Enterprise Integration Patterns for Web3 DApps (Part 2): Designing for Failure in Cross-Chain…
UpdateQuick note before we dive in: the dashboard project from Days 46–50 continues on the backend. I will share a live update on Day 56 and a final build recap on Day 59. Today we shift to Phase 5 of this series: Career and Leadership in Web3.
If you want to keep up with this 60-day Web3 journey, you can follow me on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community.
I used to write every night. Pour my thoughts into words. Hit publish. And wait. Then nothing. No clicks. No noise. Just silence. I thought maybe people did not like my voice. Or worse, maybe I did not have one. But I was wrong. People did not skip my content because it was bad. They skipped because I gave them no reason to stop scrolling. That was the first lesson I learned about DevRel without even knowing it had a name.
But here is what 51 days of showing up actually looks like in numbers:
Medium Stats (Dec-Feb):
- December: 3.5K presentations, 428 views, 93 reads, +13 followers
- January: 1.8K presentations, 548 views, 62 reads, +7 followers
- February: 5K presentations, 689 views, 105 reads, +8 followers
Community:
- Web3ForHumans Telegram: 40 members and growing
- Medium followers: 47
- Twitter/X followers: 19
Freelance Writing:
- 2 articles published by Bitquery and CoinCodeCap:
- Top Prediction Market APIs
- DEX Router Slippage for Algo Traders
None of these numbers are viral. But every single one moved. That is what consistency does. And that is what DevRel is built on.
What DevRel Actually Is (And What It Is Not)Developer Relations is one of those roles that sounds corporate until you realize it is just “be genuinely helpful to builders in public”. A DevRel engineer sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and community. They write docs, run workshops, answer Discord questions at midnight, speak at hackathons, and tweet code snippets that save someone three hours of debugging.
What it is not: a marketing job with a GitHub account. The best DevRels are builders first. They feel the pain of a bad API or a confusing onboarding flow because they have been there themselves. In Web3 specifically, DevRel means being the bridge between a protocol’s technical team and the developers trying to build on top of it.
The role exists because most protocols are built by brilliant engineers who do not have time to explain their work to the outside world. DevRel does that translation. They make the complex feel approachable without dumbing it down. My two freelance pieces for Bitquery (prediction market APIs and DEX router slippage) came directly from doing exactly this: taking complex on-chain concepts and making them readable for developers who needed them.
The Open Loop and Why It Matters for DevRelHere is something I learned about writing that applies directly to community building and DevRel content. I used to think writing was about expression. Turns out it is about tension. Your first line decides if your story lives or dies. If your first sentence does not make someone wonder, they will never reach your second.
I started using what I now call the Open Loop. You start your story but you do not finish your first thought. You leave a question hanging. You open a curiosity gap. Instead of writing “I learned to write better by practicing daily”, you write “It took me six months to realize I was practicing the wrong way”. Same idea. Completely different pull. You do not tell them. You make them chase it.
The first time I tried it I posted with the line: “I used to think no one cared about my writing, until one comment changed everything.” Twenty four hours later it had ten times more clicks than any of my old posts. People stopped scrolling because they needed to know what that comment was. That is the power of an open loop. It does not shout. It pulls.
This is exactly what great DevRel content does. It does not start with “here is our documentation”. It starts with “here is the problem you have been ignoring and here is why it matters right now”. The formula in one line: do not start with the truth, start with the mystery that leads to it. Writing is not about information. It is about invitation. Invite them to lean in, to wonder, to need to know.
Community Building Strategy in Web3Building a Web3 community is not about follower counts. It is about creating a space where people feel smarter after showing up. Web3ForHumans grew to 40 members without a single paid promotion, just daily content and genuine conversation. Small but activated. The communities that win in Web3 share three things consistently.
They have a clear villain. Every strong community knows what it is fighting against, whether that is centralization, bad UX, or information gatekeeping. Web3ForHumans exists because Web3 feels unnecessarily complicated. That shared frustration is the glue that holds early members together.
They reward contribution over consumption. Discord servers with ten thousand members and zero active threads are graveyards. The best communities make it easy to contribute something small, answer a question, share a resource, test a new protocol, and recognize that contribution publicly. Every reply I got on Medium or Future came from someone who felt seen by the content, not sold to.
They build in public. This entire 60-day series is a community building exercise disguised as a learning journal. Every article is an invitation to follow along, disagree, or build on top of. That transparency creates trust faster than any marketing campaign. February’s 5K presentations on Medium with 689 views happened not because the content was perfect but because it was honest and consistent.
What Community Building Looks Like Day to DayThe romantic version of community management is hosting Twitter Spaces and giving keynotes. The real version is replying to every comment, writing the weekly recap nobody asked for, DMing the new member who joined but never spoke, and staying consistent when engagement drops. In Web3 the tools are Telegram, Discord, Farcaster, and Lens, but the work is the same as any community: show up, add value, repeat.
The metric that matters is not size but activation rate. If your community has 500 members and 50 engage weekly, that is a 10 percent activation rate, which is genuinely strong for Web3. Most large communities hover at 1 to 2 percent. Quality over quantity is not a cliche here, it is the strategy. Web3ForHumans at 40 members with daily conversation beats a 4000-member ghost town every time.
How DevRel and Community ConnectDevRel without community is just documentation. Community without DevRel is just vibes. The best Web3 projects treat them as one function. The DevRel team creates content that attracts builders. The community gives those builders a place to land, stay, and grow. The feedback from community flows back into the product via DevRel. It is a loop, and when it works it compounds fast.
The freelance writing that came from this series happened because the content proved I understood the space. Portfolio before resume. If you are targeting a DevRel or community role in Web3, the single most valuable thing you can do is build your own small community around something you genuinely care about. Web3ForHumans started as a Telegram group. This 60-day series is its content engine. That combination, community plus content plus consistency, is the portfolio that gets you hired.
Twitter/X at 19 followers is not a big number. But every follower there came from Web3 content, which means every one of them is a potential collaborator, reader, or future community member. That is a more valuable 19 than 1000 random follows.
If you want to follow along as I keep learning, building, and occasionally changing my mind about Web3, you can find the rest of this 60-day journey on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community to discuss these topics.
Resources- Day 46 — Dashboard origin and Phase 5 pivot
- Day 49 — Community coordination mechanics from games
- Day 50 — v0 scope for the dashboard
- Web3ForHumans Telegram — The community this series is building
- Top Prediction Market APIs — Bitquery freelance piece 1
- DEX Router Slippage for Algo Traders — Bitquery freelance piece 2
- Developer DAO — Largest Web3 developer community to study and join
I Wrote 51 Articles in Web3. Here Is What Actually Happened was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.