Humans of the Open Web Sandbox: Valentina De Vidts: The OWS IT Wizard

The Humans of The Open Web Sandbox is a series that provides a small background behind the contributors engaging with the NEAR ecosystem through The Open Web Sandbox. This edition’s character profile is Valentina De Vidts — our IT wizard/Software engineer for the Open Web Sandbox Team. So, who is our IT wizard and what was her journey to the Open Web Sandbox team?

Who is she?

Valentina is a 24-year-old software engineering student who specializes in design and innovation from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, one of Chile’s most recognized educational institutions in Latin America, and Universita di Pavia which is one of the oldest universities in the world. University education has allowed her to explore different skills that contributed to her entrepreneurial mindset. Another motivating factor in striving to be successful is her family; and although she currently is away from them in Italy for an overseas exchange program, her family’s continued support is what has allowed her to focus and work towards her goals she has set out for herself.

Besides becoming a future IT expert in the world of Web3, Valentina has multiple interests and hobbies such as writing, drawing, design, and soccer. Moreover she really enjoys stand-up comedy; in fact, she took a stand-up comedy course and in her free time, when bars were open, would go to stand-up comedy bars and watch a lot of comedy shows. Travelling is another passion of hers:

Growing up, one of Valentina’s dreams was to be a successful writer. She is currently in the process of writing her own fiction book that revolves around people she has encountered while she was traveling. Her love for writing helped her segue into the software engineering industry as her love of words would help her learn the language of computer programming and code. As Valentina discovered the stark contrast between the human languages and programming ones, she was triggered to become proficient in both.

Say what: Blockchain?

When Valentina was in her 4th year at the university, she was introduced to blockchain for the very first time. She had to take a course on entrepreneurship and integration where she had to complete a group project. Their team chose to deal with the problem of falsification and creating tickets to events. Back then it seemed that QR code wasn’t safe so they decided to use blockchain technology to create tokens instead.

Joining the NEARverse as the OWS IT Wizard

Joining the Sandbox has shown Valentina that there is no right way to start off as a Software Engineer. After a few years of her studies, she began to become very discouraged as she thought she would have to be constantly preoccupied with the boring technical side of software engineering which would deprive her of creative freedom. The Sandbox presented itself as a possible reconciliation between her deep interest in the world of technology, and her deep passion for seeking solutions to problems in an innovative way. This is where she was able to meet a lot of like-minded people who understood the roles of how collaboration could help people achieve goals together. Today Valentina is developing the infrastructure for the Sandbox’s website, managing the structure and interaction between databases for which information collected from all contributors will be stored and recorded. She is also working on the Sandbox mentorship system and keeps an eye on the Discord day-to-day optimization.

The Sandbox Vision

Valentina views the Sandbox as a future central hub for the whole NEAR ecosystem to engage with all types of projects and tasks. She is happy to be a part of this early Sandbox we see today because the way we are building it now will showcase how users benefit from the most cutting-edge Web3 technology. The Sandbox will allow us to automate processes without losing the human part of collaborating on tasks or projects. To bridge the potential gap between the human aspect and sophisticated technology, Valentina has recently joined the conversation on the effective mentorship program within the Sandbox where seniors (aka more experienced Sandboxers) will be able to help junior ones to jumpstart their NEAR journey and get rewarded for it.

For more information on Valentina De Vidts follow @videvidts on discord, and @valentina4297 on telegram.

If you would like to know more about Sandbox: https://nearguilds.com/sandbox/

To get started on the Sandbox, Jump into Discord: https://discord.gg/SjyJbpnUfh