We recently had a conversation with Brian Hennessey-Hsien, Head of Developer Relations at Sui, about open source, decentralization, and developer achievement on Sui.
A few days ago, we interviewed Brian Hennessey-Hsieh, director of developer relations at the Sui Foundation, to discuss his views on the development process of developers in Web3 and how his team assists developers in developing on Sui .
Please briefly introduce yourself and your background or experience in the blockchain industry.
That's a good question, but I often don't answer it well. I've spent about 20 years working in open source since graduating from college. I started in-depth research from GCC, Linux, etc., and then entered the field of cloud computing such as OpenStack.
I've always liked open source, not just technology, it's a lot of fun when people get together, even if they don't get paid, as long as they work together to get a job done. Especially in today's world of global distribution, it's cool for people to work together to get a job done. I've come to believe more and more that open, transparent collaboration is the key to software development.
So after I finished my PhD, I started trying to find a job related to open source software development, but I couldn't find a job until I joined Uber in 2017. I worked at Uber for about 4 years and created the open source initiatives department. Until I got a job offer from Coinbase. Before engaging with the team at Coinbase Cloud, I was skeptical about the crypto industry, and even so, I was very interested in the technology.
As a computer science PhD, this technology has a natural appeal to me. Putting distributed systems, cryptography, and programming languages together fascinates me, and I want to find out. I've been exploring blockchain, trying to understand the technology, use cases and how people use it to solve real problems. I was also hesitant to join full time because I would have to give up my current job. But I'm interested in Coinbase Cloud, it's a company focused on infrastructure, essentially providing infrastructure for people to be productive and solve problems, and that's what attracted me. If considered from this level, it has nothing to do with the blockchain. So I thought at the time, you can try it. So I decided to join them, and that's how I got into the Web3 space. After that, I joined Mysten Labs as head of developer relations at the Sui Foundation.
You used to be skeptical about the encryption industry, what made you decide to get involved in this industry?
This question is very interesting. Let me talk about my views on Web3 from three different angles.
First is my job. My job is to help create more open collaboration and governance, because fundamentally, we need to make the system truly decentralized. We need to put the principles of decentralization into practice. When I focus on this goal, everything makes sense for Fenix. It's a journey, so to speak. It's like an open source project, a group of people have created this project, and now what we have to do is bring the whole community to participate, not only how they participate, but also the knowledge that can make a meaningful contribution.
Second is our technology. Sui is new, but we know we have solid, reliable technology. However, how do we explain technology itself and how to help them solve problems to the public is actually a problem. We should not be like everyone's general discussion of Web3 technology, we should understand why we need these technologies. You need to understand the characteristics of these technologies, you should consider whether the technology can solve the problems you encounter, if the answer is yes, then use it. If it doesn't make sense, look for something else.
The last one is the application and current use case aspect. Some make sense to me and some don't, it's a huge range. But I think that breadth is a testament to the value of the technology. I don't know how long it will take for it to become widely available and become the new backbone of the Internet. But I believe that the future will one day come true, and the longer I've been in the industry, the more I believe in that view.
Some people may not be familiar with the concept of the developer relations part of the Layer 1 blockchain, can you share the team and your daily work?
Personally, I think the main point of L1 developer relations is to decentralize and facilitate communication between developers. Decentralization is basically part open source, part open collaboration and open governance. You need a group of people to make sure the principles, community development methods, and culture are well established. What we need to think about is: how to interact with developers? How to engage and empower the community? How to accept community contributions?
Taking the improvement proposal process as an example, how do we ensure it is fair and inclusive while at the same time being the best for the technology? The reality is that there are not many contributors who understand the technology in depth the first time. The thing you have to think about is how do you get them started and educate them so that they can eventually contribute deeply?
We have drawn many principles from the open source world, including open collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, inclusivity, and community. From a certain point of view, I think open source supports Web3, and Web3 breaks the way of open source.
What can attract developers to Web3, and how can they succeed in this industry?
The first developers to join the Sui network are visionary technical experts. The true believers, maxis, are a group of people who really lead the industry forward. They have gone through many cycles in this industry, have failed and succeeded, learned a lot, and have their own ideas for improving Web3 and Sui.
The next wave is hard to pin down. Going back to our earlier discussion, this is a technology that, like any other, has advantages and disadvantages. Before thinking about how to attract developers to Web3, we need to think about how to present this technology so that developers can use it to solve their problems. This has nothing to do with Web2 and Web3, it may be a technology that has always been able to solve your problem in a scalable way. So how exactly do we educate people the right way?
Once we can do this well, we will attract as many developers as the Web2 world. If technologies in the Web3 space can solve developers' problems in an efficient, high-performance, large-scale, and low-cost way, they should adopt it, right? Of course, they will also evaluate this technology in the same way they evaluate other technologies.
If a developer is mid-career and wants to move to building on Sui, how do they get started?
It's always best to know the underlying theory. Some understanding of distributed systems, cryptography, and various programming languages is a good start. You need to have these basics to keep moving forward, otherwise you risk creating or designing something that doesn't fit Sui.
At the same time, developers can choose which field they want to specialize in, such as application development, core protocol development, and so on. If you want to be a protocol developer or a core contributor to the network, you need to have a very deep understanding of distributed systems and cryptography, especially cryptography, which is the key to building blocks in the blockchain Base. Sui is open source, the source code is there, read the docs, play around with the code, modify a few things and see what happens.
If you wish to become an application developer, there are no restrictions here. You can use our examples, or find a project, and see if you can understand it by cloning, building, running, etc.
Communicating with other people can gain more. There are a lot of Web3 related activities out there, but remember, pick the right ones. Some events are developer-only, where you can connect with other developers and contributors. This is part of our theme community, no matter online or offline, find your community, find your belonging. You need to know people who can actually work with you and give you directions and advice.
The Sui community is very open and vibrant. We believe this is the future of technology and want to educate as many people as possible. Sui Builder House is a builders-only event, which gives you the chance to chat with engineers and builders of all experience levels.
What plans and tools are currently being prepared by Sui to accelerate the construction of Sui developers and improve productivity?
We are still in the early stages, and there is a lack of educational content for the time being, in short, such as some documentation. These will definitely be our next focus, making sure our content across multiple media formats reaches different groups, from beginners to professional developers. At the same time, localization is also important, and we hope that our content can be easily read and understood by everyone.
With this as a guideline, we will try to design our Builder House more carefully, make sure we get feedback, and make customized designs for participants based on this. We publish the content we create on YouTube or other media outlets so that everyone can see it.
Tooling is another important topic, we already have most of the tools but I hope the community can help make it better. I've seen a lot of good SDKs and IDEs, but usually these take time and are hard to develop. At the same time, these are also very difficult to realize. So feel free to reach out to us anytime, we'd love to chat with you and let us know how the Foundation can help. Core contributors are also working on how to make developers develop better and more smoothly.
Because the Sui network is very new and is developing rapidly. We encourage the development team to conduct in-depth exchanges with the community and make progress together. If new developments emerge that have the potential to change the flow of execution, we want to be aware of them as quickly as possible and make adjustments as quickly as possible. Forming a positive feedback loop is very important.
What development trends are you looking forward to in the community at the moment? How will these trends affect Sui's future development?
People are exploring more innovative ways to use new features. How should they use dynamic fields or Programmable Transaction Blocks ? People are finding and thinking about how to use these features to improve existing code bases or create new use cases.
But we need to articulate and explain how they can better use these new tools, and encourage developers to use them. People are gradually learning about Sui's technical performance and advantages, researching it in depth from different angles, and testing it in real life. For example, is this theoretical and what are the practical application scenarios?
It's an exciting time, and that's where I feel like you can make technological breakthroughs because you have a group of smart, passionate people who start thinking about something more.
Is there a specific application or experience you want developers to build on Sui?
There are many, but personally, going back to the above open source and open collaboration, I've seen a lot of different versions, but I really want to see an amazing solution, that is, how on earth can we use a Reward contributors in a fair, transparent and verifiable way.
For example, if a contributor proposes a patch to the network or a SIP (Improvement Proposal) , how do we verify this contribution? How to measure the degree of contribution and reward it appropriately? How to ensure that the distribution of rewards is fair, just, private and agreed by everyone? If we can find a good solution, this will enable a new wave of collaboration and drive decentralization even further.
About Sui Network
Sui is an L1 public chain redesigned and constructed based on first principles, aiming to provide creators and developers with a development platform capable of carrying the next billion users in Web3. Applications on Sui are based on the Move smart contract language and are horizontally scalable, allowing developers to support a wide range of application development quickly and at low cost. For more information: https://linktr.ee/sui_apac
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