Meet Confio series #1
Hello, World!
We are happy to start the “Meet Confio” series so that you get to know Confio and its people.
I sat down with Orkun and we had a nice chat.
- Who are you, Orkun?
I’m a 24 years old, from Turkey.
(Then he made a joke that when I was typing “24”, he felt my jealousy, which is totally not true! Hmm…maybe a little bit? But only a little… ;) )
My blockchain experience started about 1.5 years ago when my friend started his blockchain project. Before then, I knew about Bitcoin, but just as an amateur, not really an “expert”. With my friend’s project, I started to get into it and I said to myself, “This is it! This is something that I should be doing!”
Blockchain has its promises, and it aligns a lot with my concerns. It matches my ideology.
Also, I can use my skill set and contribute to it.
Confio is the 4th company that I have ever worked for and the 2nd blockchain company.
2. What do you do in Confio?
Well, I’m a multifunctional guy. A dev evangelist and software developer is my official title here. I can do coding and enjoy helping people.
I’m like a bridge between dev people and business people. I try to take responsibility for the business side as well as development, trying to help in outreach to validators or developer community and clients, etc.
I make people laugh and yeah, I’m a lovely guy, I think I bring youth to the company, bringing energy.
3. More specifically, Orkun’s contribution to Confio so far was;
- Kick off/Inject DeFi idea to the company
- Setup/Organize the infrastructure to manage community(Discord)
- Write tutorials and documentation on docs.cosmwasm.com
- Give people helping hands when onboarding, hackathons, workshops
- Contribute to smart contracts
4. Can you describe how you work?
When I work on tutorials, this is how I do. I start a project, then I jump right in to implement the basic project, then I struggle in the complexity and then during all this, I find out the key question, ask that to my team members to get the answers. Meantime I repeat this, I can get a bigger picture, then I start to write a paper, a step-by-step guide. That is how I write tutorials.
5. What have you learned with Confio?
For starters, I learned how it feels when working with very competent and good people, such a nice feeling.
Then, my English got better both written and spoken.
Thirdly, I got over my anxiety, fear of presentation in front of the camera. The first time when I hosted a workshop, I was very nervous, but later on, I got more confident.
We want to grow our dev community. That is why we are hosting workshops. Ethan, our CEO and co-founder of Confio hosted the first CosmWasm workshop, but I saw people were overwhelmed. So I suggested that I host “beginner level” workshops myself, separate from Ethan’s. The biggest challenge in preparing workshops was being able to come up with the right plan, that people can easily understand, basic content but at the same time, interesting and useful topics. I, myself am still learning too, but I am catching up step by step.
Language-wise, I learned the basics of Rust and how to write wasm code, how to spin up, launch, and manage testnets. Also, I learned what could go wrong, the complexity of launching a big network with many validators.
Last but not least, I learned how remote work should be done: working async, meaning providing task completion that enables people to work on it smoothly. Also learned to prepare plans for meetings.
I guess overall, I became more competent and professional.
6. What do you think about Confio’s working environment? In general, including colleagues, communication, culture…
(He just gave me a big smile and a thumb up to answer this question)
Confio people are very nice.
To me, one of the best parts is that these people respect your life, and acknowledge that I have a life outside of work too. They improve not only in the workplace, other aspects of life as well.
We still have some problems with typical remote companies, like communication but we are exploring diverse solutions and improving them.
Confio People valued your creativity. This means that Confio not only values hard work but motivates you to make your mad ideas hit the shore, you know? But it is not like unconditional support, if they see problems, they are not hesitant to bring up what they see as problems. I guess this is another way of Confio supporting you.
Wanna join us?
Find our open positions here, and tell us your story!
