2014 - 2018 Beginning of my career, I struggled with consistency. I was very motivated first week and could tackle any big problem head-on, but then I would quickly lose momentum. I was very smart, but "lazy". I was quickly to get up to speed in any technology. This culminated in me learning both Ethereum and Bitcoin smart contracts, and learning to focus on the math-like details of it. I liked the idea that I don't write a lot of code, but each line I write is important.

Skills: Deep research and hard-tech courage; untangling the problems

2018 - 2020 It was the start of my own projects time, I found a partner that worked around my "bursts" and learned to guide them in the correct direction. So I was producing important work.

Here, I also developed business skills. I got better at learning what people want, at selling and talking to customers. I would spend hours in customer support and greatly enjoyed it. I have also learned how to build Chrome extensions, and work with WebSockets. It was painful cause DX for extension isn't good, so it was a competetive advantage I had – being able to dive head-deep into a complex system and be able to keep all parts of it in mind while working on the specifics.

We've also done lots of hackathons here. I was always the "smart backend guy" that would take on the hardest part of the project, and nail it.

Skills: intense hardcore teamwork, learning to collaborate even when there's a harsh disagreement; prototyping working products instead of just rnd demos.

2020 - 2021 This time, it was my first venture into a "big salary". My school friend invited me over to work on a big contract at xSigma. It was an exhilirating feeling when people used my frontend to stake millions of dollars into the smart contracts.

It was also a first time I didn't have any tech lead over me, I was effectively C-level. My code went directly to production, and I made all the decisions about it.

We have also had crazy fights, cause the project was real and there were serious moneys at stake. The company could have made tens of millions if we played everything right. We did move forward even in spite of these.

Skills: responsibility, ("anxiety management"), even more teamwork and collabortaion.

2021 - 2023 Buildship was the first business I found that made non-trivial amount of money (meaning it was more that just the salary). We still spent it, but!

Here, for the first time I felt how scary it is to be on your own and just float in the uncertainty. It's always easy to see retrospectively when you read startup stories, how they make dcisions, but when it happens for you, it's immensely different and difficult. It's a special skill to choose a direction and just trust yourself to follow it even though you will not know until you invest tons of your working hours, if you were right.

100ks of people have trusted my smart-contracts with 10m$ total volume. The biggest project we undertook has raised 2.5m$, with our % fee.

This time I have also build a start-to-end smart contracts repo. I have managed tests, deploy scripts, and all the contracts inside of it. I took it really seriously and made sure I have read everything many times before deploying. I guess this was the biggest tech-learning from Buildship. I knew nobody could check after me and I had to be production-ready myself.

I have also made many production mistakes, some of those costing us 1000$s of dollars. However, our business mistakes have cost us even more. We easily could have made 10x what we did, had we implemented features faster, and talked about the platform more. We wanted to scale down instead, and focus on the "real users", following the YC playbook, but ended up missing the moment.

For the first time, the code I wrote had become a big project and I couldn't throw it away, or refactor quickly. I couldn't "keep the whole system in my head", even though I have built it myself. Before, I have only worked on such systems after they were built, and was always wondering how did it happen that people build confusing systems. But now I was the author of one.