At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking outside the box and using IPFS to store the images.
In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn’t be happier about both choices.
Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs.
Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues outlined in the article won’t apply in my case and will be guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to store the images).
I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would have been much much harder to both implement and maintain.
So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current “standards” of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and lots of solutions available.
I turned 42 recently and I went through a similar situation.
Good job, well paid and still interesting enough, but becoming more and more boring every month.
At some point I felt that I had just two options on my table:
- Stay in the company as technical director to continue growing but with limited expansion possibilities. Write less code and make more boring meetings basically.
- Continue doing more coding as senior developer and be happier with my life without all the meetings, but that would mean even more limited growth possibilities.
So like in most things in life, in the end I found out that there are not just 2 options, but thousands.
In my case the best solution I found was keep working with my daily job to have the stability that makes me feel "safe" when I go to sleep, and at the same time spend most of my free time in doing what I like the most: coding on some project that is 100% mine and where I have total control over.
I tried this approach a few times with some SaaS projects and even if they didn't became unicorns and some generated barely 30-50k$/year, they were totally worth the effort in creating them, because on top of the money, the most valuable thing you get in return is to learn how to create a project from start to finish, with all the non-technical components like marketing included.
Over time I found out that you'll need to be lucky enough to find someone good enough like you on the design and marketing side of it as well, but if you finally find the right team, then it will become 100x better than working on any company. Both financially and in terms of happiness.
Of course it's not a recipe that will work for everyone because you really need to be passionate about something to spend most of your free time on it, and you will risk of getting burned out, but from my experience is definitely worth the effort!
And the most important part of this, is that you will have the ability to jump into any technology you want!
In my case I felt like the web2.0 was getting pretty boring and repetitive for me after doing all the SaaS projects, but now I'm about to launch a web3 project that I built within 5-6 months without any prior knowledge of smart contract in any way.
You can't find a job that will give you the opportunity to make such drastic changes in your career and will allow you that level of freedom.
https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...
At Flovatar [1] we've been using SVG and SMIL animations as a way to achieve true composability and interactivity for our NFTs while also being able to store all the illustrations fully on-chain.
I just fell in love with SVG and highly encourage everyone to dig more into the potentials of it. You can even have fun and create epic pranks [2] with it :)
[1] https://flovatar.com
[2] https://twitter.com/flovatar/status/1520509399466483716