Hey! I’m Aleem 👋

I'm a 16y/o developer learning all I can about blockchain & neuroscience! I’ve recently been diving deep into web3 & just deployed my first smart contract—wave back to me here! Throughout the past couple of years I’ve been in and out of the crypto space, founding BitcloutIQ, a VC backed data analytics platform before shutting down after ~6 months. Now? I’m back!

Currently focusing on co-creating PadawanDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization to fund young web3 enthusiasts going to blockchain conferences—this month we’ve raised $400k+ for the upcoming conference ETHDenver :)

TL;DR:

Building PadawanDAO 🤘
Spoke at IBMs Evoke conference 🎤
Learning solidity (launched a dapp) 🧑‍💻
Burnt out really bad 🤒

PadawanDAO

A Padawan is a broke asf kid trying to get in crypto.

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is community voting systems on a blockchain. Learn more here.

Goal: Fund kids to crypto conferences

This moved super fast! Within just a couple of days we had spun up a discord server, gathered 100ppl+ to help and had a multisig ready to start receiving donations—while now we’re starting to organize ourselves a bit better to allow frictionless scaling it’s still rapidly expanding :)

Miami

After reaching out and being sponsored going to DCentral Miami by Blockchain Education Network (BEN), I had realized they had allocated ~$2k for sponsoring kids. Between flights and Airbnbs, this led to a 15% acceptance rate, which doesn’t make sense considering how many talented kids applied. After some logistical planning, I made a proposal to PadawanDAO to allocate some more funds, leading to 13 more kids being flown out 🎉

ETHDenver

This is our main focus, sending 100 padawans to Denver ⚡️

We’ve created an official partnership with ETHDenver and BEN to organize everything, this allows a more structured process to get tickets and coordinating places to stay—as the DAO is not a registered entity able to do everything they can legally.

Overall Progress

We’ve hit $415,000 in funding!! That’s insane—so grateful for this community 🙏

It’s important to note these are not investments, they are donations with nothing in return, or as I coined it on the site “yeets” lol—special shoutout to The Graph Protocol (yanviv & eva specifically) for supporting us so much, it makes the world of a difference ❤️ We’re also now officially funded by vitalik himself 🤯

We’ve split into 5 different working groups (WGs) to start structuring the DAO- I’m taking lead on the technical side. Doing this enables us to prevent individual siloing with intent of frictionless onboarding of new people, while also still getting stuff done :)

Here are a couple highlights:

Technical got Yeeter done (redo in underway already)
Applications started the ETHDenver partnerships & applications
Social hosted a twitter space w/ behindthehandle
Multisig deployed 6k USDC to BEN for Miami

Spoke at IBM’s Evoke Conference 🎤

Aleem Rehmtulla (@aleemrehmtulla) / Twitter

I got the opportunity to speak at Canada’s largest dev summit, attended by over 1,500 people! While this year was virtual due to COVID, I had a blast jamming out on how DAOs will reshape how we fund & own scientific research 🧑‍🔬

Totally could’ve done better from a presentation standpoint, and aim to grow from it. After a 1on1 w/ my TKS directors, we established I should do weekly presentations for personal growth without the need for a conference—then to post them on twitter. I have been slacking on this, deciding if it’s still in best interest as I’m doubling down on build mode, but it’s also a compounding skill 🤔

Learning solidity

Hugeee s/o @buildspace @farza for the first waveportal tutorial! They made everything super exciting to build & easy to understand.

After first starting off with cryptozombies, the most popular course—I figured solidity wasnt for me.. I was really bored throughout it and only finished 1/8 sections 😬. Don’t think it’s really my learning style and just didn’t enjoy it—although was valuable to understand super basics going into buildspace.

What I’ve built

Wave to my smart contract | from buildspace
Vote for your president | from scratch

Are either perfect? Noooo! But it’s my start :)

While I have ideas for large scale projects, it’d be better to make a couple smaller ones, I’m thinking a platform to use NFTs as collateral for DeFi loans 👀

Burn out 🥴

I learned an important lesson at the beginning of November, one that took me out for over a week :/

Coming back from Lisbon, I was constantly working and messaging without breaks. Whether in school, in commute or even while eating I’d try to be productive—this led to severe burnout. I started missing meals, lacking on sleep and overall being really unhealthy until I eventually ended up in the hospital.

I’ve since started to prioritize a balance, nearly always getting 7hrs+ of sleep (goal is still 8), and properly hydrating/eating again. This won’t happen again, need to start acknowledging unhealthy patterns early—sleep is my best indicator.

If you’re still reading this—thank you 🤗

Connect with me here and make sure to subscribe for next months! If you have any questions just drop em in the comments - would love to chat ⬇️

ps. got my G1 drivers licence!!

Aleem’s Newsletter

November Newsletter | 2021