Despite the doom and gloom of crypto markets of late, which my stomach has built up a muscle for over the years, I am excited for the industry. I never thought that, in my lifetime, I'd get to become part of two history-changing events: first the Internet and now crypto. Sure, there's plenty of bad crap that's happened to my generation, but these two things are something else.

I believe in this crypto meme so much that I've dived into full-time freelance work in it. I left behind the comforts of a 9-5, garden-variety engineering job to do this work.

Catching the Crypto Bug

I first caught the bug working on open-source crypto projects in the late night hours. My sleep got pretty f#ck'd up and I've learned the hard lesson that I don't snap back like a rubber band. I'm old. Nevertheless, seeing my skills already blend nicely with dapp work and documentation lit a new fire in my belly.

Telegraming devs all over the world getting things done was like nothing I had experienced before.

Soon enough, crypto work of all forms was all I wanted to do.

The Plunge

Freelancing is still...freelancing. Even though it's in the sexy, when-moon crypto industry, the complexities of freelancing are still there. You don't have an HR department, sales department, and accountants to do the annoying crap, and this is hard for tunnel-vision developers. I get that.

It has really paid off to get away from the computer and work on those cliche "soft-skills." I've discovered that they are not cliche at all. Being able to hold your own when you're on the phone or networking in a group pays massive dividends. It is also essential for any freelancer.

If you feel that your soft skills are rusty, which is a very easy situation to find yourself in even with a 9-5, I encourage you to first force yourself to improve them. Sign up for conferences or find little community gatherings so you get more comfortable with throwing yourself into a crowd of complete strangers.

Remote work

The thing about crypto that I've found is that remote positions seem much more numerous, even more so than other software industries. Companies have a consistent fixation on output. They want to see your prior output as well. So make sure all of your work is online, in a centralized place.

I took out an afternoon to work on a custom RSS feed that pulls my recent work from the various other sites that it appears in. It runs in the background and doesn't require that I update it all the time. The downside is that it crowds out my "best" work, whatever that means.

Group Messaging

If you're used to spamming spicy memes on Telegram, that will need to change also. Messaging etiquette is a big deal for distributed teams that use Slack or Telegram. Some of the usual one-liners and flame wars so common in certain channels are a major red flag in a business setting.

If this is news to you, ease into channels and get a feel for the tone before you blare your own personality, to everyone else's annoy. Err on the side of caution, because sarcasm and jokes are often misunderstood in text form.

That's what I know so far in my early stages.