Hands Dirty (Day 463)

The most important skill that I learned from two of my closest co-workers--Shain (BitGuild, Titans Finance, The APIS Project) and Cameron (Fabrica) is don't be afraid to get your hands dirty!

This happens to be one of my biggest weaknesses. I try to be meticulous and diligent--while all these sound like good practices, overdoing it is bad. It becomes an excuse for fear of failure.

I still remember when we first started deploying servers, we ran into so many issues with Kubernetes. I was afraid to play with it as it has huge implications for server stability and security, and I don't want to be the one who causes any issue. My ego gets in the way. Luckily, Shain jumped in, shouldered the responsibility, and worked hard on it for weeks until we got to a good place. We ended up with a system that costs way lower on infrastructure than most.

Cameron is another person I admire for not being afraid to break things and get his hands dirty on new tech stacks. His two EthGlobal wins are a testament to that. He's never defensive about his code; while he always strives to find the best solutions yet he is never afraid to push out something quick and dirty. He's known for his code delivery speed for a reason.

In the crypto field, deploy once and it is there forever, it calls for more diligence and security considerations than ever. However, it is still so experimental that even the smartest developers and biggest projects got hacked once or more. While we should be implementing the best practices, not being afraid to get hands dirty is still the fastest way to innovate and iterate.

Image credit: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash