Volume: V | Featuring Developer Interview with Tina Wang
4 May 2022 - Community is the Utility
Reading Key:
Intro from iseult
Tina Wang is an extremely helpful individual and an essential member of the Pak community. She is a certified @wizard, musician, and the creator of an amazing array of helpful NFT tools.
All of Tina’s project’s bolster sleek presentation along with elegant design. The one that we are most familiar with is a statistics dashboard for Pak’s Merge NFT, aptly named: Mege.Tina.Cafe The dashboard features filtration for the first mass.black event in addition to collection statistics, “search” by id#”, latest merges, global leaderboard, blue leaderboard, and merges leaderboard.
Tina has taken the time to pair each one of her answers with songs that are meaningful to her experience. Please feel free to listen as you read along.
- iseult
Developer Interview with Tina Wang
Can you tell me the story of how playing the piano led to your first job?
🔊Now playing.. Justin Hurwitz - Mia & Sebastian’s Theme🔊
ahah, this is not as exciting as it may sounds 😅
I have been playing piano for more than 20y now (yes I know very Asian cliché where you have to learn piano or violin ahah), so after moving out my parents’ house for a small student closet, I was no longer able to train on a real piano. So I started learning about DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
To summarize quickly it’s a kind of software for producing music where you can play and install virtual instruments. These instruments come as plugins that you can download and install in your DAW. I have played piano on a crappy plastic keyboard for some years like that 😄
Moving forward to my 2nd year of engineering school, I had to do an internship to validate my semester.
I started sending email to a robotic startup company and also, with no real hope, to the company making the virtual piano software that I was using every day. Saying that I love their products, that it sounds really great, blabla, and that I was looking for an internship. I got an unexpected answer!
We set up an interview that went roughly like this:
Q: Have you done some web development in your school?
A: eeeuh… very little
Q: Do you know javascript?
A: eeeuh no, but I’m willing to learn!
Q: mmmh… so you play music ?
A: oh yes! I have played piano since i’m 5 years old
Q: cool cool, sounds good.. you’re in !
And that’s how my career as a web developer began.
What was your introduction to Web3?
🔊Now playing.. NTO - Invisible ft. Sofiane Pamart🔊
I mined some crypto back in 2015 but I can’t remember why, maybe after seeing a video on youtube. Sadly I kept everything on an exchange that closed since. But I only got involved in NFT back in November, so all of this is pretty new to me. It was a drop from Sofiane Pamart to help him grow as an international artist. The floor is back to where it was when I bought it so not a good investment I may say. Ahah ! But at least I had the opportunity to listen to his last album before its public release and I got another nft for free after doing some dev for him, so I’m not too mad about it 😄
Thus far you have created two projects pertaining towards Pak’s ecosystem. Watch Ash Fly is a website which provides an overview of the $ASH token, its cost in $USD, the return yield for “burning” a fungible cube NFT, how many fungible cube NFTs are left, the total $ASH supply, how to get $ASH, and where to purchase “A Cube”.
What has compelled you to create these projects?
🔊Now playing.. Kamasi Washington - Street Fighter Mas🔊
I came across secondstate’s website watchcubesburn.art and thought that the displayed infos are very useful but the design was… not so great.. (sry sec, ahah). At that time I wasn’t working on anything interesting so I decided to rework his website in a more elegant way. It was just a design exercise for me. In the end, the Merge collection came up, and I saw it as a great opportunity to try this “exercise” again and take it one step further. I think I did a way better job this time 😄
Are you working on a dashboard for Ash Chapter 2 Metamorphosis?
🔊Now playing.. Jinsang - Betrayal🔊
No. I think the burn mechanic is fairly simple, someone already made a Dune dashboard (https://dune.com/queries/542532) that shows everything one needs to know. I don’t think I have anything useful to add for the moment.
What does it mean to be a Pak collector?
🔊Now playing.. Frank Ocean - Nikes🔊
wow, eh I’ve always been bad at answering this kind of question, ahah
Having a Pak nft means I can finally post gifs in the #Lorem channel!!
No seriously, since I got into Pak ecosystem I found a lot of friendly and welcoming people. Some I’m working with them now on cool projects.
I’m so happy to have found people interested in the same thing and in the same way as me. 0xG said something that goes like “I collect what I want, don’t invest”
The only thing I invest is my time building for the community and what I get in return is used to collect. But I’m not a hypocrite, if one of the pieces I own mooned, I’m very likely to sell it, ahah.
What I mean is.. Pak has managed to build a very strong community around its ecosystem. Like a garden with a sandbox. And I’m here to collect flowers and build sand castles. ⛫
How do you integrate your love of music into technology?
🔊Now playing.. Daft Punk - Da Funk🔊
At one point I did some music related web development. I made a sketchy synthesizer inside a web page which can be controlled by any user connecting to the website, not gonna lie it turns into a sound nightmare really quickly. A web app that streams audio from real physical synthesizer that you can control from the app itself, that was pretty fun. I would like to do some kind of cool visual effect for sound/music using web based technologies. This is definitely something I want to try.
Will you be releasing an NFT project in 2022?
🔊Now playing.. Nujabes - Feather🔊
I will quote Pak on this one “I create what I want to exist”. I got some ideas on what I want to see and I think do not already exist in the NFT space. and of course it will be a sound & visual focused piece or art. Oh, and evolutive too, I got really inspired by the merge mechanism. I still need to think a bit more about it ahah
Is there one creation that you are particularly proud of?
🔊Now playing.. Parcels - somethinggreater🔊
The merge dashboard for sure. I think I found the balance between showing as much data as possible and keeping the design clear. And a lot of people are using it !! This is really a milestone for me. I am no longer making little experiments in my room only for me and my own needs. It’s greater than that now.
Official Pak Project Links
Do you exist? mass.black
∴ AB AETERNO lostpoets.xyz
Creation Through Destruction ASH burn.art
Contribute
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iseult#8848 on Discord
iseultimpakt@gmail.com
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