OK, so we sitting comfortably? My career path spans 30 years... Here is my timeline, believe it or not, this is the abridged version!
- Born (1977)
- Was always interested in tech stuff. Early cmputers, etc. 1989 wrote a program in basic that allowed two IBM PCs to chat to each other over a serial cable.
- Accepted to University of Bristol to do Mechanical Engineering, but deferred for a year to go live/work in the US
- Local ISP moved office to directly opposite the converted warehouse I was living in (with a Chi Chi's waiter, a Rikers guard, and a SUNY Art lecturer) in Albany, NY
- I wander across road with bowl of chicken wings and ask if I can work evenings there in lieu of my $30/mo internet fee. They agreed.
- Learned lots about the internet (this was 56K model days) and Unix (FreeBSD, SunOS), learned HTML and started building websites.
- Returned to the UK and after 1 year of Mech Eng, decided to switch to Comp Sci. As final year project built a mailing list archive search engine (Dejanews for mailing lists)... inspired by two guys called Brin & Page and a search engine they were working on called Backrub and their paper Anatomy of a Large Scale Search Engine. Graduated with 2:1
- Randomly met a guy in a lift and started talking about lack of web hosting in the area. Started a company (Netsight) doing web hosting, domain name registration, and colocation.
- As web hosting became commoditised, we switched to web development. Stumbled on Zope, the first web application framework, written in Python. Started building CMSs (Plone), portals, etc for companies and governments. Grew company to 15 people over 16 years.
- Was heavily involved in the Zope and Plone communities, co-founded one of the first software Foundations (Plone Foundation, 2004). Ran several international developer conferences (Plone Conf 2010, 2014) and travelled the world doing open source
- Via Plone community member, I was offered a role to lead the mobile development team for an LA-based health and fitness startup (enquos). CTO turned out to be psycho and after much drama CEO fired him.
- After 3 years, startup ran out of funding and fired everyone on Thanksgiving Day. After doing async programming in Swift, decided to make peace with Javascript and learn node.js. Remembered some XRP that our sysadmin from web dev company had given me, and as a programming exercise started writing a trading bot on the XRP Ledger (the first DEX in web3). Knew nothing about trading, or finance. Lo and behold the bot was making money.
- Went down a rabbithole of crypto/blockchain. Did a Fintech diploma at Oxford University Säid Business School. Created a startup idea to link XRP Ledger to UK Banking Faster Payments network. Despite working prototype, couldn't get it off the ground as no bank would partner. "No porn, gambling, or crypto". CEO of Starling Bank threatened to sue me if I continued. Crypto market crashed early 2018.
- Wife said "You best go get a proper job, or you will be pissing me off sat on the sofa in your underpants all day trading". I saw a vacancy advertised by a guy I had randomly met 10 years prior. He had been stood outside a Python Conference on his own having a cigarette, I invited him to join us for dinner. 10 years later, he hired me.
- That job was for a MongoDB startup just acquired by IBM. (IBM is about as "proper company" as I could get wifey happy!)
- For two years worked on database in the cloud stuff, mainly related to GDPR regulations coming in.
- Randomly chatting to a woman in the office who said "You'd be good at Developer Advocacy, there is a vacancy on our team, you should apply". So I applied, and got the job. Joined the London IBM Cloud Developer Advocacy Team
- Went into the new office on first day of new job. Told about Covid-19 and lockdown and that was last day I was in the office.
- During the day, I worked remotely for a year doing live coding on Twitch and doing Python DevRel for AI/ML stuff on IBM Cloud.
- During the evening, I worked on algorithmic trading and machine learning, and doing Youtube explainer videos on how blockchains and cryptocurrencies work.
- Got headhunted by Ripple to join their new RippleX division at Head of DevRel based on the advocacy work I'd been doing in my spare time on the XRP Ledger.
- Worked for Ripple for about a year, doing live coding on Twitch and launching a grants programme.
- Moved from the UK to Barbados, due to my wife's ill health.
- Left Ripple to take a break from work and spend time caring for my wife.
- On day I was walking my dog on the beach and some woman randomly stopped and started fussing him saying he was cute. she had a top on with the logo of a conference I recognised. We got chatting. She worked for an incubator in Accenture that had a project looking for a DevRel for a AI on the Blockchain company. I was interviewed the next day and started work for Bittensor.
- I went to London to present Bittensor, at a meetup organised by a former IBM colleague, who invited a bunch of fellow former colleagues along to present. One of which now worked at Filecoin, Ally.
- Bittensor realised they'd hired DevRel too early and didn't have product yet. So we parted ways.
- I applied to Protocol Labs (Filecoin) on Ally's suggestion and got job. So started with the Filecoin Virtual Machine team doing DevRel for an EVM built on top of Filecoin. Learned Solidity initially from some fantastic videos by a great devrel called Alysia. ;)
- After two years, Protocol Labs started to change to Venture Studio model and tried to spin out all groups. Our group didn't survive the turmoil.
- I was randomly contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter I'd chatted to about 3 years prior. Arbitrum Foundation was looking for someone to do DevRel. I worked there for 9 months on Arbitrum Stylus mostly, learning Rust. The role wasn't quite working out, and we parted ways amicably.
....and here I am now... looking for my next role.
You will notice one word that appears many times above. "random". Most of my career has been a result of a series of random events.
But as I told someone who just asked me earlier today (and what reminded me to come back and write this) is that you need to place yourself in the way of those random events. And help people. Be nice. "Lift as you climb". Many of my breaks came from people I'd interacted with years earlier.
Oh, and chicken wings, they were a key ingredient to the start of my career.