time that I can point to times in my life before this happened and after this happened and how I look at things.

(20:58):

But my first one that got me into tech was when I was building out and playing around with coding my first website for an e-commerce store and I started understanding how the internet is progressing and how it’s now, or at least at that time in 2012, was starting to have its tentacles in pretty much every business, and I just had this aha moment realization that every company is a tech company and in the future it’s going to be even moreso.

(21:30):

That was like a sure thing. It was like one of those things in my head, okay, this is a sure thing and this obviously has a million, a billion opportunities if I just am into it, so let me get into it. That gave me really a lot of ammunition for long nights of work and long nights of reading and coding and trying to get ramped up at that late of a stage in my life. But it fueled my career because I was like this is where everything is going, this is what I want to do. I actually am fairly good at it and I enjoy doing it. So that was that moment.

(22:07):

Then for this, I think it was the combination of what web3 is, the ideas behind web3, along with the technology capabilities that are now introduced with the original implementation, I guess, of Blockchain. That was the first true actual success. Bitcoin, what all of the different things that have spun off since then and understanding why those things matter, and then seeing the different web3 infrastructure pieces that need to actually come into place for that to happen. What are the different pieces that we need to start building out? The same apps that we’re used in web2, but in web3, and then understanding the different players that fit into that.

(22:55):

So The Graph is one of them, and then there are a few others I think that were pretty exciting. I was like, I want to work in this space with one of these companies. Of course, I felt like The Graph fit me the best because I’m pretty good with GraphQL and that was really why I pursued that opportunity.

(23:13):

So it’s a combination of The Graph, the technology itself, along with the entire ecosystem and all the other people doing really interesting stuff as well. So The Graph is doing amazing stuff and there are also other people doing amazing stuff.

Nick (23:26):

Well, I agree with you. I don’t understand it to the level that you do, but being able to meet some of the people involved in the web3 space and seeing some of these projects they’re working on, it’s really been inspiring and it makes me very excited about the future.

(23:40):

So I want to ask if you could compare and contrast the work that developers are doing in the web2 space versus the work that you’re seeing developers do in the web3 space.

Nader Dabit (23:50):

So some of the main things that have stood out the most, and of course this is my only experience is working with the Edge & Node team and The Graph teams, so this is coming from a fairly limited perspective over the course of a couple months. But I can say that the passion and the happiness and the truly interest in the day-to-day work is just so much higher in this space. People seem to really, really enjoy solving these problems and they seem to come to work and show up truly interested in doing this stuff. Whereas I felt in a lot of the web2 space, we’d gotten to the point where we were past that early stage of excitement and everything started to become more corporate money driven. How can we do things to meet these goals and these different metrics and stuff like that.

(24:47):

Of course, I was at AWS for over three years, so this is maybe my most recent experience, but it was no longer the fun coding early days, I would say, from what I remember getting started and having my first few opportunities and stuff. It started feeling almost like an office job or something. Have you ever seen that movie, Office… Forgot the name of it. You know what I’m saying?

Nick (25:12):

Yeah. It’s Office Space, right?

Nader Dabit (25:14):

Office Space. Yeah, I felt like somebody from Office Space. I was like, this isn’t fun anymore. Maybe because it was the pandemic and I wasn’t traveling and I’m working remotely, but I did feel like I’m starting to get in a rut and I felt like people that I’m working with also weren’t just happy. They could be. I don’t know. Whatever. You don’t have to be happy, right? That’s not a core thing. But I just am saying that’s the difference I’ve noticed.

(25:38):

Coming into now into this space, it seems like everyone’s truly excited and energized about the work they’re doing, and to me that’s super interesting. But I think it also results in better and higher quality things happening and in more of a synergy between everyone, but also more of an overall aggregation of better work over time maybe. That’s one thing I noticed.

(26:03):

Another thing I’ve noticed is that, I mean, especially in our team, everyone that I work with is an All-Star almost. Everyone I feel on my team is just literally the best of the best. I’ve worked with a lot of really great people. I mean, my team at AWS was amazing as well. But I feel like the level of expertise and the level of excellence on everyone on my team is just bar-raising. I feel like in the past I maybe had been on teams where I started off as a new person, but I quickly ramped up and I was at some point maybe in that top five or 10% based on my reports given to me by other people at least. Whereas I feel like in this team, no matter how hard I’m working, we’re all just on the same level, which is really pretty cool. Being on a team and being in a room of people that are smarter than you is something I enjoy, so that that’s something I’ve noticed for sure.

(27:00):

So those are the two things I’ve noticed the most that stand out the most difference, but also I think the problems that we’re trying to solve maybe are a lot more meaningful than some of the stuff maybe we were doing at AWS. But of course I’m only having my latest perspective. I’m sure there are really exciting teams that would be similar to maybe work on in the web2 space maybe, but I feel like I can’t think of any place I’d rather be right now at least than where I’m at.

Nick (27:27):

I want to ask a follow-up question about your perspective. I know this depends on point of view, meaning that there’s two sides of the table to this argument, on one side you’ve got web2, and on the other side you’ve got web3. But it seems to me that you could argue that web2 is in the process of being disrupted by web3, and as somebody like yourself who has sat on both sides of the table, I’d like to know your opinion about that. More specifically, are web2 companies aware of the potential for disruption? Are they cynical of it? Are they ignoring it? How do you think about that?

Nader Dabit (28:05):

I think there’s a little bit of both of those things to that. So there’s some people that are completely unaware of it. I can even say that that was me not too long ago. I do feel like when I joined this space and started investigating it that there was so much amazing stuff happening and how am I so unaware of all of this as someone that is extremely deeply involved in the developer community? So I feel like there is a lot of stuff happening here that isn’t noticed, not because those people aren’t maybe aware of what’s going on in the developer community, but I just feel like maybe there’s not a lot of overlap between the two communities maybe.

(28:43):

So that’s one thing, but I would say that a lot of people are completely unaware, but there are people that are aware of it and they’re doing maybe what they think they can do to make the current way that they’re doing business somehow profit off of this maybe by offering blockchain solutions. I think Amazon has managed Ethereum. But I think it’s fundamentally at odds maybe with a lot of the things that are happening there so maybe that’s why it’s not interesting to them.

(29:14):

But I mean obviously I think for a lot of these decentralized protocols, they’re basically going to be having nodes running on different servers in different places. So I don’t think that it’s actually maybe something that is overall going to be competing with maybe AWS and GCP and Azure and stuff. I think it’s just a different way of building that maybe won’t, I would say, disrupt the service providers as much as it might some of the more user facing applications in the future.

(29:49):

Yeah, you’ve heard about Facebook talking about finding some way to come up with some way to integrate some crypto, so I think there’s companies that are aware of it, just maybe they don’t understand how to approach it. But it also is fundamentally at odds as with the ad based model of doing business. So Facebook is an ad advertising company, so how are they going to integrate crypto or web3 into their current model? They would have to, in my opinion, start from scratch and build something different. So maybe they could find a way to build out a decentralized version of Facebook without the ads, without the data tracking and stuff.

(30:28):

But yeah, who knows? I guess we’re still going to see.

Nick (30:32):

I think I have a pretty good sense of how the world changes in a lot of ways if web3 is more fully adopted and makes the impact that so many people think that it will. I want to hear your opinion for how a web3 world impacts the average everyday person. The people out there that aren’t necessarily involved in crypto don’t know a lot about blockchain and things like that, how are they impacted by web3?

Nader Dabit (31:00):

Well, I think the main way it might affect them in the long run is that a lot of the applications that they’re used to using today will be greatly improved if they can be built with these web3 ideas put in place. I think what we’re really waiting on seeing is that first, quote-unquote, killer app that gets the tens or hundreds of millions of users around the world onboarded into some type of real application that allows users to interact with each other and maybe pay each other in some type of crypto.

(31:39):

I think it might, in my opinion, have something to do with a creator economy type of model where you’re starting to see a lot of applications offer a way to make payments. So OnlyFans of course is one that’s become popular, but Twitter is adding a way for you to send money and pay people and subscribe to maybe feeds and stuff in the future. YouTube has a way to, I think, show ways to send money. People on Twitch ask for donations. So all these are creator economy type of models. GitHub allows you to pay developers that are creating interesting stuff by sponsoring them.

(32:18):

So it seems like all these applications, they understand that there needs to be some payment model, but the onboarding ramp to those payments is very, very complex because of the fact that they’re using traditional financial systems so they have to integrate Stripe or PayPal. These companies, like Stripe and PayPal, exist mainly because there is no native payment layer built into the internet. So you have these companies that employ tens of thousands of people that are generating billions of dollars of revenue out of thin air essentially just by providing that layer. Whereas crypto is that layer, it’s built into the internet, and it makes it a lot easier for developers to build that into their apps. But it also removes the abstraction that is the banking system as well.

(33:06):

So you not only no longer need the software, you also no longer need the banking, so you’re removing a lot of this abstraction that was pulling portions of money out of everyone’s pockets. So I think that having a way to just send money directly to each other using some type of crypto, and we’re seeing now Layer 2s on top of Ethereum, like Polygon that allow transactions for a fraction of a cent, I think we’re starting to actually finally get there. We’re getting the different pieces in place, now it’s up to us as developers to lay the groundwork for how we’re going to build these things and for people to start building and experimenting.

(33:43):

I think we’re starting to see these things starting to come up. Decentralized versions of web2 apps. I saw a decentralized Airbnb a couple days ago that I shared, which I thought was interesting. I think that these ideas are springing up, but everything is still being fleshed out so there are a lot of questions that come up when you’re dealing with these types of applications.

(34:05):

I think one of the main ones is around identity, it is around reputation, and it is about these civil attacks, how can you mitigate all that stuff? People are figuring out answers to that. So I think you’re going to see that first killer web3 app in the next two to five years and I think that’s when the entire industry will start to be disrupted. That’s what I’m betting on and that’s what I think.

(34:33):

I think I’ve gotten in early on a lot of different technologies in my career, to the point where I can start seeing trends and spotting them early enough to maybe capitalize on those, and that’s what I’m seeing in this space as well.

(34:46):

But I also don’t feel like it’s a zero-sum game. I don’t think someone’s going to come up with the decentralized Twitter and put Twitter out of business. Maybe that’ll happen, I don’t know, but I actually feel like it’ll be more like a different paradigm than we’re used to. It’s going to be this new social media platform that works so much differently than anything we’ve seen in the past it’s hard for us to even compare the two.

Nick (35:38):

Thank you for answering so many questions about this dichotomy between web2 and web3. I want to now talk a little bit about your role at Edge & Node. What can you tell us about what you’re doing at Edge & Node and what your focus or some of the initiatives you’re working on?

Nader Dabit (35:53):

So we have a lot of initiatives at Edge & Node, but the main one that we’re focused on today is supporting The Graph protocol, improving the developer ecosystem, developer experience, developer tooling, everything around the protocol itself. Of course, I’m mainly working in the area of Subgraph’s documentation and stuff like that, so I’m not working that closely with the actual Indexers in the node software itself. So that’s what I’m doing.

(36:21):

The main focus is for me right now I’m doing a lot of educational stuff. So I’m going to a lot of events, speaking at conferences, sponsoring conferences, answering questions as I can on Twitter, a little bit in Discord. I’m not in Discord as much as I would like to be. I’m doing a lot of talks and stuff on podcasts and conferences, spreading awareness for The Graph and some of the stuff that we’re doing there.

(36:46):

So my day-to-day is a lot more right now focused on The Graph protocol, but I think in the next six months, the last six months maybe of this year and early next year, we’re going to continue doing that, of course, but my focus is going to start shifting a little bit more into the actual web3 space and some initiatives that we’re doing at Edge & Node around web3.

(37:10):

So we’re building out a couple of interesting projects. We are working with a few different teams and individuals in the web3 ecosystem that are doing interesting stuff. We are doing some open source stuff. We’re also doing some educational stuff. So all that stuff is stuff that’s still not have been announced yet, but those are the initiatives that we’re working. You’ll start seeing some of those things being released and announced late 2021, maybe early 2022.

Nick (37:40):

I’d be curious to know if there are other roles within The Graph ecosystem outside of the current role you have at Edge & Node that interest you.

Nader Dabit (37:48):

Well, I think the idea of curation for me as a developer is super interesting because it’s something that I think other developers would be interested in as well. It’s a low barrier to entry to come in and build something and make money from it. So if you’re a developer and you have a good idea for an API, you can actually write a subgraph and it probably won’t take you that much time. If you understand how to write a TypeScript and a little bit of GraphQL, you come in, you create a graph, you deploy it, you can then basically signal to that graph that you created and maybe make some money from it. So I think it’s a cool idea for developers to be able to participate and make money and I think that’s really interesting to me.

Nick (38:31):

That’s a great answer because curation and the work of Curators is a very hot topic right now in The Graph community, so I appreciate that perspective. What would be your advice to listeners, and some of them might have a background in development, but your advice to those who want to pursue that role of being a Curator in The Graph ecosystem?

Nader Dabit (38:52):

I would say come in and look at the subgraphs that people are already using today and try to find code that’s out there for some of these subgraphs, because a lot of the code is out there, and look at that code, understand what’s going on, and then maybe take a little bit of GRT and start participating in a couple of different subgraphs by signaling on them. Just get comfortable with the whole process and how that works and see that if you find it interesting. That’s what I would say a good way to get started.

Nick (39:25):

Sticking with this theme of advice for listeners, what’s your advice to any listener out there who doesn’t currently work in crypto, and maybe they’re actually a dev in web2, but they want to make the move into crypto, get more involved in web3? As somebody who actually made that move and successfully contributing to web3, what is your advice to those listeners?

Nader Dabit (39:49):

Yeah. I found the crypto space for me has been extremely, I would say, hard to parse all of the things happening because you have a lot of people that are extremely, extremely financially motivated that are out there talking about the things that are out there. So you have a lot of non-technical people trying to push certain things because they have a lot of money invested or they want to make a lot of money and they are often talking about the things happening and it’s hard to understand what is true, what’s untrue, what is valuable, what’s not valuable. So it is hard to come in and understand what’s going on.

(40:28):

I think I would tend to lean towards projects that are not hyped that much by the people that are actually involved in the sense of price and things like that and look for the projects that are extremely developer focused. Because I think those are the ones that are actually going to be producing value and you want to be involved in those projects, the one that are producing value, because the ones that are producing value are obviously going to continue to create more value and be valuable themselves.

(41:02):

So how can you do that? Well find out a few different projects you’re interested in, go to their Twitter feeds, follow the developers and even the people in the company themselves, follow them. If they’re out there trying to show the price or talk about things like that, that’s to me not a good signal. To me, a good signal is talking about the interesting things that they’re building and the improvements that they’re making and how they’re listening to the developers to build out the things that people actually want.

Nick (41:31):

One of the things I’ve asked guests to do on this podcast is help listeners understand core concepts related to The Graph and you can’t get very far in trying to understand what The Graph is without knowing what a subgraph is. So would you be willing to share how you define or describe what a subgraph is?

Nader Dabit (41:49):

That’s a really great question. To me, a subgraph is almost like maybe, if you wanted to really define it in non-technical terms, maybe a menu that you would get at a restaurant. The person sitting down is the consumer of the menu and then the kitchen is the blockchain, and the subgraph is the interface between the front, the person, and the data. In the subgraph you can define, oh, I want to get this thing, and it basically is a combination of ingredients that people put together. So I think that’s a good way to describe what a subgraph is.

Nick (42:36):

That’s a great way. Thank you for explaining that. So as a non-technical guy, the one way I’ve approached this concept of what a subgraph is and tying it together with what The Graph does, and I invite you to correct me where I’m wrong or fill in any of the gaps, but as I understand it, anybody, so long as they possess the technical skill, they can write a subgraph, but it becomes really cost or resource prohibitive to run all the queries and store the data. So that’s where The Graph steps in making it easier and a lower cost for people who write subgraphs to run the queries and to store the data.

(43:11):

So can you fill in the gaps there or correct me where I’m wrong?

Nader Dabit (43:14):

No, that’s really pretty spot on. I mean, when you think of a typical app like Facebook or something like that, when they retrieve data, they’re going directly to a very, very highly optimized database that allows them to use something like SQL to say, give me all of the friends of this user, and then that operation happens in a fraction of a second and that data comes back.

(43:38):

So that data is indexed in a really performative way, but with blockchains, it’s essentially just transactions that are written one after the other over a long period of time. So the blockchain was never created and optimized for data retrieval, it was just really optimized for data storage. So when you want to then get that data, you can’t say, I want to get all of Nader’s friends, because I would actually have to go and read every single transaction, aggregate that data, and then run some type of filter on it.

(44:08):

So the way that The Graph comes in, it works as that indexing layer, like how a database typically would in a regular web2 application, but allows anyone to deploy their own layer for their application that fits the data needs for the front end that they’re working with.

Nick (44:28):

So at the cost of being a little redundant here, I’d really like to know how you think about what The Graph is and what it does.

Nader Dabit (44:36):

I really like the idea of it being the Google of blockchains, or the Google for blockchains maybe makes a lot of sense because essentially it’s what that is. If I wanted to find out all of the restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi where I live, before Google came around, or before a search engine, let’s not even say Google in particular, but a search engine was there, it might have been hard for me to find that. Maybe I could go to a local website that had a few links to those, but there was no way for me to know where that website lived in every city that was around. So Google created a way for me to just search for that and have all of that data returned, and I think The Graph sits in a very similar position.

Nick (45:22):

Well, similar to you, I also gravitate towards the idea of The Graph being the Google of blockchain, but there are fundamental differences and everybody in The Graph community knows that’s not a apples to apples comparison. One significant difference is Google’s relatively simple to use, right? You go to Google, you type in the search bar, and in a few seconds you’ve got all the search results you need. The Graph is a little bit more complicated in trying to understand and use from the perspective that you’ve got Curators, you’ve got Delegators, you’ve got Indexers.

(45:52):

I’m not arguing that the user experience is fundamentally more difficult, I’m actually arguing that there’s something fundamentally different about querying blockchain than what Google does querying websites and the internet.

(46:05):

So my question is what is it that’s so fundamentally different about blockchain that makes that experience different than using Google?

Nader Dabit (46:14):

So right now, there are only a handful of blockchains storing, in my opinion, a lot of important data. That would be probably Ethereum, number one, because people are actually writing real apps on top of Ethereum, and of course Bitcoin has a lot of transactional information, and maybe one or two others. But I think now that we’re starting to see the explosion of the improvements for not only layers on top of Ethereum, but other blockchains, and how people are starting to actually build real applications on these, you’re starting to see more and more information stored on all of these different chains.

(46:49):

So as all of that data starts becoming used in front-end applications and other applications, you’re now looking at not just whatever is on Ethereum, but also on Polygon or these other Layer 2s, as well as these other chains that are out there, and maybe five years from now, all of the other applications that have built on top of all the data that they’ve stored. So the more applications that are built, the longer we’re here, the more data that is stored, so the more opportunities that there are for people to use that data to build out different interesting front ends.

(47:28):

I think the most interesting thing about blockchain versus a traditional web application is that all of this data is completely public. So if you’re storing something on the blockchain, it’s meant for it to be public, so anyone can come up with new ideas for how to combine that data and build out something completely brand new. So to me, that’s super interesting.

(47:50):

So if there’s like five NFT smart contracts that are out there, someone can combine all five of those to build out a new interface on top of those, and since the smart contract itself defines how people can interact with it, then I can just build maybe a completely new application on top of that. Then you’re basically having a backend that any developer can build a new front end for, which in the past was completely unfeasible and incomprehensible almost because the complexity for most backends, and also the proprietary data that is in most of these backends, would make that impossible.

Nick (48:29):

Well, as a follow-up then, what’s fundamentally different about building apps or being a developer in the web2 space versus in the web3 space?

Nader Dabit (48:37):

So I mean, I think this is more blockchain specific, but when people come into this space, they want to know, oh, I want to build out X type of application, and I think that the things that we build today are not going to be one-to-one mappings, I would say, between traditional web2 applications. At least, not right now.

(48:59):

So for instance, I probably couldn’t build the highest performance messaging app right now on top of a blockchain. It wouldn’t even make sense, actually, because most messages are going to need to be private, encrypted, and you don’t really want someone knowing what you and your wife are probably talking about stored in a blockchain.

(49:21):

I think when people come in, they’re like, oh, I want to build out this type of application, but I think really the blockchain itself is utilized for certain types of applications today, and therefore The Graph is used for those type of applications.

(49:35):

So I think any type of application that is suited for, of course, a blockchain is well suited for The Graph, and as the ecosystem around all of these different blockchains improves and the cost for transactions goes down, you’re going to see more types of applications. But I don’t think that every single type of application that web2 developers are used to writing is going to be a good fit for blockchain.

Nick (50:04):

It wasn’t long after you joined Edge & Node that the first 10 subgraphs migrated from the hosted service to the main net. I know you were relatively new, but I would love to know your experience or perspective of that. It was a huge undertaking, and with your pedigree and your professional background, what was your perspective or experience watching all of that happen?

Nader Dabit (50:28):

So as someone that is fairly new to the team, at this recording, I’ve been here for a little over two months, and understanding the monumental effort that went into this before I got here, not only from people on The Graph Foundation and The Graph team, but also from the community, and all of the long months and even years of effort that went into it, it’s hard for me to really, I would say, put a perspective on it that probably gives it the amount of deserved, I would say, to me, just monumental type of thing that happened with that. To me, it’s a huge deal.

(51:13):

I think overall I thought it went really, really, really well. I think that there was a lot of course things that happened that are maybe unexpected because it’s a brand new thing that no one I would say has really done at this scale maybe. It’s also a zero to one type of event so I think of course you’re going to have some issues when you’re doing something like that. But I think the overall final result has been everyone seems to be pretty happy with it.

(51:43):

I think it was just an interesting thing to watch from the sidelines, because I was really not that involved in that from the perspective of what my day-to-day work is, but I did see a lot of those conversations happening and I thought it was really awesome to watch.

Nick (51:59):

Earlier you referenced that you’ve really got an eye out there watching a lot of the amazing projects people in the web through your crypto space are working on. Outside of the things you’re working on at Edge & Node and what The Graph is doing, what other projects have caught your attention or that you’re keeping your eye on?

Nader Dabit (52:15):

Yeah. So right now my main focus is understanding all of the different parts of web3, fulfilling the pieces of the stack that are needed to build out the type of applications that we’re used to building in web2, like I mentioned before. So I’m really interested in protocols that are solving some of those challenges and some of those problems.

(52:41):

So as a developer, if I want to build an app, I typically need these different pieces. So identity is one, storage is one, data is one. Some type of business logic execution environment is often one that you need. Sometimes maybe video streaming, these sorts of things. So I think I’m really interested in any of the applications, protocols, teams that are out there building the things that will fill those needs.

(53:09):

So for me, Ceramic and IDX are really interesting to me. Also, CS Skynet is doing some cool stuff around not only storage but identity as well that I’m keeping an eye on. Livepeer with streaming is interesting to me. ThreadDB seems pretty interesting to me.

(53:31):

Yeah, just pretty much any application or any team that’s out there working on different pieces of the web stack that are going to be built in a decentralized manner are really interesting to me.

Nick (53:42):

Can you take a minute and describe what is meant by this idea or concept of full stack? I see it brought up all the time, and again, as a non-technical person, I’m not sure I understand what the concept of full stack means and how The Graph fits into it all.

Nader Dabit (53:56):

So the full stack would be like, as a developer, I want to build out the user interface, which is what someone sees when they open their phone and they press on a website’s app icon or they open a website up in their browser, I guess you could say. The user interface is like that, how you interact with it. Front end developers typically build out those UIs by using images and text and CSS and stuff like that.

(54:27):

So the front end would be that, and then the backend would typically be the database, or in the case of The Graph, a subgraph, or even maybe an Indexer could be part of the backend. A full stack developer, or someone building full stack apps, is doing both.

(54:44):

I think that the nature of a lot of the web3 protocols makes full stack development a lot easier than maybe a lot of the traditional web2 stuff. I think that the things that I was working on AWS were serverless, which meant that a lot of the backend stuff was abstracted away, making it easier for front end developers to build full stack apps. I think a lot of the stuff like The Graph, like some of these other protocols that are abstracting away some of this complexity, also make it easier for front-end developers to build full stack applications or they just make full stack application development easier. I would say anything that increases developer velocity will ultimately bring value because people will be able to build faster and more efficiently.

Nick (55:36):

Thank you for that explanation. It’s obviously very helpful. I want to finish up with a few final questions. The first one being, what’s your long-term vision for The Graph?

Nader Dabit (55:46):

I think some of the most interesting things that I’ve been hearing lately are people that have ideas around indexing massive data sets on The Graph and making them accessible. So I think in the future, the long-term vision is having anything that is public data being indexed or indexable by The Graph and being able to have this global API layer for anyone that wants to build anything and have that data readily available.

Nick (56:15):

As I mentioned before, you recently published a book, it was published by O’Reilly. The book title is Full Stack Serverless: Modern Application Development with React, AWS, and GraphQL. Who did you write that book for, and for listeners that are thinking about picking it up, what might they find inside?

Nader Dabit (56:31):

I think that book is a really great entry point for anyone wanting to understand how to build apps on AWS getting started. I would say it’s probably to me the lowest barrier to entry to AWS development that there is. Also anyone looking to learn GraphQL. So The Graph uses GraphQL, so if you’re looking to understand a little bit more about how people use GraphQL, that’s probably a good book. Then finally, if you’re a front end developer and you have traditionally written just JavaScript and HTML and CSS and you want to understand how to expand your skillset to build out cloud applications, then it’s a really low barrier to entry, a good entry point, I think, for that.

Nick (57:13):

I want to encourage listeners to check it out if they’re interested in learning more. Again, the title is Full Stack Serverless: Modern Application Development with React, AWS, and GraphQL.

(57:24):

Nader, before I let you go, I want to ask you one final question, and it’s for those listeners who are currently working in the web2 space and they’re contemplating making the move that you recently made into the web3 space. What’s your advice to them?

Nader Dabit (57:38):

I think that they should look at some of the projects that are happening in this ecosystem and look at some of the production gaps that are out there and get into a few of the Discord communities and just see the discussions that are happening and just see if some of the ideas and some of the conversations that are happening interest you and spark your curiosity. Because I think that this space is intellectually stimulating in a way that a lot of the web2 stuff just isn’t, and it’s attracting a lot of really smart people that are starting to see that as well. So I think that getting your foot in the door by understanding some of the different conversations that are happening is a good way to spark your interest.

Nick (58:28):

Nader Dabit, I’m deeply humbled that you would take the time and do this podcast. Thank you so much. For listeners that want to stay in touch with you and learn more about what you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Nader Dabit (58:39):

Definitely follow me on Twitter at D-A-B-I-T, and the number 3, dabit3. Then also, YouTube, I’m Nader Dabit on YouTube, so you can go to youtube.com/naderdabit, I think. Or you or youtube.com/u/naderdabit. I don’t remember. But yeah, YouTube and Twitter is where I hang out the most.