After 12+ years working in a career I loved, helping people in an industry I care about, and doing well enough to take care of my family, it came time to pursue an adventure I’ve fallen in love with over the past couple years - join the digital revolution, dive deeper into Distributed Ledger Technologies, decentralized digital communities, and Web 3.0, generally. At the end of December of 2021, I parted ways with a job I worked to the bone, embarking on something scary and new - a restless attempt to rewrite my future without a clear plan. Riddled with anxiety and going against the best advice of my closest loved ones, I threw my ambitions onto the table, exposing every obstacles and challenge I would need to overcome to make this dream a reality.

Although I’ve become technically savvy enough to handle myself comfortability in the digital world since I was a kid in the 80s, I had never learned how to code or do anything worthy of saying confidently, “I’m a computer person.” I don’t plan on letting this stop me from doing incredible things in the space, however, and since I’ve left that job behind, I’ve committed to working full time in this exciting and innovative community.

Since late 2020, with every spare second I’ve had, I’ve immersed myself fully in this universe. Studying whitepapers for digital assets, joining and eventually administering Discords for crypto enthusiasts, starting talking about it publicly on TikTok, and finally I built my own NFT collection.

With a career change, I have every opportunity to maximize my exposure and tackle my goals without much obstacle. Decidedly, I spent 2 weeks in late December, scouring Web3 career sites, searching for a non-technical positions with a company or DAO in the industry. As someone whose total coding experience can be summarized in a MySpace HTML remix from a decade and a half ago, I found myself lost in a sea of hiring posts for Software Engineers and Marketing Managers - neither of which I had an ounce of formal experience in.

In the last 16 months, I had begun logging “big ideas” on a whiteboard. The kind of projects I wish existed in the DeFi, DAO, and NFT space, but didn’t. I approached some trusted associates in the space with ideas on how to realize these conceptual visions, and they told me I had some very innovative propositions, but I would need to find professionals and a lot of capital to make any of them a possibility, let alone a successful one. I didn’t want to just hand these over to a faceless person. Although I value the principles of “trustlessness” in Web3 communities, I wanted to build these myself, in order to not compromise to Venture Capitalists, or have them watered down by those seeking a quick profit. I want to do big things that last, and it became clear what I needed to do - I had to learn how to speak and write in the language of digital gods. It was time for me to learn to code.

After several conversations with my friends in both Web 2 and 3, family that worked in IT, and my comrades in Discords and TikTok, the advice was generally to not fall prey to the Coding Bootcamps I had been interviewing with. Instead, they said - just do it. The education is practically free, so there’s no need to go into debt with a school, just to get job placement working on an app for a startup that will probably not help you leapfrog into coding smart contracts. That was the gist.

I coughed up some fiat for codeacademy during an annual discount promotion, and started right away on Python 3 beginner course. I talked about these changes with my TikTok followers, and a mountain of supportive comments and DMs seemed to validate my adventure. These are people that see my commitment and exhaustive love for the technology every day, and feel confident I can carry this dream out. It’s easy for them, because they love a good “come from behind” story. While I appreciate every bit of their “You can do it” attitude, I know it can leave one feeling a false sense of security. The comments from software engineers themselves are what truly motivate me.

I want to work with them all someday.

I want to design tools that empower and enrich my community, and the less fortunate.

I want to build something revolutionary.