This is part 2 of the week 4 recap, (the technical portion here is part 1 for those of you interested in the technical growth). This week I was successful in finding opportunities to talk with developers through informational interviews so I'll be sharing some highlights below from those conversations. 

If you're new here, this blog is part of a series where I reflect on my progress as I go from coding newbie to working in web3, and I'm leaving this behind for others who might be looking to do the same. 

Here's what I learned this week.

Articles

I tweet every day about at least one web3 article, here's the biggest takeaways from those articles this week;

• Web3 is making a creator-driven economy where community-powered, advertising-free, and self-monetization is central
• This year there is going to be a huge increase in automation via AI and Smart Contract
• There are serious cybersecurity risks in web3 that are still being addressed
• The market is flooded with "you in" pitches that resemble Multilevel Marketing schemes 
• Web3 needs scalability and education for the general population
  • Plug: join the learning community I'm building here
• Tokens and DAOs are changing how products are taken to market 

And you can find my sources here:

• Web3 holds the promise of decentralized, community-powered social networks
• Top 10 Anticipated Web 3.0 Trends For 2022
• THE GROWING CYBERSECURITY CONCERNS ARE THREATENING WEB 3.0
• NFTs, Cryptocurrencies and Web3 Are Multilevel Marketing Schemes for a New Generation
• The False Promise of Web 3.0
• Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics

Informational Interviews

I was able to secure a few informational interviews this week, due to scheduling issues and the difficulty in securing these, the informational interviews will not be coinciding with article focus periods. And another note, I promised each of the individuals I interviewed that they would be anonymous. With that out the way, I talked with three people this week and what follows are some highlights of what I learned.

Web Dev 

Web Dev does not work in web3 but she is an old mentor of mine and does wonderful work. Her recommendations to be a better dev were to be multi-faceted gain exposure to different platforms and content management systems. Programs like Trello and Salesforce and helpful software to be familiar with. During the job hunt, I should be knowledgeable of industry pay rates and read the fine print of any job offer, especially remote opportunities. Some parting advice from our talk was to find niche skills to learn, research what the companies I want to work for the most are looking for, and consider pursuing a Google Analytics certificate.

Web3 Operator

I also spoke with a web3 operator who does gig work with a DAO platform and got into dev work after starting in community management with different projects. They recommend I get familiar with web3 js docs, ReactJS, and Solidity depending on what I am more interested in working with (front vs back end). I asked about mini boot camps or courses that would be helpful to get more familiar with the tech and to no surprise as this is what I was expecting; their response was while those can be nice, it's far better to just build projects (I'll probably ask future web3 operators what hackathons they would recommend).  Their parting advice was that you can be a great developer but connections are everything, I need to network and meet as many people as I can. 

Sofware Engineer

The final person I spoke with this week was a software engineer that wasn't looking to work professionally in web3 but they were actively trying to get more familiar with it out of personal interest. They strongly recommend that I always be trying to learn new tech or languages after I start working for a company to always be improving my skills but also because sometimes the company you work for may just be using outdated stacks and it isn't always helpful to be entirely focused on those. They are going to be taking some courses from Udemy, at least to get that initial understanding of the tech underfoot before jumping in to try different projects.

Webinars

I was able to attend one webinar this week, titled "how to get a job in web3". This turned out to be a great opportunity to network with some different people who were in similar positions as me and to meet some executives from web3 companies. It also just so turned out that one of my top picks for organizations I would love to work for was there. I set up some follow-ups from that webinar so those might be written about in next week's recap. Aside from the networking opportunity, it was some typical job searching advice that I've heard and some new stuff. Big points 1. network, 2. web3 is aggressively hiring, and 3. get involved in communities for projects you are interested in.

What's Next?

This was the second and final week of my focus on learning about web3 in broader terms, and I'll be switching it up for the next two weeks and focusing efforts to learn specifically about Blockchain. In the technical growth, this was also the final week for web fundamentals and learning about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, starting on Monday we begin the Python stack. 

Know of any upcoming webinars I should be aware of? Or resources I should or could be utilizing? Share them below in the comments?

If you'd like to join the learning community I'm building on Discord. I'm trying to build a space for myself and others to share their growing knowledge of all things web3. You can find the link for that here.

You can also find me here:

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