AugustoL Contributor Work Proposal #7

dxDAO
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AugustoL Contribution Work Proposal #7

Background

Hola a todos, I have been contributing to DXdao since 05/2020, first I started helping DXtrust (aka bonding curve dapp) development, then I started working and experimenting on other governance/security initiatives and after that, I moved to the dxswap project (what is swpr now) doing the fork of uniswap v2 and adding the extra features DXdao wanted to add, after that the swpr team was formed and they took over the dapp development.
After swpr I started with the development and research of DXvote, which is now our governance dapp.
Dxvote was deployed in mainnet and xdai on 09/20 after being working on it for several months, after that, I helped in the organization of the gov dev squad, a group of developers that took over DXvote development.
DXvote is used now as the technical playground and alternative governance application to Alchemy.
On June 2022 we decided to fork DXvote into project DAVI (Decentralzied Autonomous Voting Interface) which will provide a governance interface for our new DAO smart contracts and ERC20Guilds.

This is my seventh contributor proposal, which will be focused on a new role I want to take in DXdao as “Development/Technical Manager”, which can be seen also as a DXdao Developer Leader, infinite hackathon, and smart contract development.

Worker vs Contributor Proposal

For me, a contributor proposal is paid in full at the end of the contributor period taking into count how much was it covered from the proposal submitted on chain at the start of the period. Like worker proposals the user needs to create two proposals, one at the start of the period and one at the end, but the contributor proposal opens gives more importance to the goals and forces them to be more detailed, while also allowing to have some responsibilities, to allow an easier evaluation from the dao at the end of the contributor period.

Timeframe

From 01/09/2022 to 31/12/2022. (four months)

It was going to be a three months proposal but since we have like 15 days in Colombia in October and it is about taking over more responsabilities and a new role I thought it would be better to have a four months length proposal that finish right on the end of the year.

Proposed Scope of Contribution

Goals

  • Finish the dxdao governance smart contracts v2, new Avatar, Controller, Reputation, WalletScheme, and DXDVotingMachine.
  • Guide and help the dxgov team on improving the dxdao-contracts developer operations and documentation to have a simple and flexible guilds & dao deployment process.
  • Help and guide dxgov testing dxdao migration to new governance contracts v2.
  • On board a security/solidity consultant/auditor/educator into dxdao.
  • On board a solidity senior dev/tech lead into swpr with @0xVenky.
  • Kickstart cross-squad solidity collaboration.
  • Work with DXgov team in Bogota and after bogota to design a DXDVotingMachine that will support Gov 2.0 Requirements

Responsibilities

  • Technical Development Manager.

Think of all DXdao developers being part of a football team, the team has different groups working on defense, offense, free kicks, etc. Every football team has a manager that makes sure each player is playing in the position they feel more comfortable in and where they can deliver the best for the team, sometime they might have to switch positions or help other players. The manager has the responsibility to make sure the team is going to be in the best shape possible, with high morale and a good team spirit to win as many matches as they can.
This is what I am proposing to start doing in dxdao, manage the developers, all our squads use a very similar programming stack (fullstack js with reactjs) and all the smart contracts are written in the same language (soidity). I have lot of experience in building applications and smart contracts while making sure they follow strong technical requirements.
With the help of Ross I managed to create a good technical, collaborative and hacker culture in the dxgov team, I plan to replicate it in the rest of the squads, to share as much technical stack as they can to make sure they can cross collaborate if needed and wanted, increasing their experience and strengthening community bonds.

I will focus on bringing solutions to dxgov, swpr and carrot devs and team leaders, by following up as close as I can on what they are working on, how, and why.

The other very important part of this new role is to help squads establish clear goals and objectives for every period, based on the discussion had the past over the past months regarding the use of our developer resources and what are we getting from them, as development manager I will help teams sets achievable goals that will also help dxdao financially, not adding features cause they are cool, we want to build and fork cool stuff that will make us earn money and sustain our hacker culture and make our investors as happy as we can.

Also I plan to start a developer board where we will track all contributions from dxdao developers, each developer would be able to choose a contribution per month and we will do a monthly review of it, we will see something like:
Total issues opened/closed.
Total PRs merged.
Total lines of coded added/removed.
Special mentions to contributions.
And I think we can even start a developer of the month NFT where developers would vote between them and choose the dxdao dev of the month.

  • Maintain dxvote legacy application stability.
  • Manage and execute audits of dxdao smart contracts and products, communicating with audit firms and auditors to set up audits, and handle communications between them and dxdao squads.
  • Lead DXhackathon technical side organization of the event (talks, technical content, selection, and judging process)
  • Help @melanie to work with lateral on the dxretreat design.
  • Collaborate with @melanie to create an ongoingrecruiting strategy for Senior Solidity developers.
  • Lead weekly developer calls, have demos, cool PRs shared, and special guests, every two weeks, make them more technical/hacker focused.

Compensation

  • Estimating 100% time commitment
  • Contributor Level: 8
  • DAI : 36000 USD.
  • DXD: 19000 USD vested for 3 years with a 1 year cliff starting 01/09/2022.
  • REP: 0.32% at based on the latest REP supply on mainnet at the moment of submitting the worker payment.

Work Validation

All or most of these goals should be accomplished.

  • DXdao governance smart contracts audit by omega team complete.
  • ERC20Guilds smart contracts audit by sigma prime team complete.
  • DXvote minimal stable version for legacy dxdao-contracts.
  • dxdao-contracts (new dao contracts) v2 ready integrated into DAVI.
  • Start monthly dxdao developer update, share on what the developers have been working on, the pull request they selected for the developer update and the start developer of the month awards.
  • A solidity security/consultant/educator onboarded on dxdao.
  • A senior dapp developer onboarded on dxdao to work on swpr.
  • Squads collaborating with each other on solidity smart contract development/reviews.
  • Have a DXDVotingMachine smart contract ready to be audited to be used as core of DXdao Gov 2.0 Voting System.

Work Experience

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I don’t think I’m saying anything new to you Augusto as we already talked about this, but I don’t think you’re suited for a leading role. A few points/doubts I have on your track record and general commitment/leadership:

  1. I think by checking out the repo (and correct me if I’m wrong), I see the first ERC20 guild commit in the DXgovernance org on Jul 10th 2020. How long did it take to have a first auditable version of the ERC20 guild smart contract, and why? Why didn’t we have a look at Compound’s governance model which has been battle tested for example and forked that?
  2. I’ve seen an audit report with like 6 critical bugs and 40 pages of report for the guild. Now, it’s normal and even desirable for audits to find vulnerabilities, but from a developer with your experience I wouldn’t expect 40 pages of audit if full focus was put into the development of the solution…
  3. Directly related to point 2, how long is it taking to fix the audit, and are you directly involved with full effort/ownership/responsibility? As a reference, I’ve started working on Carrot v1 contracts (a FULLY original product, no fork) the first time on Jan 21st 2022 (well actually a bit earlier as this is the first v1-related commit). On June 7th the first audit by Omega team started and when I got back the preliminary report, I had 1 high severity issue, 2 medium, and the rest low and info. Keep in mind I’m a developer with much less experience in general. On Jul 4th I sent in the contracts for a final audit, and on July 14th the second audit started. Preliminary report came back with 3 medium issues, and the rest low and informational. On August 9th I gave back the code with the fixes and I’m waiting for the final report as of now, while I’m working hard on the frontend. I’d say Carrot is a pretty complex smart contract system and product overall, order of magnitudes more complex and flexible than the Carrot MVP. In the meantime I also worked/researched Jolt (which in hindsight might probably be wasted time, and I regret that) and I also got some vacation, so all in all I have a few doubts, even though I know you also worked on other things.
  4. Please correct me on this if I’m wrong, but how is it possible that in today’s dev call you didn’t seem to know how DAVI’s frontend (a project made by the team you’re in) looked like? I get that you’re working on the smart contract side of things, but is the silo THAT strong and there’s absolutely no interest on your side on seeing how a product born from your initial work on governance smart contract is progressing?! Besides, the smart contract side of things still was I think also delayed, anyway.
  5. Why did it take so long for DXswap to get out there initially? I think the main blocker was smart contract work of which you were responsible of, but I’d encourage you to correct me if I’m wrong since memory is a bit foggy for things that happened 2 years ago when I had just joined the DAO. I’m mainly asking because in the end, Sushi ended up frontrunning us, and we lost a big opportunity. Plus, we got the fee receiver hack a couple weeks ago (I’ll admit that doesn’t fall on you completely though, as we had other eyes having a look at the code there and some decisions with tradeoffs were taken).
  6. While we were launching Swapr and the SWPR token on Arbitrum you did a focus-related mistake on a very very sensitive matter: deploying the new Arbitrum DXdao base. That happened while the SWPR token had already been launched, the Swapr smart contracts deployed, and ownership given over, as you told me to do. The issue made all the work I did to deploy Swapr basically pointless, and added even MORE work, because some people already claimed their SWPR airdrop. This led me to work alone for an unhealthy amount of hours (quite literally I have nightmares when remembering this) on having a new full Swapr deployment (core + periphery + frontend) + SWPR deployment + SWPR airdrop claimer contract + a custom made, tested migration flow (comprising of a completely new smart contract, and related UI) over a weekend.
  7. I still remember this debate right here on your worker proposal when you were asking to be paid in full when the contributions didn’t match the amount of effort you claimed to have put into work (I remember having a look at this directly and being saddened…). Gotta say, this shocked me at the time…

Having these points in mind, it’s also weird to me that you want to take on more responsibility (in a leadership role!) after you’ve been at 66% time commitment when we and your team very much needed you to produce on the smart contract side of governance (on both guilds and gov2.0, on which you haven’t pushed as far as I’m aware), and then I also remember you explicitly saying you didn’t want to have more responsibility just a few weeks ago. Where does the sudden change of mind come from?

You have done great work in getting people involved in DXgov but I feel like the DAO could use you way more if you focused 100% of your time on SC development. This might just be me, but I don’t think the role of tech lead is necessarily needed right now, you’d produce much more value by developing 100% of the time in my mind (which still leaves time to mentor new developers, review SC PRs in other squads etc as part of the commitment). Aain, if anything I’ve said is wrong please be brutal with corrections.

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I always respected Augusto, because he shared a similar ethos around how DXdao should live and operate. Over the last three years working with him, I came to the conclusion that Augusto never wanted to lead or take responsibilities. Fun fact: In the very early days Augusto was actually the lead developer for a couple of months until he asked John to take over leadership.

As a product manager and UI/UX designer with several years of experience, it is clear to me that Augusto does not care about leading teams and with it products/protocols with the goal to find product market fit. In my opinion he cares more about his currently established lifestyle, which he wants to protect now. He wrote about it in one of his worker proposals:

I have other priorities in life outside of work, I am building my house, surf, climb, travel, and I am still a nomad. But when I am not doing any of that I am contributing and being part of dxdao, and In fact I think all those things I do outside of my work is what takes me back to it eager to code cool stuff and connect with a decentralized organization spread around the world.

So in order to try to find a balance between my nomadic life and dxdao I will be requesting compensation once a contribution to dxdao is done.

I appreciate @luzzifoss taking the time to clearly articulate the performance, missing leadership and accountability of Augusto. With it, I will vote against his upcoming proposal.

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Just for clarity @corkus, do you plan to down vote this proposal that @AugustoL has listed above, which is being proposed, or was this reasoning regarding Proposal #6, which is currently live and based upon the work that’s already been completed.

I ask because just a few minutes after you replied to this proposal, you voted against Augusto’s Proposal #6 for past completed work.

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The first audit was done on January 2021 dxdao-contracts/erc20guild.pdf at main · DXgovernance/dxdao-contracts · GitHub, and it found 1 critical issue, 2 mediums and 1 low. I started playing and researching on July 2020, yes. After that I took tasks like maintaining the openraise application, starting the fork of dxswap (where we plan to use the ERC20Guilds here to govern the pool fees), and I started experimenting on forking alchemy and daostack, we had troubles with the graph going down and having no voting platform live, I had to create js scripts to listen for new proposals being created and monitor the creation of proposals in dxdao, I think it was later that year that you joined dxdao and started working swpr (ex-dxswap) and I gave you and zett the product to work on it and take over it and I moved back to start working on dxvote, erc20guilds and wallet schemes, that’s why the first audit happened 6 months after I started playing with the idea, I was very busy on the stuff I just mentioned, but I also had time to work on the ERC20Guilds smart contract.
And the next (contributor period #4)[AugustoL Contribution Work Proposal #4] I finish them and delivered for audit, at that time we had been approached by Augur and they wanted to use our guilds system, we felt very motivated! but then Augur just disappeared and it was a lot of energy wasted :frowning:

If you are referring to the Audit done by Sigma Prime, I expected it to be a long one, we audited a lot of code. The ERC20Guild, 8 different implementations and the PermissionRegistry and TokenVault.

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Me by myself, entirely focused, less than a month for sure, it might be even 1 week. Depends on how many issues are received, on an audit you want as many issues found as you can, since it is what you are paying for.

Of course I know how DAVI looked, but last time I ran it was like three weeks ago, and it was a month and a half since I was using the action builder, I never tested it to the full extend, and on today’s demo ross made sure to show off all the great work they did. Luckily ross is doing a great work managing the team and they work a lot, there is always things to do and work on. The smart contracts are not delayed. We fixed all issues submitted by the audit, the ones that they say are left cant be replicated, I am waiting to talk back with the auditors to get a final audit document signed by them saying that we addresses all the issues.

You can see all the work I was doing in the answer 1, I was very busy and with lot of things on my plate, that’s why it took more than usual.

Yes, that contract was not audited, it was rushed and we didn’t follow the necessary procedure, I was the only one working on it at the time I think.

About 6. If you expect me to be sorry, I am. I spent that weekend working a lot helping to fix the mistake that I made.

About 7. I committed to work on specific things and I get it done on most of them. I think I should have paid for the work I committed to do and I did. I always took my work at dxdao very seriously and that proposal was very sad for me too, I almost left the dao cause I felt betrayed by some members who I think didn’t value what I have brought to the organization in all this time, besides just code.
I accepted it and moved on and started doing contributor proposals to be accepted at the start of the period and paid in full at the end, I exposed myself a lot to accountability since that happened and I’m still doing that and accepting feedback on my performance.

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I am very surprised to hear that you came to that conclusion after the last three years. I think it is entirely wrong. And the only things that I would say is:

I like to lead, fight for what I think it is right, I am very passionate on what I do, one of the things I’m passionate about is crypto and blockchain, I am here to build applications that will help individuals free themselves from financial centralized systems, the cause is the best way they have to control us, money. I am aware that for me to make that dream come true we need to create products that generate profit to sustain the dxdao mission, that for me is what I mentioned before, be part or even a leader of te DEFI Open Source community, by building and forking.
Regarding my lifestyle, there is nothing better and more healthier for than waking up in the morning and go surfing, or skating or experimenting with something new, and after that sitting down with a clear and rested head to be part of an organization that can have a truly positive impact in the world, like dxdao. This is who I am, and Im proposing what I want to do and work on.

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Caney Fork voted FOR this proposal.

Augusto is an extremely valuable contributor to DXdao. There are really no other options for someone to code Governance 2.0, which is a (the?) top priority of DXdao, so it’s encouraging that one of the goals Augusto included in this proposal is:

It would be great to also get regular updates in the forum about Gov 2.0 development.

This proposal would also expand his scope of work outside of the DXgov squad to become “Development/Technical Manager” for DXdao devs.

So far, he has demonstrated his technical capability as well as the ability to recruit and train developers, but Augusto will need to grow and build new skills in order to succeed in this role. This will require Augusto to be more focused and organized, and also provide ongoing communication and accountability to REP and DXD holders.

I am confident Augusto is up to the challenge.

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Proposal on chain dxvote.eth

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Level K voted against this worker proposal.

I agree Augusto is a valuable member of DXdao and could make a great impact on Gov 2.0 development, so don’t mean to discourage Augusto from these efforts, but in my experience with Augusto at DXdao, he has not shown a propensity for ( or really even an interest in ) management. I also highly value the opinion of @luzzifoss, who I believe is without question the most skilled and productive developer contributing to DXdao, and think his above assessments are accurate. Furthermore, Augusto has not completed delivery of a few of the items which were listed on his previous worker proposal. For these reasons I believe the expanded responsibilities for Augusto are inappropriate and inadvisable.

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I believe we need to increase feedback loops a lot at DXdao. It’d be great if other technical people i.e. @luzzifoss and @adamazad had regular calls with Augusto (fortnightly?) to sync up about tech-strategy and I’d be happy to facilitate this call if all three parties agree.

I also think Augusto has been really good at building the “hacker culture” a number of restructuring proposals have called for. Yet, I also agree Augusto will have to step-up and prove himself to be capable of such a position. Personally, I see this proposal as an interim position for 4 months - during which Augusto will have the opportunity to prove himself. I think there are clear deliverables mentioned in the proposal which makes evaluating his success or lack thereof easy after the 4 month period.

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An update on my contributor period.

There was an error on the DXD compensation and it should be 9500 USD in DXD * 4. So the total is 28000 USD in vested DXD, not 19000 USD in vested DXD.

Current status of the work validation goals where all or most of these goals should be accomplished:

  • DXdao governance smart contracts audit by omega team complete. In progress, waiting for final report
  • ERC20Guilds smart contracts audit by sigma prime team complete. Done
  • DXvote minimal stable version for legacy dxdao-contracts. Done
  • dxdao-contracts (new dao contracts) v2 ready integrated into DAVI. In progress, will be finished after gov 1.5 audit
  • Start monthly dxdao developer update, share on what the developers have been working on, the pull request they selected for the developer update and the start developer of the month awards. Not done, unlikely to be achieved
  • A solidity security/consultant/educator onboarded on dxdao. In progress, still following my leads
  • A senior dapp developer onboarded on dxdao to work on swpr. In progress, job search on going
  • Squads collaborating with each other on solidity smart contract development/reviews. Not done, I will wait to pursue this Q1 2023 when squad budget/guilds structure is in place
  • Have a DXDVotingMachine smart contract ready to be audited to be used as core of DXdao Gov 2.0 Voting System. In Progress, I should have code written by end of December

In addition to all this:

  • Infinite Genesis hackathon was a successful event, I was one of the main organizers on dxdao side.
  • Worked on an anonymous ERC20 Guild implementation during devcon week.
  • The dxdao retreat was overall successful, I was one of the main organizers on dxdao side, helping a lot with the coordination dxdao <-> lateral.
  • ContributionReward vulnerability fix on chain and coordination with rest of dxdao contributors on the fix.

I think I have been doing a good job overall, it could be better of course, it can always be, but taking in count that I had a month in Colombia where infinite hackathon, devcon and the dxdao retreat took place and also while dxdao is going through a restructuring process, in my opinion, it was good first three months, now I will try to finish the gov 1.5 audit, start working on gov 2.0, help on the senior solidity search for swpr and continue working on starting education/training solidity activities in dxdao, it would be hard to get something done on the end of the year but I will continue pushing for this when I have time.

Lets see how the next month goes, for now I think I am good to submit a proposal to request payment for 100-80% of what I initially proposed, I will propose an amount in a month, now back to work!

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Payout proposal up for voting, dxvote.eth

If for any reason you think I should not deserve full payment downvote it, in case it doesn’t pass I will create other proposal with 90% of the total amount, and then 80%.

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still strongly against discounts :muscle:

updated to say: strongly against discounts that are solely for the point of being late.

but if you’re late, then you explicitly open yourself to criticism. this seems like a healthy norm

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Caney Fork voted NO on this proposal, but would vote YES for a 90% payout.

This was a unique contributor proposal in that it covered four months and expanded Augusto’s role and responsibilities. In the past, Augusto was at 66%, so I am more amenable to pay deductions as this proposal was an experiment in an increased role of time and scope. The NO vote is not to deny Augusto payment but to recognize that Augusto’s execution of this scope of work did not live up to Caney Fork’s expectations when it voted for the proposal in September.

In looking at the “work validation goals where all or most of these goals should be accomplished” in this proposal’s scope, it’s clear that of the 9 goals, less than half could be said to be accomplished, and of those, there were issues with two (ERC20Guilds audit & DXvote minimal stable version). There was a notable bug for guilds that enabled transferability and for DXvote’s minimal stable version, there was a week where the new contribution reward scheme was not showing on mainnet, as well as a bug for displaying duplicate proposals on both chains.

The last few months have been tough for DXdao and the market overall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like DXdao took this time to build a solid technical foundation, and going into 2023, it now needs to attract (or develop) senior technical contributor(s) who can can provide mentorship, high-level architecture guidance and security advisory, as Augusto’s time is at 50% in the 1H2022 budget proposals. We should also examine the weekly developer call, DXdao’s security posture and other cross-product technical collaboration.

Augusto arguably has the most technical contributions to DXdao since inception and continues to provide critical work on the Gov 1.5 and 2.0 efforts. He remains an active on-chain governance participant and led DXdao efforts in Colombia across Infinite and the retreat. He should be paid for these and other positive contributions to DXdao, but at a slightly reduced rate that was laid out in this proposal in September.

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Proposal with payment of 90% created, dxvote.eth