Token on Tour: Days 0 & 1 at DevCon IV 🦄

4 of the Token team have headed out to Prague for DevCon IV (it’s the first time at DevCon for Mischa, Yannis and I). Here’s a short recap of our highlights from Day 0 and Day 1.

DevCon kicked off with Vitalik presenting the Serenity update to Ethereum: describing the upcoming integration of Casper and sharding. This ended in a mass singalong by the full auditorium: check out the full presentation here

My highlights (so far):

• Alex Van de Sande’s talk on Universal Ethereum Logins. This was about the industry’s need for UX and usability improvements — and how a Universal Ethereum Login could help fix issues in the usual login system by creating an ENS username. Overall there’s a big focus on UX and Usability at DevCon — there’s an awareness that to get to mass market adoption the industry has to make big strides forward in UX. Alex touched on the K factor (which can be used as a measure of product virality)— the slide below sums up nicely why we as an industry currently have a problem!

Problems with the K factor!

• Aya Miyaguchi kicked off the DevCon keynotes with a thoughtful presentation on the need for the ‘why’ rather than just the ‘how’ we build, as well as the culture she is helping build at the Ethereum Foundation. There were numerous gems from her talk — one of my favourites being ‘without philosophy the tools can’t change the world’ — why technology has to connect to a higher purpose. I also learnt what Kaizan means (see below).

Aya Miyaguchi’s keynote

• UX Audit: Every day there’s the chance to drop in and have your product go through a UX audit with a group of designers who the Ethereum Foundation have brought to the conference. Mel and I met Sebastian who spent an hour looking at our app, giving us a lot of detailed and practical feedback. Short recap — he’s impressed with what we’ve created — and had some interesting ideas around how we evolve and optimise our sign up flow.

Design Audit of the TokenCard app

• I also attended an interesting workshop on Mechanical Design meets UX. This took the concept of cake sharing (!) and applied game theory to it, getting us to think about incentives, rewards and penalties, whilst also considering UX and design. Oh, we also got to eat the cake, which was nice.

Finally — Mel and I also had the chance to meet with a couple of very our Token community members — it’s great to be able to put some faces to names.

The rest of the team

Mischa’s been at many talks over the last two days. He’s been learning about Vyper (attending a two hour workshop ‘Getting started with Vyper’) and also chatting to other cool projects — such as the guys from Maker and also Argent.

Yannis’s highlights:

1. talking to guys from Runtime verification (an open source tool for smart contract formal verification).
2. ENS Ethereum Name Service on-boarding booth (registering and start using ens domains right away)