This is super weird, but I'm leaving Google & the #Angular team. I absolutely love the team and will continue to be a user and part of the community (if you'll have me). This was one of the best jobs of my life and I'm sad to leave. I'm helping a product in a new space. Deetz TBA pic.twitter.com/rKeQxWeZPO
— Stephen Fluin (@stephenfluin) March 12, 2021
Thank you everyone for the super positive response. I love the Angular community and hope to keep supporting developers there, but I have a new job! I'm now the Head of Developer Relations for Chainlink Labs working on Chainlink. Chainlink helps developers bring external data and APIs into blockchains, which by default are isolated from external data or capabilities.
A little background on me
If you ever get chatting with me late at night at an event, I'll probably bring up my personal life philosophy:Better life and work product through tooling
To me this is all about humans realizing their potential to be happier and contributing more to themselves and each other by using the right tools. I've personally seen how even tiny microscopic tooling changes can have a dramatic impact on people.When it comes to my career development, I've ended up focusing on developers because developers are both building and benefiting from some of the most interesting tools out there. I look back at the last 20 years and see that technology has moved society forward, and this is only continuing to accelerate.
I love being part of these big transitions. I started my career in 2001 staring at palm pilots saying "mobile is the future". I was right, I was just 8 years too early. I think blockchains are another of these big societal transitions.
My history with blockchains
I've actually been interested in blockchains for around 10 years.Back in August of 2011 I tried my hand at cryptocurrency mining and found some faucets. In 2013 I was trying to get friends and colleagues into cryptocurrencies everywhere I went. I even sent a colleague Jessica 0.005 BTC (I wonder if she kept it 🤔). In 2014, instead of buying stocks or ETFs with my spare income, I was putting a small amount of money into Bitcoin every month.
I stopped buying in 2015 because I couldn't explain the price, and started slowly selling crypto whenever my portfolio became unbalanced.
I believed that there was huge utility in having a digital currency as a means of exchange that was fast, global, and trustless.
As Bitcoin went crazy late in the 2010s, I sold a bunch of my Bitcoin and bought my car, my computer, etc, but I've become increasing interested other projects like Ethereum, where there's not only a distributed ledger and a currency, but there's also the ability to write code and create systems.
I love systems. In the early 2000's I used to talk to colleagues about a silly idea, "the quality of a system is inversely proportional to the extent it relies on humans". I have more faith in humanity today than I did back then, but only when people have the right tools and support.
Joining Chainlink Labs
There are a lot of cool companies in the crypto industry working with blockchains, but there's also a crazy number of anonymous startups that may or may not be creating value, so joining a team that has a track record and reputation was important to me. I'm joining the folks over at Chainlink Labs to help build Chainlink, which is a decentralized way to bring data into blockchains, and connect blockchains to the rest of the digital world. They've been around for a few years, and they are super active in the community, running some of the biggest hackathons, and making smart contracts more useful.I'm really looking forward to combining my Developer Relations experience and skillset with my passion for building technology that changes the way humans interact. It's fun to be getting back into a space with explosive growth and tons of excitement. If you have been with me primarily for my Angular content, I'll definitely be finding ways to help Angular developers interact with the blockchain.
Stay tuned as I relearn this exciting industry, and if you are interested, I'm hiring! There's a lot of work to make smart contract development more accessible for developers in other spaces. I've got open roles for Technical Writers and Developer Advocates.