Ross Worker Proposal 18/6/2021-18/8/2021

[ross]

Background / Previous period self-reflection:

I have completed my trial period and after receiving positive feedback from the Mesa/Aqua team it’s about time for my next proposal. Currently, I am still planning on working part-time since I have my full-time job at JP Morgan still. I also have my final dissertation for my part-time university honours degree due in August which is taking up a lot of my time.

Fortunately, after this worker period, there is nothing stopping me from going full time with DXdao which all things going well is what I would like to do.

My trial period was very enjoyable, learning how the DAO works was super interesting after attending most daily calls. Also, I was made very welcome and comfortable working on the aqua team.

Mostly I worked on frontend issues and features since this is what I have the most experience with. I also shared some of my experience working on larger development teams by trying to make aqua more agile and easier for teams to work on. This involved helping Martin to set up a change flow and advising how we should be handling versioning to make the entire aqua stack more transparent for all contributors. More details around my trial period can be found here .

Since I am used to being a full-stack developer I have tried to take a larger part of smart contract development and not just frontend. There are some blockers to this that should be alleviated with agile changes and so in future, I hope to work more on all parts of the dapp.

I have also been enjoying getting to know more people from the dao and taking a larger part in governance. I’m looking forward also to meeting everyone at EthCC and becoming a larger part of this great community.

With current uncertainty with Aqua’s leadership and future in mind, I am open to working on other DXdao projects also wherever my skills may be applicable.

Timeframe:

2 months

Goals:

• Work on polishing aqua to be in a state to securely and safely launch fixed-price sales on the platform
• Next in the UI, I will focus on creating a smooth user experience for the fair sale auction mechanism with the rest of the team
• Take a part in the development, initially small fixes, of smart contracts and generally increasing my understanding of the SC side of the project
• Make development in the team smoother and more transparent experience to increase increment speed of aqua prototypes and releases

Responsibilities:

• Keeping the team working in an agile way with proper use of issues, pr reviews and versioning
• In Martin’s absence I will be leading the daily aqua calls as well as representing the aqua team at DXdao calls and trying to keep development going towards MVP release

Compensation:

Experience level: 3

Time commitment: Part-time - Over my trial period I had estimated 10-20 hours a week and I was closer to 20 during this period. In the next 2 months I will be busier with my full-time job and other commitments and so I don’t expect it will be quite so high. I estimate 15 hours a week on average with some weeks more. I will track this as before in a spreadsheet with the Aqua team.

Hopefully, this will be my last part-time worker proposal as I should be able to move to full-time at the end of this period.

Salary - Calculated from 37.5% rate at further 80% rate due to first proposal after trial period, will recalculate depending on actual amount worked:

• $3600 DAI (($2250*80%) * 2 months), to be sent half on the first payment proposal and half on the second payment proposal
• 4.592 DXD for trial period ((2.87*0.8) * 2 months) in a vesting contract continuously for two years with a one year cliff when the work agreement finishes (18/8/21)
• 1564 REP for trial period ((977.5*0.8) * 2 months), to be sent half on the first payment proposal and half on the second payment proposal

This proposal falls under the current worker compensation guidelines. Should DXdao governance approve any changes to the compensation structure that could apply to work during this scope of work, the compensation amounts in this proposal may change and be reflected in the amounts requested in the final on-chain proposal.

Work experience:

Daotalk - Trial period worker proposal

3+ years as a full stack web developer at JP Morgan

Won polygon NFT prize at 0xHack hackathon

rossneilson - Overview

A few recent PRs of mine for aqua:
https://github.com/cryptonative-ch/mesa-interface/pull/280
https://github.com/cryptonative-ch/mesa-interface/pull/242
https://github.com/cryptonative-ch/mesa-interface/pull/196
https://github.com/cryptonative-ch/mesa-interface/pull/217

[ross]

I had incorrectly copied the amount from the spreadsheet calculator.
Previously was 1995 REP and now changed to 1955 REP for 2 months.
Thanks for spotting this @madusha

[ross]

I had to make further amendments
I forgot about the 80% rate for the first proposal after the trial period so I have added this on so new amounts should be correct.

[ross]

Self Reflection on previous worker proposal:

My previous worker proposal (first after trial period) covered the time from the beginning of Martin’s compensation discussion through to now. Since then quite a lot has changed. The initial responsibilities listed focused mainly on improving my skills and implementing the remaining parts of the fixed price sale MVP. However as Martin left DXdao these responsibilities and goals changed slightly to include more management focused activities as I volunteered to keep the team running. Due to my university dissertation deadline and overlapping EthCC I worked less at the beginning of the previous proposal and more towards the middle/end, balancing out to just over an average of 15 hours a week.

Did well:

• Development - I think my main responsibilities as a developer I did well over the past 2 months. Most of my time was focused on UI development which has gone well and progressed well with MVP.
• UI upgrade to v0.1.1 - One of the development efforts I worked on was integrating the UI with the new SC and subgraph version 0.1.1 upgrade for MVP release. These sorts of tasks are something fairly unique to the web 3 world and I feel it went fairly smoothly. It also made a large impact on the state of Aqua and progress towards MVP since it is the major version the MVP will use when launched.
• Planning and coordinating Aqua - Since volunteering to keep Aqua going in the right direction I think I have done a good job with coordinating the team and the application. A few examples are running the daily standups, weekly planning as well as one off discussions such as the roadmap planning to prioritise future development efforts for Aqua. Recently, I have reached out to the DXvoice team to organise branding and communication for Aqua. I have also started coordinating potential sales for the Aqua MVP release (buybacks, NFT, etc).

Did ok:

• Managing people - Aside from small development efforts I don’t have a lot of experience managing a full team and ensuring everyone is working on the correct tasks to maximise the efficiency of a team. So this is something I want to work on in the future. However, given that the Aqua team has kept moving with no major issues and we are very close to MVP release, I think I still did relatively well here.
• Learning - I learnt a lot from starting development work on subgraph as well as developing a more in depth knowledge of how the aqua framework works (I made an architectural diagram for docs page and my own understanding). Generally, I want to learn more about subgraph and smart contract development techniques such as how to best debug issues, and will highlight this as a key goal in my next proposal.

Improve on:

• EthCC - When I made my previous worker proposal I didn’t even know I would be going to Paris so it was certainly a sudden decision for my first conference. It was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot, however I don’t think I did a great job of introducing people to the DAO or making connections with people. I am generally a wee bit anxious and not great at talking to new people, so this is something I want to improve on to better represent DXdao at future events (basically I need to get better at shilling).

Timesheet for previous part-time period

[ross]

Alchemy | DAOstack