Some background context:
- I self-taught myself coding at the age of 14 in 2004 with Flash/ActionScript using computers in my school's library. Very few people in my small town were interested in coding at the time so it was unusual.
- Studied Software Eng at university. Graduated early with a Info Tech degree due to high number of job opportunities (I was already working part time).
- I got in early on the web development trend.
- Joined an ed-tech startup. Got some shares. Has been slow steady growth but they haven't exited yet. Not sure I'll ever be able to sell.
- Launched an open source library which got thousands of stars on GitHub.
- Joined a startup backed by big investors including Y Combinator, Greylock Partners, A16z.
- Joined a $4 billion market cap crypto project in 2017 which got into the top 10 crypto projects in the world at the time. I was developer #6; the project started using the open source library I had built. Although the project slid in the rankings due to lack of marketing, it's still worth hundreds of millions and hasn't been hacked in 4 years since it started using my open source library. A lot of weird stuff started happening in my career after joining this project.
- Earned like $50K per year (average) from blockchain forging for about 3 years. I was earning 200% yield on my investment each year for 3 years which I used to fund my own time to work on side projects. Then crypto had a big crash though my principal is about the same as when I had started.
- During that time, I launched 6 different side projects with other people. All still running but none earning any revenue yet. Algorithms don't give them any exposure.
Unfortunately, even with this track record, none of this translated to significant long term income or opportunities. I have fewer opportunities today than I did when I just graduated from university in 2012.
- I self-taught myself coding at the age of 14 in 2004 with Flash/ActionScript using computers in my school's library. Very few people in my small town were interested in coding at the time so it was unusual.
- Studied Software Eng at university. Graduated early with a Info Tech degree due to high number of job opportunities (I was already working part time).
- I got in early on the web development trend.
- Joined an ed-tech startup. Got some shares. Has been slow steady growth but they haven't exited yet. Not sure I'll ever be able to sell.
- Launched an open source library which got thousands of stars on GitHub.
- Joined a startup backed by big investors including Y Combinator, Greylock Partners, A16z.
- Joined a $4 billion market cap crypto project in 2017 which got into the top 10 crypto projects in the world at the time. I was developer #6; the project started using the open source library I had built. Although the project slid in the rankings due to lack of marketing, it's still worth hundreds of millions and hasn't been hacked in 4 years since it started using my open source library. A lot of weird stuff started happening in my career after joining this project.
- Earned like $50K per year (average) from blockchain forging for about 3 years. I was earning 200% yield on my investment each year for 3 years which I used to fund my own time to work on side projects. Then crypto had a big crash though my principal is about the same as when I had started.
- During that time, I launched 6 different side projects with other people. All still running but none earning any revenue yet. Algorithms don't give them any exposure.
Unfortunately, even with this track record, none of this translated to significant long term income or opportunities. I have fewer opportunities today than I did when I just graduated from university in 2012.