00. prologue: i was just following my friends
my first encounter with anything remotely technical actually started in high school.
i was in a networking major, mostly because my friends were there.
yes, that was pretty much the career planning.
somewhere along the way, i started realizing that i probably chose the wrong major. i wasn't particularly passionate about networking, and honestly, i was mostly just following the group like an npc.
but ironically, following my friends also led me to one of the most important rabbit holes of my life.
web3.
one of my friends introduced me to crypto, and somehow i got lucky enough to make stupid amounts of money from a solana meme coin airdrop.
yes.
a meme coin airdrop.
not a startup.
not a job.
not a brilliant investment thesis.
a meme coin.
for a brief moment, i thought i had figured out life.
then came the classic mistake.
when you make a lot of money for the first time, you don't think, "this is enough."
you think, "what if i make more?"
and that is basically how my diamond hands turned into a crime scene.
i still have like 9 bucks left from it.
at least i took some profit and gave some to my lovely mom, so technically the degen phase had a positive roi somewhere.
01. the degen era
after that, i went deeper into web3.
i discovered nfts, especially the solana nft scene, and somehow managed to get lucky there too.
i made decent money from several projects that were actually good. some trades were clean. some were... let's just say i discovered that "take profit" is a very important concept.
there were also projects where i sold way too late.
classic.
but compared to where i started, i was already learning something valuable: money can disappear incredibly fast when you start believing you're smarter than the market.
the nft era eventually started dying around the time i was getting close to graduating high school.
fortunately, i had made enough from all that chaos to pay for my own college.
so i decided to officially retire from being a professional degen.
temporarily.
02. plot twist: maybe i should actually learn how to code
when it was time to choose a university major, i started looking into programming.
somehow, i ended up in informatics engineering.
at first, though, i wasn't exactly a programming machine.
i mostly just attended classes, did the assignments, passed the exams, and went home.
which meant my programming skills were basically stuck at:
"it works on my laptop."
then i found a coding community called rpn, which has since pivoted into eth jakarta.
and this was probably one of the biggest turning points in my journey.
for the first time, i wasn't just learning how to make crud.
i was learning actual programming logic.
the kind of logic that makes you stare at your screen for three hours and question your life choices.
dijkstra?
💀
yeah.
that kind of logic.
but the difference was that i was actually learning things from scratch. not just memorizing what the lecturer put on the slide.
and i started realizing that my growth outside university was much faster than relying on university material alone.
that community also introduced me to a bunch of people who encouraged me to apply to a program by dicoding, with partners including google, tokopedia, and others.
i ended up taking the cloud computing learning path.
and honestly, that program gave me a lot.
cloud computing, deployment, infrastructure, software engineering practices, and a bunch of concepts that made me realize that writing code is only one small part of building software.
i also met a lot of great people there.
i still keep in touch with some of them.
some.
like one or two.
we're all busy pretending we have our lives together.
03. internship arc: let's see what happens
around semester six, i decided that i wanted to collect as much real-world experience as possible.
so i started looking for internships.
somehow, i ended up getting accepted at kanbro corporation, an indian company.
shout out to mr prasad, who interviewed me and gave me the chance.
that internship lasted around six months, and it was probably one of the biggest jumps in my engineering journey.
i got to work on actual products, actual problems, actual deadlines, and most importantly:
actual code that someone else had to maintain.
which is a very different experience from submitting an assignment where the only person judging your code is a lecturer who has 87 other submissions to check.
when the internship ended, they offered me a full-time position.
and i said yes.
so somehow, the random networking student who was following his friends ended up working full-time at an indian tech company.
not exactly the career plan i had.
mostly because i never had one.
04. somehow, i ended up at assemblr
after graduating, it didn't take too long before i got another opportunity.
i joined assemblr indonesia as a backend developer.
i've been here for around six months now, and i've already learned an absurd amount.
django, databases, caching, payments, production bugs, infrastructure, performance, and all the other fun things that happen when your code is no longer allowed to simply "work on my laptop."
one thing i really appreciate here is the working environment.
the working hours are actually human.
which means i still have enough brain cells left after work to explore things outside my main job.
shout out to my best boss in the world.
seriously.
having enough time and energy outside work has given me another opportunity to explore something i've always been interested in:
web3.
05. the degen returns
and here we are again.
i've started exploring chain robinhood, learning more about the ecosystem, experimenting with new things, and generally trying to understand where all of this is going.
except this time, i'm trying to approach web3 from a very different angle.
back then, i was mostly just clicking buttons and hoping the jpeg went up.
now i'm more interested in the engineering side.
smart contracts.
infrastructure.
on-chain data.
automation.
agents.
and yes, finding ways to use agents to make more money.
i never said i became a responsible adult.
06. what's the point of all this?
looking back, almost none of this was planned.
i picked networking because my friends did.
my friends introduced me to web3.
web3 gave me money.
money paid for my college.
college led me to programming.
a random coding community pushed me further.
dicoding introduced me to cloud computing.
an internship turned into a full-time job.
then another job brought me to assemblr.
and now i'm back exploring web3, except this time with actual engineering skills.
it's kind of funny when you think about it.
a lot of the things that changed my life started from completely random decisions.
so i don't really have some grand advice.
just one thing i've learned so far:
collect experiences while you're young.
try things.
build things.
lose money.
make money.
write terrible code.
rewrite it.
join communities.
talk to people smarter than you.
get rejected.
take the opportunity when it comes.
and don't be too afraid of losing.
because what exactly are you afraid of losing when everything in this world is temporary anyway?
i'm still figuring things out.
this isn't the end of the journey.
there's probably another plot twist waiting somewhere.
hopefully this time it doesn't involve holding a coin down 99%.
but if it does...
well.
see you onchain.