How I Became A Blockchain Developer
I've had an on-and-off relationship with computer programming. I'd like to document my journey of how I became the programmer I am in this blog. I currently am a freelance blockchain developer (and a very new one at that). But it all begins with my love of videogames.
It's the early '90s. I must have been 3 years old. I am in my older brother's room holding a Super Nintendo controller in my hands. The game is Street Fighter II. I am using the character Dhalsim and spamming his slide attack (crouching heavy kick). I am defeating all my neighbors in this game using this "cheap" tactic. Hey, guys, you can block while crouching you know?! This was the beginning. I was addicted. I loved the feeling of winning against another person in head-to-head competition. Throughout my childhood, I've taken pride in being good at videogames[1].
I was obsessed with video games as a kid. All I wanted to do was play video games. It was a motivation for me to get good grades at school because my parents would reward me with new games. Why was I an honor roll student every year? Video games. You don't wanna see me at 10 years old back in 1998 when Pokémon first came out in the US. I just wanted to be a Pokémon master.
I had a vivid imagination as a child. Me and my twin would draw a lot as children. And looking back at it, we were paper prototyping our own video games by drawing original characters, backgrounds, character select screens, and health meters. Around the year 2000 I was introduced to a game called Graal Online (pictured above) by one of my classmates. This game was essentially a clone of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past within a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) world. But what really got us excited about Graal was its level editor. We made our own dungeons with custom-scripted boss battles. The level editor featured a Javascript-like scripting language for non-playable characters (NPCs). Although technically it was scripting, this was my first taste of computer programming.
Are you old enough to remember what the Web was like in the late '90s and 2000s? I'm nostalgic for the days of tacky Angelfire and Geocities websites. I would spend so much time lurking the Web reading fan pages for Pokémon, Starfox 64, and fighting games. I also read a lot of web comics. I wanted to be part of this. My twin and I along with a friend started our own website where we hosted our own web comics, video game reviews, and music reviews. This is where I first got my feet wet with Web development. I learned HTML and some basic CSS and JavaScript.
When I started college, it just made sense to me to enroll as a Computer Science major. I learned all the basics of lower division computer science studies: data structures, algorithms, assembly, etc. My university focused on Java. By the time I began my upper division courses in advanced data structures and discrete mathematics, I started to feel the stress building up. I was burning out and was losing motivation as a computer programmer.
After a lot of soul searching and with the help of a very empathetic professor, I decided that I should switch majors[2]. It made sense for me at the time to switch majors to Music. (I will definitely make a blog post soon about my story as a musician).
So I ended up graduating from college with a degree in Music Technology, and my first job, ironically enough, was doing contract work for a tech startup. So I was back as a programmer. I worked for this startup for a little less than a year making prototypes for brain teaser games geared towards traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's patients. I liked that I was doing work for a good cause, but unfortunately the company never really took off.
However, I learned a valuable lesson in what kind of technology I wanted to work with as a programmer. I was hired to make these games as Java applets. Now, this was around 2011/2012, and the fact that Java applets was already out of style by then was a red flag to me. I told the founder that these games should probably be implemented in JavaScript, but she was reluctant because that would require a lot of new code from scratch.
I was starting to get burnt out again and was convinced that Java was rotting my brain . I soon stopped working for the company due to excessive stress, and I started learning about HTML5 which was starting to gain traction at the time. I decided that I should pursue game development again and began collaborating with my twin again with some prototypes built on top of HTML5 using the new canvas tag for browser-based games. But along the way while researching new technologies, I took somewhat of a detour.
I learned about functional programming and this old language called LISP. This would change my whole outlook on programming. With Java, programming was such a chore. With this functional paradigm, programming seemed fun and exciting! I watched MIT's lecture series on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (it's a classic which is still relevant today. Go watch it!) and followed along with the book.
Having a background in Java, I was inevitably drawn to Clojure which is a LISP-based language built on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). I messed around with this language for a while and even attempted to contribute to some open source projects built with Clojure. My greatest achievement was a tutorial I made for a library for making Android apps with Clojure.
With the release of an alpha version of Super Wizard Potion, my twin and I would begin making games under the name Plunger Games. We would pursue this as our careers for a few years. We've partcipated in some game jams with some other great developers in California. We were even fortunate enough to sell some of our games to browser-based gaming websites.
The game which I am most proud of is Rock Paper Scissors Joust which was aimed to be a minimalist fighting game with simple controls. Unfortunately, we had trouble making money as indie game developers, and Plunger Games has since been on hiatus for a few years. We both pursued other sources of income so we could pay the bills.
To make money, I've gone through a few non-programming jobs including audio transcription, working at a music warehouse, performing at weddings, and computer repair. I even thought that I would never be interested in programming again. It takes a lot of creative energy, and I'd prefer to focus that energy on my music[3].
I first heard about Bitcoin back in 2010/2011 on Hacker News. At the time, I thought nothing of it. So it's like money? But not real? I don't get it. So I kind of ignored it for a few years although I was aware of it.
I started noticing crytpocurrency again during 2017 when I was working as an audio transcriptionist. Some of the clips I was transcribing were for cryptocurrency-related YouTube channels and podcasts. I was hearing terms like 'ICO' mixed in with economics lingo like 'bull market' and 'financial bubble' and was just totally lost. I just transcribed what I was hearing. But a certain story caught my attention.
I learned about the corrupt government in Venezuela and the hyper-inflation of their national currency. I learned about their class divide and that the average Venezuelan citizen did not have access to banking. Bitcoin was a system that allowed the average citizen to participate in the economy. I started to understand that cryptocurrency was a game changer in this regard. But I still didn't understand how it worked, nor did I dig any deeper to learn more about it.
Let's fast forward to October of 2018 when I was working in a computer repair shop. There was some downtime during my shift so my supervisor suggested I keep up on new computer tech by reading some tech website articles. So I'm reading some news about new computer parts and stumble upon an article about cryptocurrency. This article stated that blockchain developers are in high demand. I found out the price at the time was hovering around $6,000 USD. And I learned that it was at all time highs over $100K back at the end of 2017. Whoa! Maybe there's something to this cryptocurrency thing.
At the end of October 2018 (coincidentally around the time of Bitcoin's 10th birthday), I was layed off from my computer repair job. As I was sitting there on my unemployed ass, I couldn't help but think "blockchain developers are in high demand." So I went in. I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube. I read Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos. I read the Bitcoin white paper.
I was pretty apathetic about programming for a long time, but the technology of cryptocurrency was exciting to me. I was interested in programming again! Thank you, Satoshi.
As a programmer, Ethereum was what really got me excited. It's a Turing-complete[4] virtual machine distributed throughout a peer-to-peer network? Cool! Web3's applications will make the web decentralized again? Yes! I was sold. I started learning how to program in Solidity. I went through some tutorials. I made my own ERC20 token[5]. I made some Cryptozombies. And then I discovered Gitcoin.
I wanted to pursue blockchain development as a career, but I didn't know how to gain experience other than doing my own projects. I found out that Gitcoin is a platform which puts cryptocurrency bounties on solving bugs and issues on Github-hosted open-source projects[6]. I jumped right in and have been working on Gitcoin bounties for a few months now. It's been a great experience so far. (And the functional detour has come full circle: I'm working on a project written in Clojure!) When I told one of my friends that I got paid in cryptocurrency for the first time, and told them about the bounties, they responded with "Oh, so you're a bounty hunter?" Yes. I like the sound of that.
I've only been taking on low-hanging fruit type of bounties with low pay to get started. (Checkout my Gitcoin profile.) As I gain more experience, I'll take on the bigger bounties. And hopefully sometime soon I can make a full-time career in this blockchain space.
I'm pretty new here on Steemit. I've known about the Steem blockchain for a while, but when I saw that social media apps were built on it that people were actually using, I decided to join. I felt very welcomed when I joined! Consider this my development blog. I'll update you all as my journey as a blockchain developer continues. Thanks for reading!
[1]: Of course, I would be humbled once I entered my first Smash Bros. tournament in college.
[2]: My failures and setbacks as a Computer Science student could be the topic of another blog post. Please comment if you'd be interested in that!
[3]: Creativity, discipline, and focus is another blog topic I am planning to write about. Stay tuned for that!
[4]: Technically, quasi-Turing-complete.
[5]: I plan on making a tutorial on how to make a ERC20 token. Stay tuned.
[6]: I could make an entire blog post about Gitcoin being the incentivization layer on top of Github as the collaboration layer. Let me know in the comments if you would be interested in that!
