EPISODE SUMMARY
Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the third episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It’s for devs, by devs. Today's guest is Brian Friel, a Solana dev and regular contributor to the Solana Cookbook who recently joined Phantom as Developer Relations Evangelist. 01:18 - Intro / Phantom 04:04- Brian’s background 05:10 - His experience before working in Solana 06:42 - How did he start working in Solana 08:06 - When did he start looking into Solana 09:41 - First project on Solana 11:36 - What are the challenges working in Solana 13:14 - Anchor vs. Solana native 15:31 - The Solana cookbook 18:09 - Contributing to the space 21:01 - Solana Native Programs 23:01 - Any advice? DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.
EPISODE NOTES
Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the third episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It’s for devs, by devs.
Today’s guest is Brian Friel, a Solana dev and regular contributor to the Solana Cookbook who recently joined Phantom as Developer Relations Evangelist.
- 01:18 – Intro / Phantom
- 04:04- Brian’s background
- 05:10 – His experience before working in Solana
- 06:42 – How did he start working in Solana
- 08:06 – When did he start looking into Solana
- 09:41 – First project on Solana
- 11:36 – What are the challenges working in Solana
- 13:14 – Anchor vs. Solana native
- 15:31 – The Solana cookbook
- 18:09 – Contributing to the space
- 21:01 – Solana Native Programs
- 23:01 – Any advice?
DISCLAIMER
The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.
Chase (00:39):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana ecosystem. My name is Chase Barker, developer relations at Solana Labs. Today, we have with us, Brian Friel. Brian is actually a heavy contributor to the Solana ecosystem. I spoke with Brian, probably, a few months ago. I started noticing that he was writing some really great articles about Solana. I always have my eye out to kind of find people who are just altruistically contributing in the ecosystem. Brian was one of those guys, and here he is today. Brian, how’s it going, man?
Brian (01:13):
Hey, Chase. Good to be here. Big fan of the show.
Chase (01:16):
Super excited to have you. You have done so many contributions to the ecosystem, everything from your own personal articles about PDAs with Anchor. You’ve contributed heavily to the Solana Cookbook. Actually, many people probably don’t know because you never really spoke about it, there is some great news today. Brian, I actually heard from a little birdie that you just got hired at Phantom.
Brian (01:50):
That’s correct. This is a Solana podcast exclusive. I’m joining Phantom, and I’ll be their first developer relations hire there. Super stoked to build out the best wallet on Solana.
Chase (02:02):
Yeah, that’s awesome. I haven’t fully grasped what… I know that there’s a use for that on a wallet. Every company’s completely different whenever it comes to developer relations. You’ve been hanging out with the Solana Labs devrel team. I’m sure you’ll jump in there, and you probably have already started to try to figure out what you’re going to do on day one, I’m sure.
Brian (02:24):
It’s a green-field kind of space here. There’s a lot to do. I think you’re right. One of the best things about this space, too, is that so many people are just building in public that we get a lot of feedback of what developers building on Solana want to see out of us at Phantom. My job is really to kind of get in touch with everyone who’s building and start triaging what the biggest priorities are to make this the best experience.
Chase (02:46):
That’s awesome. I’m sure you’re going to do great. Also, another one of our wonderful part-time dev advocates, Loris just got hired by Metaplex. But, at the end of the day, we love this. This is exactly what we want. All the better and congrats on that.
Brian (03:00):
Yeah. Shout out, Loris. He’s awesome. Metaplex got a huge win there, getting him.
Chase (03:05):
For sure. I guess, I usually start these out with some more of the boring things for most people. Everybody wants to hear about the development stuff. Number one, when you did start working with us, had I reached out to you or did you reach out to me? I’ve been thinking about this today, and I cannot actually remember how that unfolded.
Brian (03:25):
I think, way back, I actually reached out to you once. At the time, I might have not even been on Twitter under my real name. I just started a Twitter account just to check out a couple different things. I was interested in crypto. I saw your presence pretty early on and messaged you, but I’m pretty sure, at that time, you were just drowning in DMs. I went all out my way starting to build stuff, and then starting to just share stuff publicly, which we can talk about. But, I think, through that, then you had circled back, and then we reconnected.
Chase (03:55):
Yeah, exactly. If you’re listening, that’s how you do it. If I don’t respond to you, do something cool, and we’ll eventually connect. Anyways, definitely, generally curious on your background, whether it’s tech related or not, just whatever you are comfortable with sharing and what you were doing before you were involved in any of this crazy thing that we call crypto.
Brian (04:16):
It feels like a lifetime ago. I, actually, didn’t study computer science unlike a lot of people, but, over time, I did make my way into the tech world. Then, quickly after graduating, I got pretty lucky, and I got a job as a front end engineer at a small crypto hedge fund here in the Bay Area. It’s called Castle. Was with those guys for about four years. Absolute, awesome experience. It was really interesting to see the whole trading side of the industry, which, obviously, is kind of how this all got its legs. People want to speculate on this. Over time, my role there really evolved from just the pure dev to somebody who was really kind of boots on the ground trying to figure out what’s new in the space.
Through that, I came across Solana pretty early on. Obviously, seeing Sam Fried throw his weight behind it, but then some other stuff that came along like Mango. I’m seeing the possibilities there. In my free time, I really started just digging to it outside of work. Work was the catalyst for finding it. But, that’s really how I got my start, just looking into the developer side of things on Solana.
Chase (05:18):
What was your experience level directly before Solana?
Brian (05:22):
I was a React front end engineer, was really my specialty. I, specifically, was tasked with building interfaces for our trading systems. We had a whole proprietary tech trading system, and I was the front end guy, so I would say pretty proficient with React and Node JS and TypeScript. But, I really wasn’t a back end guy. I’d never done anything with Rust, and I actually hadn’t really done too much on Solidity at the time yet. I had kicked around a few side projects, but nothing really ever got past just a couple weeks, side hobby sort of deal.
Chase (05:54):
What I definitely am seeing in this ecosystem, and I think Armani’s talked about it a handful of times is that a lot of engineers in Solana are actually Solana natives that have never touched Solidity. They’ve never owned a MetaMask wallet. Obviously, a lot of these guys are probably some of the more younger guns, even some of the older ones as well, probably for a variety of reasons. But, it’s interesting to see technologies that have been around for a while that newer technologies are actually being used and developed on first. It’s never really been a thing before. There was always a learning path that was you find out about Bitcoin. You find out about Ethereum. You build on Solidity. Then, you find some other things, and you might jump ship. We’re seeing a lot of people that are really just going straight to Solana. You were involved in that space, tasked with finding out what’s hot, what’s going on, and you saw SBF was building a central limit order book on Solana, and, then, that’s kind of what set you in that direction?
Brian (06:54):
Yeah. I was pretty aware of the Ethereum ecosystem before. We actually were running our own validators for Eth 2 and doing a couple other things as it relates to trading, actually, on Ethereum Mainnet today. For me, personally, I think it was just really an interesting time to dedicate my free time in learning Solana because it felt like there was this new paradigm of blockchain development. A lot of the stuff that was coming out with other earlier ones felt a little bit derivative of Eth, but Solana really felt like it was carving its own path out, and I thought that was worth exploring.
At the same time, I could see there was people who had serious credibility in the space who were dedicating their time to it. Then, combined with that, they’re just wasn’t any resources or really any subject matter experts on it yet. That, to me, was the signal that it is a really good time. I still think it is a fantastic time to just dig my heels in and learn about this. I haven’t really looked back since.
Chase (07:52):
The first time we kind of talked, it was probably early on, and I was really just trying to get a feel for everything. There probably wasn’t a ton of information or content. I feel like there was some. You made a note to Mango Markets. What timeframe did you really start paying attention to Solana, not necessarily about what’s going on in the ecosystem, but rather start looking at the documentation? Was this super early 2021?
Brian (08:18):
I had kicked the tires on things at the end of 2020 when Sollet was the only wallet, and there really wasn’t anything. But, I think Break Solana was out there, and I think Raydium was out there.
Chase (08:29):
Serum DEX was also there around that time as well, I believe.
Brian (08:32):
Yeah, Serum. I had just kind of made a mental note around that time. Things were pretty crazy in the space, too, just everything was going on.
Chase (08:40):
The market, yeah-
Brian (08:41):
I was pretty busy at work, but, I would say, when the market kind of cooled off in the summertime is when I, personally, started to dig into the development side a lot more. Mango and Phantom, well, trying that out was definitely just the light bulb moment for me when I saw just how insane that user experience was. What really got me down the rabbit hole of development was following Armani on Twitter. Shout out, Armani’s the man, and seeing what he was doing with Anchor, specifically.
I had stayed away from the development side of Solana purely because I had told myself, oh, I’m a front end guy. I would have to learn Rust first. Then, I would have to learn all the intricacies of Solana. It’s just not worth my time. But, Anchor signaled to me that I could start a side project, and I could get up and running with something quickly. Then, if that was interesting to me, then I could dig in further. That’s what I did. I think that’s actually a pretty good path for people who are just kicking the tires on Solana development.
Chase (09:39):
I guess that means that you’re pretty much intro journey into development. You went straight for Anchor before you-
Brian (09:46):
Yep, a hundred percent.
Chase (09:48):
… because I remember… Was the PDA article you wrote the first article that you had written?
Brian (09:52):
My first thing I did, I think this was either late August or early September, I just said, I’m going to make a really basic app, like a voting app on Solana, something that everyone’s made before, but I’m going to use Anchor to do it. I think, at the time, Nader Dabit had just published his first article, so I was kind of using that as a reference. But, there really wasn’t a whole lot about the intricacies of how Anchor related to Solana development, in particular. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the account model, which I think is the biggest thing for most people coming into the space, especially if they’re familiar with Ethereum. I had just done a very basic, put a key pair on a node server, spin that up, something you would never want to do in a production app. It worked until the Herokuv server crashed, and then it just was a joke of an app.
I couldn’t really sleep well. I had written up my experience, but I couldn’t really sleep well knowing that that’s as far as I got. That’s when I dug into PDAs. I really started to understand the account model better on Solana, what that was. I just wrote about that experience, really, selfishly for me just to have a memo on that. Then, I just put it out there, but I found out that a lot of other people were simultaneously going around the same sort of journey. I think that was the article that I really started to get connected with a lot of people in the space.
Chase (11:09):
I mean, it’s pretty typical for a lot of these guys to be documenting their journey. A lot of times that really sparks a revelation for people that I’ve noticed. It’s like, wow, this is super valuable. Then, I want to do it again. It’s like, if this is helping people, I’m going to keep deep diving these things. But, it all started with Armani being like, hey, I’m going to make this easier for everybody, and he did. Now, he has a massive community of supporters that are just building on top of Anchor. Was the accounts model in the PDAs… Typically, it is, but, for you, is that specifically was, until you got past that, Solana was pretty hard?
Brian (11:47):
Yeah. In my mind, I thought it was going to be Rust, especially being a front end dev. It’s just the total different world, but-
Chase (11:54):
The syntax is disgusting when you first look at it, at least in my personal opinion.
Brian (11:58):
Yeah, you can kind of understand. But, I mean, it really is. If you’ve never touched Rust, it’s not bad. It was nothing that, really, three or four hours worth of just looking over stuff. You can understand the gist of things, which is as much as you really need to get your first app up, which I think is the best way to learn, just by doing. For me, it really was the mental shift of just how does Solana work in the account model because I think everyone’s so used to… I have Ethereum address. It has all these coins directly related to it. Then, there’s this Ethereum smart contract, and it has its state. It has a counter, and it can do these things. It’s really weird to, one, you’re already saying, I’m going to go away from this ecosystem. I’m going to look at Solana.
But, then, two, a lot of what I have in my head as a mental map doesn’t carry over. That seemed like a scary drum. That probably was the hardest thing, but, it’s really that account model. I think that once you have a pretty good understanding of that, that’s 80% of the work. The rest of the 20% of the work, you’ll get over time.
Chase (12:58):
I mean, if we’re talking about Rust Native, and then we’re talking about Anchor, Anchor also hides a lot of these issues. You don’t have to really worry so much about the serialization piece. Honestly, I don’t know very many people that actually even know how to really do that efficiently and effectively in Rust. It’s a huge pain in the ass to make that work. Have you done any of the serialization in Rust Native?
Brian (13:26):
Yeah. I’ve played around with Borscht a little bit now. I think as far as the whole Anchor versus Solana Native debate, speaking anecdotally, I definitely thought it was easier just to go with Anchor. It lets you focus on what you’re building. You don’t have to worry about all this stuff like serialization. But, then, I think once you do build something to actually really understand how it works, and if you ever were to actually put any money, your own, let alone other people’s money in it, you absolutely should understand how Anchor relates to Solana Native, and why it’s doing the things it’s doing, what each trait and macro is actually doing under the hood. Then, that just makes you really understand, I think, Solana, all the better.
Chase (14:03):
There’s a couple types of people there. There are the type of person out there that’s like, no, I want to start with a base, and then I’m going to work my way up. Those people tend to be the more thorough, take their time, whatever. But, then a lot of others are like, I want to push out an MVP because I want to write code right this second, and then they do it. Then, just general curiosity over time when you feel like you understand a language like Anchor, and you’re like, okay, I got this. This is great. Now, I’m actually curious how this works under the hood, so you just go in the reverse direction.
Brian (14:38):
This is, again, anecdotal, but for people like me, and probably if you’re a front end dev, actually, it’s really nice to have something tangible where it’s like you built this. You can show it to a friend, and they can connect the Devnet Wallet to it, and they can use it. Then, you kind of really understand the tangible value of this new platform that Solana is. Now, you’re innately curious of, okay, well how does this actually work? I saw that Anchor does this in less than 50 lines of Rust, but half these lines are macros that I’m not quite sure what they do under the hood. It’s very natural, your learning path from there, if you can just get the first project done.
Chase (15:15):
Have you, to this day, written anything in Rust Native. Have you written any programs?
Brian (15:21):
No. I’ve transitioned over more to the web3.js side of things because that’s what I’m more comfortable with.
Chase (15:28):
Okay.
Brian (15:29):
As you know, recently, I’ve been spending most of my time on more conceptual stuff like the Solana Cookbook, and I dug in some stuff as well about retrying transactions during network congestion and all that. That’s a little bit more, conceptually, how the Solana blockchain works as a whole.
Chase (15:42):
If you guys didn’t know, Brian just released a PDA section to the Solana Cookbook, so check it out. Also, the retry portion. That was actually requested by the Solana core engineer team. They were like, there’s a lot of people that don’t understand how to manage failed transactions and how to retry them properly.
Brian (16:04):
Yeah, totally. That’s kind of what drew me in to this space is that I had seen people like the core engineering team there, Trent and what Anatoly’s built, obviously. But, there’s all this amazing tech that these guys have built and they’ve been so focused on building that no one’s really there to tell the story and to help make it more relatable to devs, maybe Web 2.0 devs who are coming in. I’ve seen a lot of people, and I have friends who maybe aren’t full-time crypto who are just like Solana just doesn’t work, unplug it and plug it back in kind of a deal, like what’s going on there because it’s very different from Ethereum.
But, in my mind, it’s an incredible piece of technology that’s been built, and there’s reasons why certain things have hiccups at certain times, but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad design. It just means that we’re testing in prod. We’re moving this thing pretty fast. What I wanted to do is help shed light what is actually happening because as I learned about it, it gave me more confidence in Solana as a whole, the platform, understanding what the growing pains actually were under the hood.
Chase (17:02):
Whether people like to admit it or not, every blockchain, in its infancy, has suffered very, very similar problems. They’re continuously working to improve this with QUICK and other different options that are going just make this more sustainable. The best thing we can do is be honest about it. We have Solana Docs. They’re highly technical documentation. They’re not necessarily developer experience friendly unless you’re a very specific type of learner with a very large brain. The first time I read it, I probably absorbed 10%. The next time I got another 25%. Then, it took me five or six or seven times before I grasped everything that was happening in there. It serves a very specific purpose. Most of that documentation, the brunt of it, was written years ago by the co-founders. It can use some improvement, but, at the time, we’re like let’s move fast. Let’s get the community contributing and kind of get the Cookbook built out.
It turned out really great. It has a half a million page views, just short of half a million, which is insane since that just goes to show you how valuable it is, and how valuable your contributions are. The same reason why we have these little developer advocacy teams that join weekly meetings with us, so they can know what’s going on and just help. The goal is to get some experience, and then eventually get hired by whoever you want to get hired by. Luckily for you, that seems to have worked out and that’s amazing.
Brian (18:25):
No, the Cookbook’s been an awesome experience, and, definitely, shout out Jacob Creech and Leesam [inaudible 00:18:31] and Loris and Colin and all those people who are working hard on it. It’s been very organic, and I think that’s kind of true of the whole Solana developer ecosystem as a whole is that it’s an aptly named podcast, Chewing Glass. But, there’s a reason why people are dedicating their free time outside of work to this because it’s really awesome. The Cookbook, in my mind, is the best way if you’re sort of on the sidelines, or you’ve maybe built a small project, and you don’t really know how to go from here, getting involved with that is definitely the best move I think you can make. Contributing to the space, as a whole, helping other people learn. The best way I’ve ever learned is writing for other people. Then, once you do do that, it’s really easy to connect with others who are building in the space. There’s so much to do that you’ll get picked up by somebody, for sure.
Chase (19:12):
It’s kind of crazy. When that Cookbook just exploded, also, shout out the SuperteamDAO for actually helping solve [crosstalk 00:19:20].
Brian (19:19):
Yeah, totally there.
Chase (19:20):
They really crushed it. Watching that organic just inflow of people that are like, hey, I’ll do this thing. I’ll do that thing, and they just did it. For a ghost chain, we actually seem to have a lot of developers in the ecosystem.
Brian (19:32):
Anecdotally, I’ve seen just an explosion of people who’ve reached out to me saying, hey, I read your stuff and I want to learn more. What’s the best way to get involved? I think that gut feel of the developer buzz and people who are spending their nights and weekends trying to wrap their head around this. I think that’s the best kind of indicator you can really have because, at the end of the day, there’s a lot out there. But, if you can get people who are actually interested in putting in the sweat to actually learn about this thing that’s not always easy right off the bat, but even if they’re just interested in it’s going to take mind sharing. That’s how we can better.
Chase (20:08):
Yeah. Every day, I’m blown away, but I don’t have to reach out to anybody. It’s just all people reaching out. Obviously, I love to hear that they’re reaching out to you and everybody in the ecosystem has their DMs open. If you write an article, expect for people to come and ask you for advice, and that tone has been set. It started with Anatoly with this whole openness thing, and him and Raj with their DMs open, went down to me, and then to the community. Then, it just keeps spreading and spreading, and everybody’s really just trying, out there, to help each other. Without that sort of kind of vibe, you and I wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have worked together. None of these things would’ve happened.
Brian (20:45):
I think that’s definitely the most important thing is keeping that vibe set because I could have just as easily gone away, but I hopped in an Anchor discord right when it was just getting started. There’s people like Armani, but then others like CQFD and Don Diablo and other people who are in those channels taking time out of their day to help me out. Once I learned it, I felt like I had to pay it forward or wanted to pay it forward really and connect with more people. I think as long as we can keep that momentum going, that’s a good thing.
Chase (21:18):
For sure. You talked about, you were doing some Web 3.0 stuff. You saw that the token program was completely rewritten in TypeScript.
Brian (21:25):
Yeah. Pretty cool.
Chase (21:27):
Have you touched that yet? Have you played around with it.
Brian (21:28):
I played around with it a little bit. Haven’t done a whole lot there, but I definitely plan to. I think one of the things that I was most interested in when I came here was Web 3.0, web3.js because it’s just so simple. It’s like an NPM package or a yarn install. You can get up and running with that. I had an idea of making a little site that was a little bit interactive where you could have a snippet of code, say how to send a SOL to somebody, and then you click that. Then, on the right, it’s actually rendering and showing what that actually looks like. But, I think the Cookbook has done a pretty good job. My idea kind of started right around when the Cookbook launched, so I’ve focused my efforts there, on the Cookbook, but I would say that should be a focus of mine and a bunch of other people who are interested in contributing. It’s just improving the developer experience on Web 3.0 right now. There’s a lot documentation-wise that I think we could improve.
Chase (22:22):
Even some of the Solana Program Library, for instance, the Solana Token Program JS library, which they dot bindings in the documentation, that doesn’t exist for every program. You would, literally, just have to write your own custom transactions and instructions to be able to use it. We are adding that to our little roadmap. I’m sure there’s additional components and extensions we can add to these things. We’re working on it.
Brian (22:51):
I think it’s the right time to be contributing towards that kind of shared resource like that. Another one that I found that isn’t Solana Native programs, but the Saber team has done a great job with their Saber common repos. I think they’ve set a really great example for other projects that if they want to win, they got to have the whole ecosystem win. They got to grow the pie, open sourcing code and sharing what you know with people. Everyone I’ve interacted with across all projects has just been awesome so far. I would really love to see that continue.
Chase (23:20):
I do this every episode. I’m going to put you on the spot and just kind of ask you, give some advice.
Brian (23:27):
I thought about this. I’d seen your two other episodes, so I pulled a tweet from Armani, which if I can read here because this is what had actually, finally got me kind of off the couch and contributing. This is September 2021. He says, “For every new technology, the pace of innovation exceeds the pace of education. If there’s tons of examples to copy and paste, you’re late. If you’re confused because there’s no docs, good. You’ve discovered a secret that is yet to be revealed to the rest of the world.”
I saw that right when I was kicking around the idea of maybe I should make an Anchor thing. Ah, I’m busy. I got all this other stuff. If I got a puppy, all this kind of stuff to take care of. But, I would a hundred percent agree with what he tweeted there. I think that’s a legendary tweet. If it’s confusing, good. Just keep at it. Then, I would say make a really simple project about as simple as you can. For me, it was an app that basically said, do you like crunchy peanut butter or do you like smooth peanut butter? You connect your Phantom wallet, and you vote for an option. The program records it. It’s still live to this day. You can check it out, PBvote.com.
Chase (24:32):
Nice plug.
Brian (24:33):
Nice plug for the peanut butter there. I’m not sponsored by any peanut butter companies. But, that, for me, was really what got me going. I had set a deadline. I’d said, okay, I have to have this live in two weeks. I think giving yourself that deadline is actually the most important thing because so many people come in. They say, hey, Solana is cool, but then they get distracted by something else because there’s something new happening in this space every day. It’s easier to watch the price of things, but sticking to a deadline, and even if you fail, but knowing why you failed.
If you’re under pressure, and you can get something out in two weeks or less, just write about your journey. Just say this is what I built. It’s simple, but it’s live. Here’s the source code. Here’s the link, and this is what worked for me. This is what didn’t work for me. This thing sucked. This thing was great. Just create a Twitter and tweet about it. I guarantee if you do that, people will reach out because you’ve probably touched some piece of code that someone else has written and they want to hear feedback on how that was. Then, you have your own experience you can write about, and maybe you can share something that helps other people build in the space. It’s all about contributing really. Once you contribute, other people really want to reach out.
Chase (25:39):
It really just becomes this perpetual cycle of contributing, sharing. Somebody else uses it, and feels the same way, and it just keeps going you going. That’s all we want. I’m just there screaming on Twitter to fuel the fire. You made a great point. Nobody’s made that one yet. Bravo to you, not about the peanut butter, but about the fact that set a plan because all of us as engineers, in our past, have been like, I’m going to do this thing. You set no timeframe. You start on it, and then you never get back to it. Then, you have about 500 things that you’ve started, and then you never touch any of them, so really writing that down, setting that timeframe, setting that goal. You got to find a way to hold yourself accountable.
Things I’ve done in the past, starting Chewing Glass, about starting this show. I didn’t ask anybody at the company. I just tweeted, “I’m going to start a podcast.” If I didn’t, people would start asking me about it later, and then I would look like a liar. I had to do it, so accountability can really come from just tweeting because if people follow you, they’re going to throw it in your face one day, and nobody likes that.
Brian (26:43):
I’d say if you’re still listening this podcast, if you’ve made it this far in Solana, you’re interested enough to build something. Build it, and then tweet about it. You probably are interested in following people like Armani, people like Chase, people like Anatoly, and share it. If you build something, people will see it, and then you’ll have kind of innate sense of accountability because you’ll be connected those people, and you won’t want to let them down. It’ll just totally consume your life. But, it’s awesome.
Chase (27:07):
By the way, if you build something really cool, or you write something really cool, tag me in it. I’ll share it so other people can find it, and then you can inspire other people to-
Brian (27:18):
Join a hackathon. Win some money.
Chase (27:20):
Exactly. Anyways, Brian, this was awesome. I’m so glad we got to have this call. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for talking to me. Any last words?
Brian (27:31):
Thank you, Chase. I mean, this whole past couple months has totally exceeded my expectations, and there’s real opportunity in this space. I think if you’re listening to this, reach out to Chase, build something. He’s a man who knows everybody. He can connect you to the right people, and he can teach you a lot. I’m super thankful for knowing him, and I’m super thankful for this space.
Chase (27:51):
All right, man. Have a good one. Cheers.
