My First Post In a Long Time

Well, hi there again :D

It's been exactly 2 years and 1 day since the writing of my first blog post.

Funny how this website only gets updated during recruiting season lol. Recruiters, if you're reading this, thank you for being thorough with your candidate research.

Now, let's get into the actual meat of the article: a self reflective rant.

In the 2+ years since this websites creation, I've grown tremendously from the internships I've gone through and startups I've built.

My two internships at AWS have taught me what it feels like to be a full fledged software engineer in a large churning corporation. Slow, but a good kind of slow. It's the kind of development that makes sure that you can't mess up a smoothly oiled machine. A structure where it's impossible for an intern to cause a sev 1. That is good. :)

In stark contrast, my short-lived internship at Alice, a startup based around P2P stablecoin payments felt more like a very serious school project, where work was less structured, but development was much quicker. It was fun, getting design decisions made through quick discussions and drawings on a whiteboard with the CEO. A feature for the main app could be built, pushed, and tested by live customers in the span of 2 weeks, speed unheard of for a tech giant. This was also where I got some Web3 dev experience, which was super cool and fun.

StyleX, the first startup I co-founded, is a social media application connecting barbers to their clients and allows people to easily search for hairstyles and find the barbers who can give those haircuts. What I learned from StyleX is that no matter how much effort you spend on creating the most efficient backend and creating a functional frontend, if the premise of your product does not have an interested group, your product will go nowhere.

Moonfi, the second startup I co-founded, is a web application where users can deposit fiat currency to earn high yields on their savings by playing Wordle. The yields are generated by converting users' holdings into stablecoins and leveraging DeFi protocols. From Moonfi, I learned that investors are always looking for hype. Being first and early adopters of new technologies with the hottest buzzwords is the cheat code for getting funding as a start up. HOWEVER, no matter how good your product is, no one will use it if it doesn't look good. Basically, all start ups need a designer, and a really good one will make your product go far, even if it is in actuality, bad.

And with that, my self-reflective rant has ended.

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For the unrelated news of the day, unfortunately, it looks like we're in a recession (2 quarters of negative GDP growth). :(

Also, for the cultured, Isekai Ojisan is the best anime airing this season ૮ ´• ﻌ ´• ა