On the 1st of February, I was laid off from my role at Polygon Labs unfortunately. Polygon laid off 60 people (19% of the workforce). At Polygon, I built the Ecosystem Portal and was the only dev on the project. It's a portal that hosted Solution Providers and allowed devs to connect with them to build better projects. Here's a link to my work: https://ecosystem.polygon.technology
This was my first experience of a layoff. There was no notice whatsoever, I lost access to my mail, slack and GitHub while I was coding. We later received a mail that explained the situation.

At that moment, I sort of decided to not work for anyone but rather with someone. It might sound corny but I love to build and I didn't want to be like an employee. I started contracting.

I contracted at Stack.so. Stack was building on-chain loyalty system and I was working to build the UI components. When most of the platform was developed, the contract ended their as well and stack announced their raise. I learned a lot there.

I also worked at Openblock Labs. Openblock provides data analytics and engineering services to it's clients. Most of the work was building features on top of existing tech and maintainence. I left after just a little over 3 months because I didn't feel there was much ownership and was contributing massively. The development tasks were adhoc.

One of the highlights during the journey is building DeStreet. DeStreet is a "social" trading app in the true sense. You create a trade, people join your trade and launch it. You win, your trade depositors win.
My first experience with Solana and an exciting project with an amazing founder. I can vouch for his integrity and work ethic. It's an innovative, interesting idea and I was handling the frontend for it. Here's my work if you want to take a look: https://app.destreet.com

I still had that bit where I want to build and have my project or product out that people use. I learned about a retroactive grant by the Base chain for building a permissionless ERC721 bridge to move assets from ETH to Base. I built the UI on top of the existing contracts deployed on Base but couldn't get any traction whatsoever and not the grant either. Try the bridge here: https://chainbind.com

I continued looking for more things to do and bounced around ideas with my good friend, who's also a great designer. We thought about video streaming in web3 initially but people in web3 don't really like to get doxxed so we scrapped it and after a bit of iteration we realized there's a gap in social.
Of course, there are a lot of web3 social apps but it's still very web3, it's not normie. I believe we're on to something here and so I started building Tike Social in the onchain summer buildathon and have been building on top of it since. Currently, built on top of the Farcaster protocol we might move completely on chain. This really could be a winner for me. Try it out: https://app.tike.social

To add to my credibility, I also built opdready which is an app to store your healthcare information and it's completely secure and private. Even I wouldn't know what information you've added considering how sensible medical data really is. https://opdready.com

I have realized what I lack is distribution and that's what I'm going to work on building and hopefully find some success. Otherwise, I'm learning maths while I continue building because I want to learn about finance and that's what's been up so far.