An old friend of mine queried, over hot mocha at a hipster cafe: "So Calvin, what is the most challenging technical skillset or programming language that you think I should master, to grow my tech career?",

I was most tempted to answer - "Haskell", "Erlang", "Rust", "electronics design", "cryptography" or "AI".

But I decided otherwise.

The most challenging technical ability to master is the ability to hold contradictory ideas in your head, remain zen regardless of uncertainties and execute despite a lack of clarity. To be fair, one can argue that this isn't really a technical skill and it sounds a lot more like soft skills.

Hear me out.

a16z wrote a well thought out piece expressing the why and the promise of web3 as a design challenge requiring strong foundations in 3 aspects

• technical decentralization
• economic decentralization
• legal decentralization

It's a great read and I can definitely identify with it in relation to my own experiences working with a range of crypto-native, web3 companies.

It's been a fun 5 years journey in some amazing companies. It's all heads down and getting things done.

And it's been a while since I wrote and publish publicly.

It's a really good time for some reflection and for sharing mistakes I have made, successes I have had, the cool people I have had the opportunity to work with and all the fun stuff I have done.