How we built Quit Now for EthSF 2022

Screenshot of our project, Quit now :)

A recap: We won the Best Unexpected Use of Triangle, (shoutout to Triangle for being fucking amazing and super helpful, yes you Cody!) and the Pool Prize with Mina Protocol, a platform that offers teaching people how to use zero knowledeg proofs. (And I happened to be a product engineer there for my first job :))

We built a platform to support people who are thinking about quitting their jobs by allowing people to share kind messages and encouragement. Users can also share answers to questions about their current situation for points on our system (exploring token options). The point is that currently, in “free” products like LinkedIn, you are the product. But in our project, you are the benefactor of your data. They make money off your data. We help you make money from your data.

So, my thoughts on EthSF 2022 after taking my friend:

1. Crypto is still difficult to onboard onto, even for someone super educated and smart. My friend with two Stanford degrees, not saying degrees make you smart, but she is overall amazing and super cool, could not figure out for the life of her to get Ethereum on a wallet. I convinced her to use Rainbow at first to use a wallet, because for the hackathon you need a deposit, but it didn’t even work LOL. Her debit card, and mine, were both declined and I had to authorize the transaction so my bank could buy me some Eth. Haha.
2. The demographics problem at Eth Hackathons is bad- and awkward. I could count how many women of color there were — and every time, we looked at each other and I wished I knew what to say to connect us.
3. There should be a newcomers prize.

Those are the big ones, but I also wanted to share our project!

So here’s the demo video: It’s only 4 mins long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_rn_TayAJI&t=181s

And here’s the demo link (please only view on desktop, I only had enough time to code that up and got lazy with the mobile lol had no more time): https://meek-smakager-d79825.netlify.app/

This is a timeline of how we did it:

1. Came up with the idea before the hackathon after we were noticing so many people around us wanted to quit their jobs, including us, who just quit just two weeks earlier (sunwoo her CEO job) and me in July (founding member at Entropy)
2. Went to hackathon to grab free food, swag, and connect with engineering teams at Triangle, Mina, etc.
3. Went home. Did a user research interview with a Meta engineer thinking about leaving for a more cash based compensation job at a trading firm.
4. Synthesized user research interview ideas, and started sketching.
5. Worked on branding, typography, and colors with Sun, Sunwoo’s partner.
6. Sunwoo and I tried 10 different SDKs from the hackathon to see which one would work best for our project. Mina Protocol, World Coin (was a bust), Push Protocol (worked very well), and Polygon and Alchemy for smart contracts (I had tried this a week ago and taught myself how to program smart contracts a week ago)
7. We chose the technologies we would integrate, and began to code.
8. I started coding the backend as soon as the hacking started.
9. I completed the backend, and started designing the frontend.
10. I designed the frontend with Sunwoo, and worked with our branding and typography from Sun, and started working on the coding for that.
11. We slept one night.
12. I woke up and coded up the entire frontend site in the morning on Saturday.
13. We tried to integrate some more technologies, successfully working with a Push Protocol engineer to integrate push notifications and subscribe to a user’s channel for people to send out messages to their supporters.
14. We took a break.
15. We tried to integrate Snarky.js into our project, tried a bunch of Mina Protocol stuff, and checked out their example, but it was kind of hard. I reached out to Martin from Mina and tried to figure some stuff out there but realized the tech wasn’t ready for us yet.
16. We reached out to Triangle, my friend Cody works there, to integrate a Create Wallet button for users that don’t have a wallet and are not going to download MetaMask. We successfully added the API after some mishaps with JavaScript. LOL. Dang it!
17. We finished the backend, frontend, and started working on our presentation midday on Saturday.
18. Sunwoo made our presentation slides, while I put finishing touched on the frontend, and took a nap.
19. I joined Sunwoo in working on the presentation, and we started rehearsing.
20. We took a break for dinner.
21. After dinner, we worked on rehearsing the presentation.
22. After we rehearsed a few times, we recorded the video.
23. We had to edit the video in iMovie and Sunwoo did so much work to make the video work because I hate video editing and it’s super tedious and annoying. But we did voiceovers and everything.
24. We rehearsed the final presentation we were going to do for judges.
25. I pushed the code on Github, taught Sunwoo a bunch of things about GitHub, and then deployed the project.
26. Sunwoo and I took a break.
27. We finished the project after Sunwoo put finishing touches on the video.
28. We went to sleep.
29. Next morning, we went to the hackathon and prepared for judging.
30. We presented to two amazing judges, Alexis Gauba, and Casey Caruso. So lit to have women. ❤
31. We ran around and had lunch, and presented to a bunch of Sponsors, including World Coin, Mina Protocol, Push Protocol, and Triangle.
32. We had so much fun, and we also got a few people to answer our survey.
33. We told a few people about our project, and met cool people.
34. We took a picture with a big Corgi and made some TikToks. Check out my TikTok, @MicheBurrito3 !
35. We waited to learn about the finalists. We met another amazing woman who was from Germany.
36. We didn’t get a finalist email, and went home.
37. We watched the Livestream and saw that we won a sponsor prize for Triangle, and Mina :)

And that’s a wrap! Super proud of the work we did, and I am super excited. We are continuing to explore Quit Now, and we are currently doing more user research. If you’re interested in our journey, follow along with me here on Medium.

:)

lots of love, MICHE

Shoutout to my amazing project partner, Sunwoo Lee. :)

P.s. if you are thinking about quitting your job, quit now. just do it. juuuuust do it. no fear. if you have problems with this, please message me and I will pep talk you.