Get to Know the Team: Eduardo Pelitti

Welcome to our exciting series, where we invite you to delve into the vibrant world of Nakama and get to know the brilliant minds behind our groundbreaking endeavors!

In this unique journey, we will be presenting exclusive text-based interviews with our team members, giving you a front-row seat to the passion, dedication, and expertise that fuels our innovation.

Hey, Eduardo! Tell us about your developer’s journey. How did you get started in the Web3 development space?

Hi! I have almost 20 years of experience working in tech, and I’ve been through a bunch of roles, starting as a young QA at the age of 18, testing mobile games, then working in account management and later in product development, finally landing in frontend programming, which has been my passion for the past 10 years. Around 4 years ago, I started getting in touch with Web3, and for almost 3 years now, I’ve been developing Web3 applications non-stop.

Could you provide details about the projects you’re currently involved in as a developer at Nakama? Additionally, what are your specific responsibilities and tasks within these endeavors?

I work as Lead Frontend Engineer for Nakama, and my role requires me to be split between all the different projects we have going on right now.

I’ve worked on Deepr Finance since the very beginning, coding, and coordinating an amazing frontend team. And, I’m now working on Virtue, plus other upcoming projects we’ll unveil once the time is right.

How does Web3 development differ from the practices and approaches commonly used in the realm of Web2 development?

Well, in the case of Frontend development, you definitely have to adjust, it’s sort of a paradigm shift from many basic rules of Web2.

For starters, authentication in Web2 is based on emails, usernames and passwords, so all of your mindset is centered around having these elements as the starting point of most applications, whereas in Web3 you connect your wallet to a dApp and most of the times actual user accounts don’t exist (because most of the times they don’t need to exist). These new abstractions are hard at first, and you have to discard a lot of previous knowledge of UX best practices.

This also impacts data collection practices, Web2 loves our data, so we’re used to building profiles and accumulating all sorts of information on users. This is a big red flag in most of the Web3 space, as we aim for a more anonymous, in terms of users, yet more transparent space, in terms of intent from companies and websites.

With blockchain dApps, traditional databases don’t exist as the source of information for websites, another big change if you were used to storing data on SQL or Mongo and reading it from a REST API. New concepts such as subgraphs and Contract Reads/Writes can be hard to grasp at first but eventually it all becomes part of the Web3 mental model.

I’ve had to learn a lot of new concepts in the past few years, some of which challenged previous hard truths I had learned not too long ago.

How do you stay updated with the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchain technology, including new protocols, tools, and best practices?

This is particularly tricky since things really are on a vertiginous path forward (sometimes a bit sideways as well). I use X (Twitter) a lot as a source of information on the latest trends and relevant news in the space.

We also discuss best practices and new versions of libraries with the frontend team on a regular basis. As a team, we are very driven by industry best practices and we love building beautiful UI with great user experience, so staying up to date with the latest technologies is a key part of how we like to advance our craft.

What’s one valuable tip you would offer to a developer who is new to working with Web3 technologies and blockchain?

If you’re trying to get into Frontend development for Web3 dApps, I’d suggest building really small concept apps that connect all the elements of the ecosystem (wallets, reads/writes, subgraphs). That way you’ll get a good grasp at what the elements at play are, and the rest is just growing the monster into an actual dApp.

Having a good understanding of the basic concepts and abstractions of Blockchain is key, as well.

And if you’re coming from Web2 into Web3, replace databases with contract state, APIs with RPC reads/writes and subgraphs, ditch emails and data collection and dismantle your concepts on UX/UI, expectations and loading times.

In what ways is AI impacting the role of a developer and reshaping the nature of their work?

We’re seeing rapid growth of AI driven solutions that simplify developer experience greatly. Having code assistants always available in the form of chat based AIs is a great way of unlocking certain problems, and tools like Github Copilot will also change the way we do work.

Development is always tending for more automatic solutions to common problems so we can focus on solving the real problems, so I think changes are going to be massive and very positive for most currently slow manual processes requiring too much human interaction for actions that have little added value.

I’m excited for all these changes, but also a bit wary of potential abuses. It definitely feels like a double-edged sword.

Thanks a lot, Eduardo!

Got more questions for Eduardo? Drop them below! We’d love to hear what’s on your mind, and we’ll happily pass them along to him.

Stay tuned for the next episode!