A Fantastic Journey: From the First Keystrokes to Becoming a Platform Advocate
Infura's Platform Advocate outlines his journey from developer to platform advocate in the blockchain space.
My voyage through the world of technology, the Internet, and Blockchain
The First Keystrokes
That’s me, on my first computer, furiously typing DOS commands into the console to summon delightful and captivating moving pixels. This primitive, monochrome display sparked my lifelong fascination with computers and technology. This was the first time I fell in love with computing.
A Stranger, in a Strange Land Called the Internet
The second significant inflection point in my computing career came through the mail. A circular disc emblazoned with the AOL logo urged me to, “Sign on today!”. After the strange sound of two computer modems shaking digital hands completed, I joined a global tribe of curious, computer pioneers exploring a strange, mysterious land called the Internet. This wild and wonderful place where I existed as a pseudonym and described myself as “15/M/VA” was a place for digital nomads to come together and information-dump about their favorite, obscure interests. Portals lead to data about almost anything one could imagine.
A Phoenix Rising
Fast forward to over a decade into my career, and my tender heart had been wounded by just a few too many production outages, weekend on-call rotations, and null pointers. I thought I could never love technology again.
But then, I discovered the blockchain.
Crypto and Web3 came into my life like an exploding singularity, breathing new passion into my relationship with technology. I felt like “15/M/VA” again, exploring a new bleeding edge of technology, probing the edges of possibility, and creating new paradigms with the stroke of a key.
The Culmination of My Life’s Work
Near the end of a long period of quarantine and personal stagnation, a fortuitous and serendipitous potential opportunity entered my life: a colleague reached out to me about a life-changing opportunity. He had recently joined a new company called ConsenSys. They were in a hyper-growth phase, riding the wave of increasing awareness and adoption of blockchain technology. My dream role, at my dream company, presented itself to me.
I had the opportunity to leverage my engineering, technical education, and digital marketing skills to engage with and help foster the emerging cryptonative developer community. It felt just like the very first time I logged onto the internet and entered a seemingly endless world of possibilities.
My first steps into my shiny new Web3 career started with a phone call. Not with a recruiter, but with the co-founder of an amazing company, Infura. Infura is the world’s most powerful suite of APIs and developer tools, giving developers reliable, robust access to numerous blockchain networks. Infura ushered entry to the Ethereum blockchain for many profoundly important and pioneering crypto projects such as Metamask, Uniswap, and MakerDAO. I met with other amazing team members at Infura and learned about the deep need for evangelism, and developer advocacy and education, inside and outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. Infura is passionate about lowering the barrier of entry for aspiring Web3 developers and reducing the friction between conception of amazing dapps and deployment to mainnet. In fact, the mission of the company is to deliver the best infrastructure and tools for developers to build amazing Web 3.0 applications.
In my final challenge during my interview period, I was given the opportunity to create a piece of content that built on the amazing work of a graduate of ConsenSys Academy. The stars aligned and my video consisting of narrated live coding and a high-level explanation of decentralized exchange mechanics was able to meet the high bar of quality ConsenSys demands.
The Call
A mysterious event popped up on my calendar one day from ConsenSys and my heart rate quickened. I immediately tried to manage my expectations but my hopes and dreams bubbled up and I considered the impossible: I would get an offer. And it happened! I was officially asked to be part of a world-class organization, driving forward the most innovative technology the world has seen since the inception of the Internet.
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Inspired to join the revolutionary world of blockchain? Check out https://consensys.net/careers/ today!
Want to get started on your journey as a Web3 developer? https://infura.io/register
Read more stories like this at: https://blog.infura.io/
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