this is a work in progress
This is a lengthy read. It should give you an idea of what Devutnia is about, who is responsible for it and why it was created in the first place. This manifesto is being written with an intention of having a convenient flow that leads you through whats and whys of Devutnia's existence.
It can be read in parts and you should be able to enjoy it too. If the experience isn't enjoyable for you, please open an issue on GitHub and we'll discuss what to do with it ("It's too long" doesn't count though). I find playing with words quite amusing, so every feedback helps to hone my skills in this department.
This manifesto is to introduce Devutnia to you and give you time to think if you want to support us with your skills or your money. We're not asking for money now, because we have yet to prove ourselves, that we can deliver. Hedera's hackathon is a perfect challenge to prove our worth and maybe win something to help use kick-start this project. (update: 21.12.22 - yep, nope, life had other plans, we failed with non-participation).
Read the manifesto, think it over and wait for our results first, before you give us your time and money.
If, after reading this you still want to help us, head on to talents section to find what you're looking for.
if (you.includes('time') || you.includes('beverage')) return Menus.skip();
else return SeriousMenu.use();- Devutnia is no ordinary company
- Not quite the origin story
- Why am I even here
- The cake is a lie
- Is there anybody out there?
- I am a big boy now!
- Life is sweet, but reality can't eat sugar
- "These aren't the droids you're looking for"
- Attack of the clones
- How about... a holocratic DAO?
- "All your base are belong to us"
- Fight the system, fix the system!
- So what about that DAO?
- Why Hedera?
- Why not Ethereum though?
- All right then, but will there be NFTs?
- Henlo, this not it
- Unicorns and rainbows don't make money
- Say I want to participate, where is your pitchdeck?
- Roadmap? What roadmap?
- What's in it for me and what's in it for you?
- Contact us
What makes us different? We work for the juniors, we don't work the juniors.
The word devutnia doesn't exist. Part of it was borrowed from a Polish word drewutnia (drevootnia) which translates to lumberyard or woodshed and it means a place where they shape wood. Devutnia shapes developers.
Devutnia's founders know what a "misfit" means. We are neuro-atypical and we want to help people like us figure out their own path in the world of technology.
Devutnia started as a brand of an IT/Graphic Design company my wife and I own. My wife designs logos and brand books and draws illustrations for books. I work as a CTO in an open-science startup and I am a dev-for-hire. I mentor juniors, I lead IT projects and I dabble in software architecture.
Due to my neuro-atypical nature I am good at spotting patterns. Especially when it comes to human behaviours. I hardly grasp the necessity for human interactions, yet I am really good at finding talents and understanding individual needs. I can also strip problems into binaries and pick most likely outcomes based on previously observed results.
Simply put: if I understand each team member's needs and the company's problems, I can usually draw a high employee-experience-oriented and low business-costs defence plans for the team. Sounds great, but it hardly ever works, because micro-management is a thing.
I am sort of an unwilling leader. I seem to get myself into situations that are about to become inconvenient for me and I manage to fix them before they get the better of me. It worked great when I was in school, but when I went to work and started at the university I realised the world is not my oyster. Manipulating pre-school peers into playing with different toys (so that I could play by myself in a corner) was as easy as supervising a team of my corporate peers (so that we could deliver good results to our superiors), but that was it. I hit one of many glass ceilings in my life - corporate middle management and people's unwillingness to improve things around them. I didn't want to become one of these people in order to achieve something more in my life. I don't have that kind of personality and the personality I have (INFP-A) doesn't have what it takes to make it up the corporate ladder.
Before I became a software developer I had a repetitive job as an accounts payable/accounts receivable agent. Call a client, send an email, add to SAP, add to Excel, add to a website, confirm in SAP, rinse and repeat. I had a lot of other things to do, but the core functionality of my work was as repetitive as it gets (and I worked at a conveyor belt peeling roots off of flower bulbs for 8hrs a day - I never thought something can be more repetitive than that!). After a year of doing the work over and over again I learned the processes, systems and procedures enough to learn some VBA and write a macro that automated core parts of my work. The macro would do a week of my work in 5 to 8 minutes. I would come in on Monday, run the macro and sit on my ass for the rest of the week. I was so bored I started improving things around me. And this is where the real life kicked me on my sitting ass: people don't like it when things change around them (heck, I am neuro-atypical, talk to me about changes to routines). Only two people in my entire team wanted me to improve their workloads. The rest looked at me funny for mentioning it on one of the dailys. Even the upper management wasn't that impressed with my beyond-six-sigma improvement and six-sigma is every corporation's wet dream (or so I have been told). The cake IS a lie.
I didn't have much to do at work, so I started learning HTML/JS. I wanted to write a web service with a UI that would simplify automating processes for my peers. My "slacking off" has been noticed by the upper management and some clients have been taken away from me. I wasn't happy - not only my good work hasn't been properly appreciated, I was actually suffering from it. I wasn't at fault here. My superiors have been informed about the situation: "I have automated all my core processes. My position is obsolete. Give me something else to do".
It didn't work. I found out that the guy who took over my clients was shitting on me behind my back (the fool CC'd me on an email to a manager of a different branch), so I put in my resignation and went unemployed to learn how to code and start my own company.
At that point in my life I have had enough of people misusing my engagement in their companies and preventing me from achieving my full potential to their advantage. I don't think I could have been more clear to my superiors: "use me, I can improve workloads for your subordinates".
Sadly, there is no personal approach in corporations. They advertise it on their websites and they talk about it on their onboardings, but when push comes to shove, there is no personal approach, because managers are stuck in a rat race. There is a long line of people between what the company wants and what employees get, so how can it ever get personal?
The revelation about the lack of personal approach freed me from the corporate ladder's chains. Going unemployed ($200 a month - state funded) for 4 months before finding my first internship and then starting an IT company 2 years later was the single best decision in my life. Turns out, all I needed was a bit of creative space coming from me being my own boss and a bit of responsibility for my own decisions. I became a CTO of an open-science startup with only 11 months of experience (now, thinking back on it, it was a huge mistake - don't ever use juniors to lead your IT project unsupervised!).
With me being my own boss I could make my own plans, take responsibility for them, learn from my mistakes and... lol, who am I kidding. I was a "CTO" of a startup that was only starting (the first round came 1,5 yrs later), so I had to work for someone else to make ends meet. I was only 11 months into the career so I pretty much knew shit about shit. Aside from holding a position of a CTO without holding the proper knowledge, I had a corporate-IT junior-level full-time job at a company with 20M daily users and nothing really changed in my life. The glass ceiling was still there, but my hobby was my work now. I was actually getting paid good money at my 9-5 for doing what I always wanted to do - sit in front of the screen and solve logical problems all day.
The glass ceiling problem became manageable, because I was not yet good at my new career. I am a self-learner. I can understand why the privilege of "having strong opinions" comes only after one reaches certain experience threshold - if you don't know what you're talking about, your opinion will never matter, because someone will always try to point out your inexperience. As long as your lack of knowledge lets them bully you, you will not be taken seriously. It took me 4 years of learning to code, neurotically analysing the market, fighting (and loosing to) technological debt, battling my imposter syndrome, battling other devs, and battling my neuro-atypical shortcomings to get me to understand that my good ideas mean jack shit if I lack knowledge to make them happen.
Maybe I was a little bit harsh towards my corporate-managers during my corporate-finance life? Maybe they wanted to make my ideas happen, but they didn't have the skill at hand? Maybe some things were simply beyond their pay-grade and they had their own glass ceilings?
When I switched careers from finance to programming I had a chance of seeing how projects are built and developed on different kinds of levels of organisations. I built admin panels for corporate analytics, I built MVPs for startups and built mobile applications (when I say "built" I mean I was included in the process from being a CSS copier to being a project leader). And all these things I built were for somebody else. My name is buried beneath NDAs and contracts and almost all of these projects are dead, because people who I built them for couldn't figure it out amongst themselves (so no LinkedIn or GitHub history) or are used internally and I can't even say anything about them. There is nothing to my name after 5 years of career. There are traces of me here and there, but they really say nothing about my skills.
I don't like it. I don't like the fact that all my hard junior commercial work is not there to benefit me in the long term. I don't like that juniors are trained at a conveyor belt and don't get the chance of exploring their own skills. I don't like it that juniors need years of "commercial experience" before even being able to get the job.
Of course this is not always the case and there are awesome companies that support more "IT-aware" approach to software development (all Devutnia's partners), but I have gone through two huge (100+ candidates) recruitment processes as a solo dev and let me tell you this: based on a pool of over 500 dev portfolios and resumes that went through my hands during my career and the patterns they all share show (again, I am not a recruiter) that juniors do not have it easy these days to advance their careers properly. Simply due to the sheer amount of people trying their luck in this industry.
I know it sounds bad, but after 40 resumes and portfolios I have seen them all. And I am ashamed to admit that my ambition to give proper feedback and code review was in vain. It is impossible to be impartial and honest after going through dozens of todo lists and burger builders.
Times have changed since my first rodeo. I see juniors started building spotify and twitter clones. Youtubers and coding courses started teaching how to build them and holy shit! I don't think I can do it after 5 years. It's a huge project. One needs to know many things in order to do it properly. I don't think any junior after a coding school can do it. And they can't. I follow a bunch of FB groups for juniors and the proof is in the pudding. Sometimes they can't even debug stuff properly. So why are these things appearing in juniors' resumes? Who is expecting that of them? Why are they being taught this, instead of this?
How about we finally do something about IT (pun intended)? About these unrealistic expectations bestowed upon juniors by overly-marketed industry? We have to do something about "1 year of commercial experience" for a junior position. We have to do something about producing juniors who think they can code, because they recreated a big service from a video.
My idea is a holocratic DAO, where juniors have real access to real life projects, where they are mentored by seniors who actually care about juniors' careers and where they don't need to have "commercial experience" to start making a name for themselves in the industry. Devutnia wants to offer juniors a chance of discovering what kind of developers they are and what drives them most in IT.
There is no micro-management in Devutnia. We adhere to holocratic values. Your experience and opinions are important for Devutnia's future and I believe that applying personal approach and understanding each other's personalities makes for a smoother team experience.
Devutnia 1.0 could not function in its original form.
Devutnia started as a self-funded and bootstrapped project. I have been working 2-3 jobs my entire career (again, atypical nature, I can work 30+hrs straight if I am into it) so I had some extra funds put away to invest. I came up with Devutnia 1.0 (not a DAO yet) in July 2021. I gathered a community of 50 juniors (some are still active) and I applied my own ideas of running a co-shared business.
I tried running Devutnia through my company, but the recent changes in my country's fiscal system made it very difficult for me to hire juniors per task/hour. There are many juniors who shift careers and they often are unemployed in-between. In my country, it is illegal for me to hire them in the most convenient way for them (a contract - they get more money), because I have to offer an unemployed person a full-time position. If I were to do that, my whole budget would be gone very fast and I wouldn't be able to help as many people as I'd like. I want to efficiently help juniors on a per task basis. The system does not help me help them help other people change their careers.
My inner righteous self gets super unhappy about governements regulating things in such short sighted way. I have MSc in Economics. My bachelor thesis back in 2014 was: "The regulatory barriers of running micro and small companies". I wrote it based on my business of selling insurance, which failed. I do not have the personality to sell things to people - I can read their haptics and see they don't like it. I know how to run a business, I know how it is to fail in business and I know what a business needs.
Governements are like school systems. They offer boxes and you HAVE TO fit in them. These boxes are good for some things and terrible for others. It is unreasonable to expect that the gov't is able to service every single citizen's needs. It is reasonable though, to expect that you will be left alone to do your business and decide how much and how you want to contribute to society. It should also be up to you to decide how much money you want to give to help the government run the country. Nothing is for free and our politicians flying around the world is paid for by us.
Imagine you are a businessperson in a country that started a war. You are fucked and you support the war with the tax money you pay for running a business in that country. Your personal opinions do not matter. If you want to eat, you have to work. If you speak wrong, your freedoms are taken away. You will not be able to find a job in a country engaged in a war. Imagine that your self employment is the life line between happiness and pain. And now imagine where your taxes go when they don't support your local micro-economy.
Some existing systems are good, but they need the software update. Some could even work from home.
It is not that I am an anarchist. I am a non-conformist. Alas, here's to freedom-encroaching systems:
Devutnia's team is working on a blockchain contract that describes Devutnia's rules and regulations of participating in this collective. We are building this DAO on Hedera, because my philosophy behind Devutnia works with this blockchain.
There will be 4 levels of participation in Devutnia's DAO:
- core team - (lumberjacks) - people who invest their time, work and money to help juniors and other developers achieve their potential. This team is what makes Devutnia go round. If you decide to join in this team, we expect you will be openly communicating with us, that you will be working with us on developing cool products and bettering the IT world.
- mentors - (overseers) - people who build teams of juniors and mentor them on different projects. They are the pilars of Devutnia's community, providing knowledge, direction and "IT-awareness" to their teams.
- developers - (carpenters) - people who join Devutnia, because they want to learn about building software products and hope to become IT business owners themselves. They want to be included in building Devutnia, but not really engage too much until they are sure for themselves.
- developers - (woodpeckers) - developers who participate in Devutnia to moonlight, find cool people to build their own projects with (and Devutnia's help) and make some money on the side and some tokens for that cold wallet.
I know these team names are cheesy. I am cheesy.
These levels are fluid. You can change them at will. Going down the levels is easy. Going up requires some elbow grease (you can always buy an NFT to cut it short - support the artist, support Devutnia). Your level doesn't prevent you from making decisions in Devutnia. It is going to be a DAO - if you invest your work with us, you have something to say.
We have these levels, because we apply certain responsibility to people being on these levels. We don't care about KPIs and SLAs (we do, but not in a crunchy way). We care that developers who work with us learn about building IT projects, we care that peoples' personalities are taken into consideration and we care that people communicate their problems, so that they can be fixed before they really become one.
I am old-school in many ways. Sort of like an Atari console. I used to break joysticks playing Boulder Dash... Anyway, I come from open-science and fighting paywalls. I understand the actual need for blockchain and its technologies. I want to use blockchain to build useful utilities that:
- last on the Internet forever - hello web archive,
- are used every day by every one - hello
<button>, - actually support artists' work - hello NFTs,
- claim to be eco-friendly - hello Hedera,
- don't have The Wall of a paywall to enter the fun - hello gas and minting fees and goodbye Ethereum.
I started thinking about creating some kind of Devutnia's token in July last year. I didn't know much about it though (from developer's perspective), so I set my organic filters on finding out about available technologies and reading their docs. Standard dev research.
I have been watching Cofeezilla for the last 3 years and I am aware of how Ethereum is used. I was still going to give it a chance, because it's foolish to judge a tool before learning how it works. Also, creating something unique (I have some ideas) on Ethereum was likely to give me resources to start Devutnia for real. There was one problem though. It was very expensive to enter. The prices of gas now, versus two years ago are multiple times higher!
Everything costs you might say. I just wrote a few chapters above that nothing's free. Am I a hypocrite? Maybe. But have you given a thought as to way Ethereum is so expensive to create things with? Because it's popular. Because there are thousands of copies of the same tokens and NFTs and thousands of exactly the same contracts polluting the chain with their unnecessarily overblown valuations and calculations. I am sort of a technological purist - I can't participate in something that I think is broken and I don't see it getting fixed. I don't think it can be fixed, so I can't be there when it breaks, (UPDATE: I am reading this 9 months later, lol, was I right or what?) because I will never forgive myself for being greedy, cutting corners and killing this idea.
I know there are L2 levels of Ethereum that are cheaper and faster, but why do I have to be bumped to a lower category of blockchain users, when I can't afford the entry fee to the main one that gets me the best chances of succeeding? Where's decentralisation in that? It's like a club of 1% whales. You can't make money there if you want to play fair is what it seems to me is happening with this chain.
Of course. For me NFTs are digital patronage. It is a way of appreciating the artist for their contribution.
Devutnia's NFTs will increase their value each time they get used on the Internet. If you're familiar with BitClout's concept (their idea was brilliant, the execution I leave without a comment), this is what we're aiming for with our NFTs. Each time they're used, their original creator benefits from it along with the NFTs owner. I can't imagine doing it any other way and Hedera with their almost non-existent paywalls and gas fees (comparing to Ethereum) is a perfect place to let users cheaply and safely create and exchange valuable digital work.
There will be different kinds of NFTs on the platform. One of them will be Devutnia's avatars (see: Devutnia's logo), hand drawn in style by my better half Ula based on the picture you provide. Devutnia is friends with many amazing digital artists and we can make sure that your NFT experience at Devutnia IS unique.
Devutnia's NFTs are not here to make you rich.
This is why Hedera works so nice with Devutnia's idea. They intend to keep it a stable coin. "Stable" means unobstructed business. It also means that there will be no weird scams going on here, that artificially blow up the coins valuation and the chain's fees. I can trust this coin enough to build my ideas here.
If you're here to get rich quick, this is not it. I am building Devutnia as a long term solution for hiring and training people who can't help themselves otherwise, because they don't fit the "market expectations" but they have other skills that make them really good in IT anyway.
I want to use NFTs to provide resources to properly train and hire devs. I want to fix the market, but the methods I have been using so far (bootstrapping and hiring juniors out of my pocket) are inefficient. When you buy our NFTs, our tokens or help us with your work, we support artists and developers who created these digital assets. They should also be able to benefit from it. The Web3 Internet and Hedera blockchain make it a reality within our reach - true digital patronage that goes to the artist, not to the whales.
If you want to start fixing the blockchain (Devutnia can't do it alone), help us however you can and we'll help you however we can.
Neither does not doing something. The Devutnia's engagement levels will allow you to support Devutnia and its juniors by buying NFTs. These NFTs will also be your customised Avatars to use within Devutnia's infrastructure and wherever you like.
NFTs are not the only way WE want to support ourselves. There are 4 products on Devutnia's road map:
- a chrome extension that is a wallet connecting Devutnia's developers to Hedera's features and Devutnia's dApps.
- Devutnia's TaaS (talent as a service) dApp platform that allows developers to build teams, find mentors, job offers, talents and skills.
- Devutnia's no-code dApp tool for building POC/MVP applications for micro-teams and solo-founders.
- Devutnia's NFT marketplace dApp where users can buy and sell their digital work created using Devutnia's services.
We will also be creating many dev-ex-oriented open-source tools and supporting entrepreneurial juniors' ideas. We can do it, but we need some help from you.
This is the pitchdeck. I am the pitchdeck. I have tried creating "proper" pitchdecks for my other ideas and they all sucked (both pitchdecks and ideas). This manifesto is my atypical entry into startup life. This time I am doing it the "wrong way", to see if reality punches me in the face.
Support me, support Devutnia, support my support of people switching careers and learning tricks of trade. Support us by buying our NFTs, hiring us in your projects, joining one of our teams or simply talking about us or following in our footsteps and fixing something small around you. Every little step counts.
Let's get serious. I am working on a roadmap done the "wrong way". I will post it here when it's ready. Until then, if you want to know about the roadmap head on here and return in a few days.
The product development plan I have is quite solid. After developing the core features of the platform we can start developing the rest of the products in any order. Building any product gives us a head start at building all the others.
Let us know if one of our products interests you and we can pivot our roadmap if you are convincing ;)
My reasons for starting Devutnia are multilevel. They are opportunistic/altruistic/pragmatic/realistic/meritocratic and capitalistic on top of all that. You are responsible for making a name for yourself here. The senior staff is here to help you discover who you are as a developer and as a self-made person. We will help you realise your ideas if we see you understand the problem you're fixing.
- Our opportunity is that we grow a net of vetted, clever and talented people, that we help progress in their careers.
- Your opportunity is that you get a framework to build your career in software development, you get access to real-life engineers, leaders and specialists who will "get real" with you on your ideas and help you figure out how to improve them.
- Our opportunity is that we will be able to hire you, recommend you to our partners and guide you during your career for a chance of being partners with you in your future endeavours.
- Your opportunity is that we will pay you during your training on real-life projects with Devutnia's partners.
- Our opportunity is that you will help other juniors on our platform and help us grow our culture of software development.
- Your opportunity is that we'll help you build your brand as a developer and find which IT branch gives you most fun.
- Our opportunity is that Devutnia will become a long term employment solution for people who can't get jobs in IT otherwise.
- Your opportunity is that thanks to Devutnia using a DAO contract, your work actually means something and mines Devutnia's pool tokens, so through your work, you ensure Devutnia's worth isn't some blown out-of-proportions baloon that can burst any minute - in short: your work determines Devutnia's future too.
Human story chapters are being created. These kinds of stories always take the longest :)
Devutnia lives in my head. I have to write it down, so until initial Devutnia's chapters are written down, "I" will be the voice of the "team".
If you want to know what kind of voice you're dealing with, head on to the first chapter
Devutnia's core consists of 4 people. Some of us had successful startups, some of us still learn. Most of us are neuro-atypical and neither of us knows what we're doing :D
Each team member will write their own chapters here, so if you want to get to know them, visit us again in a few days.
If you have it in you and want to help Devutnia, reach out to us on our regular channels.
If you are a CEO that sees potential in this project - join our core team. Your help will definitely speed things up. Most of us is already after our first startup rodeo, but new perspective always helps.
If you think crowdfunding would be a good idea and you like this project - join our core team. We have a team of UX designers and a graphic designer who can help you create a campaign. Make a name for yourself while making a name for Devutnia.
If you are on social media, you can follow us on regular channels or hit us up on Slack