Dev Committee Q2 Funding Proposal

Secret Committees
#1

Last quarter was the first official on-chain funding period for Secret Network’s development committee. The vote passed while a minority of the community voted ‘NO,’ citing the following concerns: High salaries and unnecessary 3 person, 30 person-hour/week structure. The committee met its most critical goals of completing seven high-value CCRs and returning a high ROI to the community from the mentorship of 3 new community developers. We hope the community feels more confident in the agile pod structure that the committee proposed last quarter and will suggest this quarter.

CCRs

Last Quarter Accomplishments:

As part of last quarter’s discretionary spending, the dev committee met its goal of completing 7 CCRs.

Blocks

Completed

  1. Fund Forwarding Contract
  2. Fund Forwarding Contract (Frontend)
  3. NFT Authorization
  4. NFT Authorization (Frontend)
  5. SCRT-ETH Bridge Examples
  6. Secret Factory Contracts
  7. SNIP3 Fixed Multisig

Near Completion:

  1. SNIP3 Flex Multisig
  2. Automatic Contract Verifier
  3. SNIP-721A Upgradable NFTs

Next Quarter Goals:

The committee has scoped seven additional CCRs that are expected to be completed during Q2.

A new category of CCRs will be developed, called widgets. The previous CCRs will now be referred to as blocks. Both Widgets and Blocks will continue to be maintained as CCRs. Blocks were strongly focussed on enabling devs to rapidly piece together smart contracts from templates. In contrast, widgets are Web Components designed to allow frontend devs to quickly display on-chain information on their websites. Unfortunately, Secret Network has a reputation for having clunky UI compared to other chains. We hope that focusing on upgrading community resources in this area will improve the user experience.

Widgets

Q2 Todo

  1. On-chain Treasury Balance Viewer

  2. On-chain Committee Invoicing

  3. Includes a new smart contract for invoicing

  4. On-chain Committee Payments

  5. Includes a new smart contract for payments from a treasury

We will also be increasing the maximum bounty for CCR contributions to $4000 per completed CCR to make bounty completion a more attractive project for community developers. With an estimated 7 CCRs at this rate, funding for this program will be $28,000 .

Mentorship Program

Last Quarter

The mentorship program saw the successful graduation of three new community members. The committee would like to congratulate Sandman, Kent, and Kromsten. These members were entirely new to Secret and leveraged the mentorship program to get upskilled in the network. All three have gone on to contribute further, original work for Secret, which is the most we could ask for. Thanks again to the core mentors, Danny, Lumi, and Xiph! Special shout out to Sandman, who went on to receive funding for his on-chain proposal of a peer-to-peer lending platform, Cover.

Next Quarter Goals:

With multiple Luna devs migrating to our ecosystem, we want to continue our fast-track developer education through the mentorship program. At the same time, we’ve learned from last quarter’s mentors that less than 6 hours per week is typically needed per mentor-mentee. So we will also be lowering the amount of funding we are asking for to only 3 hours per week. While last quarter we asked for $58,500, we will only need $29,250 for the mentorship program this quarter.

This quarter’s new goal for the dev committee is to begin building web3 products for the committee itself. Eventually, these tools will be parameterized and easy to consume by the other committees. These will serve as proof of concepts for other businesses interested in leveraging the power of permissionless blockchains with secure data encryption capabilities.

Funding Totals:

Dev Lead Pay:

Gino - $120/hr @ 10hrs/week - 13 weeks = $15,600

Lumi - $120/hr @ 10hrs/week - 13 weeks = $15,600

Xiph - $120/hr @ 10hrs/week - 13 weeks = $15,600

Mentorship Program:

5 mentors - $150/hr @3hrs/week = $29,250

CCR Bounties:

7 estimated repos at a maximum of $4000 per repo = $28,000

Total ask +10% buffer = $115,625

This is a $35,405 reduction from the last quarter’s budget of $151,030.

EDIT : the lead salary rates previously listed as $150/hr have been lowered 20% to $120/hr.
This reduces our ask by $11,700 and brings us down to a total of $115,625

EDIT 2: The committee lead member bios:
Gino
Gino’s experience leading technical teams from startups to Fortune 100s helps him execute exceptional technical product strategy and user experience design. His most recent work includes delivering Secret DreamScape from POC to bug-free mainnet game in 2 months and delivering the Secret IDE from 0 to 1 in 2 months.

Secret DreamScape is the first fully on-chain multiplayer game that is an excellent resource for the development community. New dev teams looking for real-world examples can leverage the open-sourced contract code, reducing their onboarding time. The Secret DreamScape NFT sale sold moderately well; however, very few people played at the launch, and feature adds for DreamScape has been paused until Secret Network receives more community growth from gamers. The game is bug-free and playable on mainnet with nearly all the originally scoped features. It does not require maintenance or any of Gino’s time.

Digiline’s Secret IDE is an all-inclusive environment for contract developers to write, deploy, and instantiate contract code on Secret Network. The Secret IDE requires part-time effort to process community feedback, add scope to the product roadmap, and provide user experience testing.

Lumi
Lumi’s background is in physics with experience building simulations and apparatus for experimental radiation pressure devices (reverse tractor beams), rocket flight path predictions, as well as some experience with robotics and self driving vehicles. His most recent developed product is BlackBox on Secret Network.

Current project involvement on Secret includes (Hours are averages):

Funded Dev Committee hours (10 hrs):
Developer Mentorship: ~2 hrs/week
Dev committee/lead meetings and admin tasks: ~3 hrs/week
CCR and tooling dev/updates: ~4 hrs/week
Developer project support (native secret devs): ~1 hrs/week

Additional Dev Committee hours (13 hrs):
Developer project support (native secret devs): ~2 hrs/week (pro-bono)
Developer project support (LUNA migrants): ~1 hrs/week (pro-bono),
Dev/Bizdev enterprise on-boarding/incubation process development: ~5 hrs/week (pro-bono),
Network Documentation Development Team: 5 hrs/week. (Currently pro-bono. Potential supplementary funding through Slabs),

Hours Outside of Dev Committee
Cover P2P Lending Platform: 10 hrs/week. (Funded through governance),
Cert-Up: 10 hrs/week (Potential funding through Slabs),

Xiphiar
Xiphiar’s background is in systems administration, previously being responsible for maintenance, repair, and upkeep of PCs, servers, and network equipment in the healthcare industry. Xiphiar also has ~5 years experience developing in PHP, and started developing in Javascript February 2021.
Xiphiar developed many tools including SecretSwap liquidity tools, SNIP20 history viewer, and transaction decrypter. He has also developed frontends for many NFT projects including Midnight Teddy Club, and maintains Trivium’s public API node cluster.

Current project involvement on Secret includes (Hours are averages):

Funded Dev Committee hours (10 hrs):
Developer Mentorship: ~1 hrs/week
Dev committee/lead meetings and admin tasks: ~3 hrs/week
CCR and tooling dev/updates: ~4 hrs/week
Developer project support: ~2 hrs/week

Hours Outside of Dev Committee
Cert-Up: 30 hrs/week (Potential funding through Slabs),
Node Maintenance: 3 hrs/week

5 Likes
#2

From the Dev Committee Charter, lead responsibilities are:

  • Maintain a list of active and engaged Committee Members and their contributions.

  • Manage the Committee discretionary budget and appropriate funding amounts to community code repositories that satisfy all AC.

    • Identifying and Planning community code repositories and scope, dev committee lead(s) will be actively engaged in developing, testing, and auditing.
    • Provide a helping hand or listen to the needs of developer(s) with in-progress work in the Committee Code Repositories to ensure best chance of success

  • Help facilitate the connection of committee members with other Secret Network community members.

  • Plan and lead committee meetings with a focus on keeping the members excited about attending because of upcoming guest speakers or other valuable knowledge transfer events.

  • Collaborate with other committees to help satisfy cross-functional needs throughout the community.

I didn’t think this was worth 150$/hr then with 3 people. I still don’t think it’s worth 150$/hr now. The reason being that the majority of these points presented are non-technical work, so why pay a technical work rate?

The responsibilities do say “developing, testing, and auditing”, but this does not comprise 100% of the responsibilities.

2 Likes
#3

From my point of of view the dev committee is the least organized of all the committees

  • No agenda for the meeting, so as a developer I never know if I should slot the time to make the meeting
  • No meeting minutes here on the forums, so I never know what went on
  • 7 Completed CCR’s? First time I hear of it, they aren’t been communicated towards developers, meeting minutes would have helped here.
  • The few meetings I have decided to join seem to get to a ‘uhmmmm what shall we talk about next?’ moment within the first 30, sometimes 20 minutes, giving the feeling that meetings are not prepared.

Other leads get $70/h for this work. Last funding round Domerium Labs openly said on the forum that for this pay we are expected twice the output, by our estimate we are only getting half.

Hard ‘No’ from us.

2 Likes
#4

I am extremely excited to have seen the secret developer community grow over the past few months.

It is always challenging to start from 0 like the dev committee did last quarter, but this team has proven they deliver.

Looking forward to Q2. It’s a Yes from me.

3 Likes
#5

Hi Stefan,

Thank you for bringing forward your concerns, though it is the first time we’re hearing them. In the best interest of the network’s health, I hope that you can bring concerns such as these directly to us as soon as you have them in the future so we can address them ASAP. We’re always glad to hear any criticism you may have. The best way to reach us is on Discord.

You are correct that our meetings do not run like the other committee meetings, but that is by design. We are focused on ensuring that the planned CCRs are built, that the mentorship program is running as smoothly as possible, and that new devs or new community members get their questions answered during the dev committee meetings (Also known as Community Asks). In some meetings community discussion can take up a significant amount of time, but we feel it’s the most important part so we leave plenty of room for it. Even then it sometimes brings us over time.

We apologize for not posting the location of our meeting notes in a more visible place. They were posted here on the forums.

And here is the CCR directory:

Could have sworn it was posted somewhere else too but maybe not…totally understandable why you or anyone else missed that. We also discuss the CCRs progress and completions in almost every meeting.

Dev committee leads take on the technical responsibility of scoping CCRs. Additionally, the leads take on the responsibility of completing some CCRs individually and have provided significant assistance in development of others. We also take on a dual role as mentors, but have not taken payment for our mentor hours nor our completed/contributed CCRs as to us it is an extension of our work as committee leads.

We’ve also made contributions outside of CCRs in response to our Community Asks, including building smart-contract templates and toolsets such as:

to show one such example from the community asks in this meeting:

In addition the dev committee also takes on the role of helping teams and individual developers with technical problems in their own work outside of the mentorship program. We see it as necessary to streamline the development process and build out the ecosystem. We are already taking a role in assisting Luna devs migrating to Secret Network with direct action reviewing their code to help move completed projects to our ecosystem as well connecting them to new projects they can contribute to. We anticipate assisting many more, and just this week we opened a direct channel with SCRT Labs for this initiative.

Additionally, Gino has offered to lead the newly formed documentation pod in daily scrum meetings as part of the development committee hours. The dev docs have been a critical blocker to other network initiatives for more than 6 months. The dev committee leads saw the process was taking too long due to this project being a significant undertaking for the small number of community members that took on the task. We met internally, identified a documentation structure, style, and process to start making serious progress. Then we discussed it with those who had been working on the docs, and it was decided our format was the best one to move forward. Since then we have been actively contributing to the documentation process to help see this through. Progress for that initiative can be tracked in the Secret University server and scope of that initiative can be viewed here:

This was the first iteration of the Dev Committee Charter and our first funding period. It’s still early, and if there’s some misunderstanding or gap between expectations laid out in the Charter vs. work performed then we can certainly make adjustments without losing total momentum. Again, your feedback is appreciated and we hope that you’re more flexible than a ‘hard no’.

5 Likes
#6

It does seem that the “dev” rate of $150/hr is being paid for non-dev related tasks. Things were mentioned like documentation, answering questions, mentorship, committee admin, etc… And a number of community devs have been doing some of those same things pro-bono, which makes the rate seem even more inflated than needed.

Also, the dev rate of $150/hr has been justified as a figure that top-quality, experienced devs can command. While I haven’t looked at all the code produced, a lot of what I have seen is copy-pasting and tweaking of existing code. Most companies would not allocate work that can be done by junior-level devs to the highest paid, most experienced devs. If the argument is that the limited number of hours allocated to leads do not allow you to tackle more complex dev projects, so you will only do the dev tasks that junior-level devs can handle, you should be getting paid at junior-level dev rates. It feels like the community is being charged partner-level rates for work that could be assigned to the paralegals and associates. If you want to tackle the partner-level tasks and receive the pay that comes with it, there should be some description of what will be developed that requires that level of expertise.

If your dev work will only be the listed CCRs, I highly doubt that any of those tasks would be paid at the rate of $150/hr if it went to a grant proposal or if a company was contracting it out. Especially now that the community chest is worth a lot less and would have to pay out a larger percentage of its SCRT to meet these rates, I think it is a good time to bring the rates back down to earth to what would be paid for that same work in the “real world”.

4 Likes
#7

I shared my concerns about the professionalism of the dev committee with Gino before the latest 3-month period started in a voice call. Gino said the meeting would be run much more professionally as he had not been compensated up till that point, and could not justify spending hours. Which would all change the moment that the proposal is accepted.

So are you expecting all interested parties to bookmark this drive?
Are you expecting new interested parties to search for this location in a forum thread that is bound to see no further messages and thus will make its way to the bottom?

I know the three of you are smart, and these questions are rhetorical. What I don’t understand is how 3 people that are getting paid an annualized salary of over $300,000(!!), for a combined nearly $1m/year have not been able to ask themselves these questions and come up with a better structure?

If you were interns, I would have been there to hold your hand and give you this feedback on a weekly basis. With your salaries, I, and I think the entire network, is allowed to expect an extreme level of professionalism, self-organization, self-reflection, and a proactive approach to the improvement of the structure. I don’t see that.

Right now, I just don’t see the ROI.

I don’t argue if your work is valuable, I’m arguing the price that we have to pay for it as a network. The disparity of what we get and what you ask is so large, that this borders pool looting, and pool looting == hard no.

3 Likes
#8

Hi Stefan,

Yes if you were an interested party we were thinking either A it would be bookmarked, or B if you only click on it once the folder should permanently be listed in your Google Drive’s “Shared With Me” folder. Or if community members are new and don’t know where to find it or have lost it, it’s very easy to ask us for the link. We don’t bite. However since this is apparently too difficult, we’re already looking at other options to make this easier. While there is no standard notes posting procedure among the committees, we see that Pmeuke has a fantastic method for the Governance Committee meeting notes. We’ll be emulating this and hopefully we can move towards standardization within the network in this regard.

But in regards to the original reference to the minutes, you mentioned you were not aware of the CCR progress and completions as they were taking place. While we already discuss them in nearly every committee meeting, maybe you can offer us a recommendation for other avenues we can discuss CCR work that may be more convenient for you? We are always glad to make accommodations. No need to hold our hands and give weekly reports as if we were “interns” sir, but genuinely if these were pain points for you, we exist for the purpose of solving pain points in the ecosystem, but can’t make adjustments if we don’t know you are having difficulties. Criticism is a significant driving force and it’s why we leave so much time open during meetings for community asks each week.

As for your quoted salaries, we do not in fact ask for 1 Mil USD per year, but our three combined salaries are 234,000 USD per year. In reality we do end up working more hours than posted in the Prop as well but as you are aware SCRT has been well below its ATH since the committee has started activity and we’d rather be less of a resource draw to the pool when possible. We prefer to just take the hit. If you still think we are too much of a draw on community resources we are entirely open to reducing our rate as Baedrik suggests above, though we may disagree on that. However, referring to us as looters isn’t conducive to finding what that acceptable number may be and would prefer to hear what you think is fair.

3 Likes
#9

It is looting when you intend to charge a dev rate for non-dev work.

If it was a good faith proposal you would at least follow the non-dev rates for such work.

1 Like
#10

Full disclosure: I’m not affiliated with the dev committee — but I do often work with the members of the committee (especially Gino).

The dev committee has done more for the secret network in 3 months than any other group of individuals. There is now a fixed meeting place where developers can share their projects and talk about what they’re working on, the problems they have with contract development, and other developers can share solutions. Also, developers are now incentivized to improve the development experience in the network by completing the CCRs and by helping other developers learn about secret contracts. This wasn’t a thing when I first joined the network. The dev committee, alongside the documentation overhaul and — not to tooth my own horn — the Digiline IDE for Secret Network are improving the development experience on the Secret Network more than anything that has been done since the inception of the network.

To me the work they’re doing is worth a lot more than 150/h. Also the claims about the work being simple work that juniors can do is objectively wrong and frankly I’m not sure where that claim is coming from.

4 Likes
#11

There are established rates for non-technical and technical work respectively. Being a technical member doesn’t entitle you to a technical rate, it is the nature of your work.

Technical rate for technical work. Non-technical rate for non-technical work. Is it really that hard?

Last I checked Lumi started coding last year. 1 year of experience on any industry, including software, has you at a junior level.

#12

Mumuse, last you checked is wrong for dev work. I was making 200 an hour consulting a year in

2 Likes
#13

Your statement is completely irrelevant to what I said. This isn’t about the rate for technical work.

#14

The comment was that the CCRs are simple tasks, so if their dev work will only be on those simple tasks, I feel the pay should reflect that. I think the the bounty amounts assigned to each of the CCR tasks reveal that the team also agrees they are simple (the largest bounty of $3k indicates that they feel it should only take about 20 hours to complete, assuming they think anyone else doing the work should be paid their same rate). I personally do not think any of those tasks would be approved for a grant if it was asking for $150/hr, but obviously others might disagree.

While I haven’t been able to attend for some time, when I was joining the dev meetings every week starting in late 2020 for over a year, I do not remember a time where all of this was not already happening. But since I haven’t been there lately, there certainly is a chance that things are organized to make that happen more smoothly now. I wouldn’t know.

1 Like
#15

‘1 year of experience has you at a junior level’ was an irrelevant comment, then

#16

It’s not. The claim was that this isn’t work juniors can do. In fact it was claimed to be objectively wrong.

Someone who only started coding a little over a year ago is a junior. The evidence of this is the entire job market for software engineering.

It is not an irrelevant comment because a) of what was claimed by Danny b) one of the co-leads fits this criteria.

And frankly, if “a year in” means the actual first year you started coding (as in starting from hello world not knowing what coding was), the consulting you did most likely wasn’t that good or coding wasnt such a critical aspect. Congrats on getting that 200$ though.

#17

Do you know for sure lumi just started coding at all last year, or is that just the first time they posted to GH?(also, this smacks to me of unfounded elitism. As someone who’s trained devs of all experience levels, number of years in the industry is a suuuuper lossy proxy which is screened off trivially by actually examining work product. I wonder whether your confidence here is founded in technical expertise/pm expertise of your own? More generally, especially with new technologies like SN, if we’re looking for people with more than a year’s experience, that’s like…2 people)

1 Like
#18

Are we sure that the line for grants and the line for CCRs should be the same here?

#19

It’s what I’ve been told by enough people to believe it to be true, back when he was part of the secret fellows program. Happy to retract it if wrong.

There’s no elitism here, I’ve never said Lumi shouldn’t be charging, or does not deserve, 150$/hr for his technical work.

I am a developer myself, I don’t claim to be any genius though, all I made is a statement which isn’t only just my opinion but something that, once again, is evident by looking at the job market.

2 Likes
#20

My understanding was that lumi started SN last year but had been coding before – maybe you’re thinking of Kent?

If your only point is about the non-technical pay then I concede (though iirc PMs are paid as well as devs pretty normally)

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