The Hero’s Return

Hey everyone, I’m back. I finished my immersive full-stack web development boot camp at the start of May, and have been in limbo since. I wrote a review of my boot camp experience here. It left me at a place where I felt capable of creating some decent web apps, but overall short on fundamentals and less experienced than I need to be to follow through on my intention for learning to code–to create interesting, useful Bitcoin apps.

So, I’ve been hunkered down, solidifying my understanding of some programming fundamentals, getting repetitions building some of the things covered in the boot camp (API’s and .NET MVC Web Apps), and playing with some Bitcoin libraries and projects. It’s also summer in Chicago, so I’ve been making sure to get large dosages of sunlight and ample time outdoors while it’s available.

Notably, I stumbled across Nicolas Dorier’s (@NicolasDorier) NBitcoin library for C# and open-source book he and Adam Fiscor (@nopara73) wrote several years ago, Programming the Blockchain in C# . [A moment of gratitude: Nicolas Dorier is a true Bitcoin Wizard. I’m blown away and inspired by what he’s been able to do in the Bitcoin space. The man is a fucking Legend. Thank you for all you do, Nicolas!] I worked my way through that book, and for a while was attempting to contribute to another of Nicolas’ projects, BTCPayServer (the most important project in the Bitcoin space imho), but still wasn’t competent enough to get a good understanding of the code base nor make any contributions to such a high-level project.

I have also been applying to developer jobs, but am presently stuck in the Catch 22 where employers are generally looking for someone with at least a couple of years of experience, but because I don’t have any professional experience as a developer no one will give me an opportunity. To be fair, I have had two in-person interviews, but I froze up during the technical coding challenges in each of those, blowing my shot at getting the jobs. The problems I had to solve were fairly easy, but both times I got extremely nervous and my mind went blank. I did solve the problems in each of those technical assessments, but too slowly and with too many hiccups. Somehow, I’ll have to train my nervous system not to freak out under the pressure of those situations.

So, I guess I’m just going to have to keep my nose to the grindstone. All I want is to work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, to help Bitcoin grow and thrive, and to hopefully be paid in Bitcoin. Eventually, I will own my own Bitcoin company. That is my aim. That is my goal. I will make it happen. How I get there is the only question.

In the meantime, I will have to beg @r0ckstardev for another training session and some ongoing tutelage in working with the overwhelming BTCPayServer solution so I can make my first contributions to an open source project. I also have a couple of ideas for Lapps, so I’ll have some “real” projects to work on going forward. Oh, and I’ll also be posting here more often.

Blessings,

Paz

P.S. Since there’s been some confusion about pronouncing my name, phonetically it’s ‘Peyz’… or Paz as in “It payz to hodl Bitcoin.”