Data Science + Web3: Lam’s Inquisitivness for tech | DevStories
Meet Lam Trinh, a Web3 Developer & Data Scientist who has been working in the automotive industry for a long time now. He handles marketing sales and strategy among a bunch of other things at his company. While Lam has been on his Web3 journey for only a couple of years, he’s accomplished a lot and his story is an impressive tale to tell.
Read ahead to know more.
How did you discover blockchain technology? What made you step into this ecosystem?
I first got to know about Web 3 through a conference, this was back in like 2018. And I just went home, picked up some books on blockchain tech, and read everything I could. Even though I knew a bit about Web3, I still didn’t get much into coding until after I started investing back in 2020.
So while I was teaching myself data science, I also taught myself a little bit of solidity just out of curiosity. I would say my experience with solidity is still in the learning phase but it’s been quite fun and interesting.
Where are you working right now?
So right now I’m working as a data scientist at SusLabs. It’s a FinTech company based in Tokyo, Japan. But on my own time, I do a lot of Web3-related work, I try and participate in more and more hackathons because I feel like that’ll be a great platform to showcase what I have learned and what I can build.
First I joined the East Vietnam Hackathon last year in Vietnam. And then afterward I’ve been honing my skills I hope to be able to build more interesting products in the future. Right now Web3 is more or less like a side passion but eventually, I’m gonna immerse myself more into shifting over to doing full-time Web 3. That’s the aspiration.
What excites you about the Web3 space?
I think that there are probably a lot of things that are left to be discovered in Web3 space. And, that is what makes it the most interesting.
I’ve been super interested in knowing how Big data, AI, and blockchain. I think that the intersection of all those elements you know would help to enable new things that will help to improve our daily lives. And I believe we are living in a similar era to the 2000s, there are a lot of discoveries innovations, new products & technology are built every single day.
What was your first hackathon experience like?
The first hackathon I took part in was Eth Vietnam, last year in November. This was an independently organized event, but by all means, I think the format is somewhat similar to the Eth Global Hackathon but it also had its nuances.
Nevertheless, it’s a very well-organized event. I enjoyed it. It started with me trying to find teammates and once the team was formed we started having discussions. We had about 10 different ideas. I at least had seven or eight different ideas of my own. In the end, we ended up choosing this idea to make a smart contract an alarm clock. I played the role of a product manager in the team.
I did a bit of everything. Anything from helping with the front end to presenting pitches to the judges as well. I did some coding as well. But yeah mainly was learning from teammates. We ended up winning the Polygon Bounty prize. It was a bronze bounty prize.
It was very encouraging. And I think that’s basically what prompted me to join more hackathons in the future.
What was the project that you built in Eth Tokyo?
This project is all being showcased on the East Global website you can see the prize that we have won. Our project was Octoplorer.
An AI-powered blockchain explorer (for Ethereum & Polygon) that makes querying blockchain data as easy as typing in natural language. Get human-readable answers in formats like tables, images, and graphs, so you can obtain any data you need.
Potential use cases for this web app:
- Obtain NFT images owned by a certain entity. This could be a in terms of the number of followers, get the Lens handles for the top 5 most popular ids.
- Obtain the aggregate statistics on certain NFT collections on popular marketplaces (for now Opensea and Rarible)
- Obtain data for recent transactions within the past 7 days for a certain wallet
- For an Ethereum Name Service name (for example, “dwr.eth”), we can get the Farcaster name, Farcaster account details, connected address, and all token balances and images
To know more about this project, visit https://ethglobal.com/showcase/octoplorer-block-query-made-easy-pdgmt
It was a very smooth & seamless experience. Of course, you know since it was a hackathon 36 hours is limited time. We couldn’t build out the entire product but we did the best we could and presented it.
What are the projects that like what are you going to work on next?
The next thing I’ll be working on, to be honest, I would like to continue working on this project but at the moment I’m planning to join the Eth Lisbon. Well you know for every hackathon you have to do a new project You can’t you know use an existing one. So the team is working on coming up with the ideas.
What’s your favorite chain to build on and what’s the toughest one?
I guess due to my probably limited experience and exposure I’m only familiar with mainly EVM. I know a little bit about Rust and Polkadot. I mean it’s probably a common answer but due to my limited experience, I guess I have to say it would be EVM its pretty convenient and easy to view. Of course, I would like to explore others as well. Try to build out on other chains as well too to see what it would be like.
What do you think are the challenges that you most often face at hackathons?
An obvious challenge is that we don’t have enough time. Which means we would have to sacrifice sleep. But I think that’s all the fun of it too, to be honest. Cause I think people are getting more productive when there’s a tangible deadline that’s actually like an urgent one instead of having no deadline. The main challenge would probably be finding the right team, capable of building the project for the hackathon.
I might not be the best smart contract developer or front-end developer but at least I do know what would be it take to put everything together. I think that’s the main skill set I can always do. Adapt to and know what is required to go from zero to one.
Lam’s strong interest in technical knowledge, excellent communication skills, and strategic thinking have made him a remarkable Web3 Dev. We hope his story inspires all the newbie Web3 devs out there.
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