Let's go Consensys Academy 2018

Consensys is an evangelic organization within the Ethereum ecosystem. If you’re interested in blockchain, you’re probably interested in Ethereum, and you should sign up for their newsletter.

Enough brown-nosing though. 😛

Back in April I got an email from Consensys about open registration for their 2018 Academy class. It took me less than 12 hours to pull the trigger on enrolling ($1,000).

Why? To buy myself a pivot. I’ve had a strong tech career at 23 because of a keen sense of when to pivot.

Coming out of high school I was dead set on running a casino. Ask half the people I graduated with. They’ll tell you.

I only applied to undergrad at UNLV (gaming management) and St. John’s (computer science). When push came to shove, call it a gut feeling, I chose computer science. Pivot #1.

We’ll talk about St. John’s being a crappy computer science school some other time. Learn by yourself if you end up in that boat.

Through my own devices I snagged a comfortable software engineering gig. “Lockheed Martin!” all the upstate New York people would gush. They told me to stick with it until retirement.

I wanted more. At first my intuition was to go from decent software engineer to elite software engineer.

My next intuition was the one that stuck though. That was to go from software engineer to software security engineer. Pivot #2.

Fast-forward to now. The security space has been great to me. I’m extremely lucky to be here. It wasn’t all my own doings.

I get maybe 3 LinkedIn messages a day, recruiters trying to send me here and there. Cybersecurity is hot. But let me tell you what may be even hotter, the money side of which foreseeably explodes inside of a decade.

Blockchain. And/or one of its children - blockchain security.

Consensys Academy is maybe the most credible certification in the space right now. For $1,000 and 10 weeks’ work I get ammunition for a Pivot #3.

That’s not to say anything about leaving EY because we consult on blockchain too.

It comes down to me rather having options than not having options.

Enough about me though. 😛

This post needs at least one solid thought so here goes.

If you don’t think about your career this way, or at least about pivots when they’re smart, you might end up average. You might end up sad.

What skills will people pay for? What skills will people pay the most for?

Here’s another thought.

I don’t think the crypto or blockchain spaces (which overlap some but are not the same) are immune from the network effect. You have the most development talent behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. This means more technological advancements in these houses. That means a compounding of development talent because rockstar devs want to work on cool stuff with other rockstars.

Now, if you landed on this post, probably you were Googling “Consensys Academy”. I’ll update with more posts as we progress.

Sign up for my newsletter so as not to miss anything. 😛