Kitchen Interviews: Chef Cheems, the Lottery-obsessed Doggie.

Chef Nina interviews PancakeSwap front-end developer and dog, Chef Cheems

🦆Chef Nina: Have you ever wanted to know more about the chefs in the PancakeSwap kitchen? I used to be an admin of the community and had the same question for a long time. Well, since this duckie has now become a chef as well, I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be starting a series of interviews with the chefs and introduce them to you! Our first guest is Chef Cheems, not a bunny but a doggy. This doggo was most excited about this interview, so selected at the top of the list.

Hello Cheems! Please tell us about yourself. What is your role in the kitchen, and what have you done?

🐕 Chef Cheems: I am a front end developer at PancakeSwap, which means I make the UI part of it. I don’t develop smart contracts, although I do like peeking at our Solidity code and see what’s going on there.. I’ve made UI for PancakeSwap Info analytics, Farm Auctions, helped a bit with the Lottery, new APY calculator and did various UI improvements and bug fixes in other parts of the site. Lots of stuff I probably don’t even remember anymore :)

🦆 That sounds amazing! You’re involved in so many different products of PancakeSwap. What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far when developing PancakeSwap?

🐕 I think the biggest challenge is time. We’re quite a small team and quite often one feature is developed mostly by 1 developer on UI and 1 on Smart Contracts. Sometimes it’s really hard to find time to focus on a new feature but also pay attention to what other developers are working on, bug reports, future plans, etc. We want to provide the best experience for users but unfortunately sometimes it means spending more time to make sure everything is working as expected. On the other hand it also gives you a sense of ownership and responsibility, most of the features I make are actually used by me personally so it feels nice to spend extra time double checking everything is OK :)

🦆 The Crypto world moves really fast, so both developers and users are struggling for time. It is often said that we grow old fast in this world… so, you’re of course now both a dev and a user of PancakeSwap, but how did you get into the world of crypto currencies?

🐕 Oh dear… I’ve been interested in crypto almost since day 1, I remember the days when Bitcoin was just a couple of dollars. The worst part is that I was just looking at crypto news and didn’t really buy anything, it was just some interesting stuff happening somewhere but I didn’t feel like it could become this big, it all looked like just some niche thing that would at most allow you to buy pizza or something. Then when Etherium came I also watched it from a distance. When I first heard about Smart Contracts it didn’t make sense at all to me, probably because there was no good example of what is possible with this technology. Around 2019–2020 things started to slowly make sense for me and by the end of 2020 I started to buy a little bit of crypto. I still haven’t made any crazy gains, I’m not a good trader to be honest, I’m exactly the person from the memes — when I buy anything Mr. Bogdanoff makes a call and things go down. I mostly just stake CAKE or provide liquidity nowadays, it’s less stressful than looking at charts and finding low cap tokens that can shoot 10x.

🦆So you’ve been watching crypto for a long time, even though you did not participate in it until recently. I heard many of our users say that they aren’t good at trading, so farming is more suitable for them. It might be news for our users to learn that some of our chefs feel the same way as them. I guess that helps you do your best to develop a platform for them to use.

Next, let’s change the questions to more casual ones. Do you have any daily routines?

🐕 No, not really. But I kinda want to. Recently I started to exercise, like jogging and swimming. I also try to find more time to practice music nowadays. I used to be a musician but with all the coding I kinda left it in the background. Still haven’t developed a routine for it, so it’s a bit hard to find time for everything…

🦆 How about hobbies? What does Cheems do for fun?

🐕 Music is probably my biggest hobby, I used to be a guitarist in a metal band, played a lot of shows and loved to be on stage. Nowadays it’s hard to find time to join a band full time, but I do still play occasionally at home, although much less than I used to. I also play a bit of piano, drums and saxophone, but at the beginner level, again — I need more time to practice.

🦆 No one would have thought that a chef was a guitarist in a metal band! I can’t play any instruments… so four is a lot! What kind of music do you like? Do you listen to music while you code?

🐕 All kinds. I can listen to Fleshgod Apocalypse album and after that switch to Yoshizawa Kayoko. I don’t confine myself to one genre, although I’d say maybe 50–60% of my favorite bands are some kind of metal. And lots of instrumental music too, Polyphia, Marty Friedman, Jason Becker, that kind of stuff… I’m tempted to just list the names of bands I like but that would be a never-ending list. And yeah I do listen to music while I code, however sometimes when you need to focus on some complex logic I find it better to be in silence.

🦆Coming back to the work related things, I heard that since you got involved in lottery development, you started playing the lottery quite a lot… How’s it going?

🐕 Ah, Lottery is so much fun! I’ve played the old lottery even before I joined PancakeSwap, and I lost a lot. But then one day I won like 10k$, it was a really special feeling, I’ve never won anything this big before. Then I stopped playing the old lottery to wait for the new version with cheaper tickets. I’ve prepared hard, calculated probabilities, made some kind of strategy which tickets to buy to get my chances ever so slightly higher and… lost at least several hundreds of CAKE. :( I don’t regret it, it was fun and I didn’t ruin myself financially, but someday I’ll calculate exactly how much I lost and I think I’m not gonna like the number… especially if CAKE price goes up… But hey, did you know that one of the huge jackpots was won by someone who bought just 2 tickets? I bet this person is still jumping from joy. Feels nice to realize somebody’s life changed a lot for the better because of the lottery. But I feel I need to mention — don’t spend more than you can afford to lose.

🦆 Thank you for closing with such poignant words. Apart from the development work, tell us a bit about the work environment. There are lots of chefs in the kitchen, from bunnies, to dogs, to a duck. Which chef do you admire the most?

🐕 I don’t think I have a favorite chef, they all have very unique and interesting personalities. I think the team at PancakeSwap is something out of the ordinary, everyone cares passionately about the project and has an enormous amount of experience in their field. I guess that chefs who truly deserve admiration are our community manager chefs, other projects might have great developers too but I think no other crypto community is so well managed as PancakeSwap. Chef Fran, Chef Bun and especially Chef Nina do an excellent job at communicating with our users on social media and delivering the news to the kitchen.

🦆 I thought it would be interesting for our readers to know what the other chefs in the kitchen think of you, so I’ve asked Chef Hutch to spread some gossip.

🐇 Chef Hutch: — Firstly I should make it clear that I am Cheems’ favourite chef whether he knows it or not. Cheems is one of a growing number of dogs on the PCS engineering team. As a small adorable rabbit, this is slightly intimidating to me but I like to think I could hold them off in a fight if anything went down. We’ve worked together directly on some products (like lottery v2 — sorry you haven’t won big yet buddy) and indirectly on loads of other stuff in the codebase. He’s a super talented engineer and I just found out he’s a virtuoso on guitar too? Damn son! Cheems has a special relationship with Mr. Bogdanoff and usually if Cheems is buying — you should be selling. Godspeed my frontend comrade, see ya in the metaverse.

🦆 Lastly, any comments to users? You can say anything you want, but I’ll put <beep> if you say something inappropriate.

🐕 Don’t sit in front of the computer all day monitoring the crypto market, get out sometimes. Love you all! <beep> and have a nice day!

🦆 Thanks for taking your time Cheems! I’m sure our community members will really enjoy this, no one could expect these contents!

🦆 That’s all for the interview with Chef Cheems. I hope you like it. This interview is part of a series and we’re already preparing for the next one. If you have any comments or requests, please let us know with the hashtags #PancakeSwap and #InterviewWithChefs on twitter.

And, don’t forget to follow PancakeSwap official and Cheems’s twitter accounts!

Chef Nina 🦆
🥞 https://pancakeswap.finance
🥞 Twitter