My Red Squirrel Journey
I had been trying to make the switch to Ethereum engineering for awhile. I had just finished a few blockchain engineering courses online but most job postings wanted a ton of working experience in blockchain that I didn’t have yet. Some job postings listed more years working in Ethereum than it had even been around! Most startups working in Ethereum are really tiny as well so they usually need someone with prior experience who can commit a ton of code quickly and get up to speed fast. I needed to get experience as an Ethereum developer before I could get hired somewhere.
Red Squirrel’s founder, Dave Hoover, and I are connected through Dev Bootcamp, where he was a co-founder. I had attended Dev Bootcamp four years ago and had been working as an engineer ever since graduation. Dave offered me an internship with Red Squirrel for a really cool gaming company where I could learn Ethereum development and get some working experience. I’d be able to submit code, see the process of working in Ethereum firsthand, and even have a mentor to pair with a few times a week. Here’s one of the projects we worked on:
My mentor was the most amazing engineer I’ve ever worked with. I would pair a few times a week with Sarah Gray and she’d review my pull requests and provide advice on how I could improve. We’d screenshare remotely on a coding problem and she’d assign me tasks for the next week. Since Ethereum is still so new, there’s not a ton of tutorials or even stackoverflow answers on problems yet. It was so useful to have someone to answer a question quickly instead of spending hours online trying to find a solution. Even seeing the workflow of how someone developed in Ethereum was really useful.
Sarah wouldn’t just focus on code as well — she would provide advice on how I could think through problems which helped me become an overall better engineer. I still use the strategies she taught me every day.
I also had a weekly call with Dave to check in about the project. Sometimes when you work remotely, you feel disconnected from the company. You sometimes wonder if people are appreciating your work or even keep up with what you’re working on. I never felt like that with Red Squirrel. I recently spoke at TruffleCon 2018, my first conference talk which was totally terrifying. A few people from Red Squirrel came and sat in the front row which helped me feel less nervous.
After learning the ropes, the gaming client actually brought me onto the project as a paid contributor. I was the team’s sole Ethereum engineer and quit my job to become a full time Ethereum developer. I’m now able to sit with my puppy and work remotely on really cool cutting-edge projects!
