About Me

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life
The most interesting people I know
Didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives
Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t
The Sunscreen Song - Baz Luhrmann

So there I was, aged 42, married with one young kid, having established myself as a succesful leadership coach and consultant, but feeling unfulfilled in my career. As a young kid I’d been glued to computer screens, my brother and I playing every game we could get our hands on. At school, maths had always been the subject I’d excelled at, to the point where I started my university track in Actuarial Science, before pivoting to a degree in Philosophy and Pure Maths, and then a second degree in Electrical Engineering. Mathematics, problem-solving, and programming were things that I loved and was really good at, but somehow my career path had taken me away from these things almost completely.

How had that happened? Well, after the engineering degree I went to work for Citigroup in London, as an analyst in a corporate finance team. Finance and markets have held a fascination for me for the longest time, so this was a great experience. However, I felt the pull to return home, and once I did I lucked into an amazing opportunity to set up a leadership academy for the largest opposition political party in South Africa. And so began my journey into leadership development and coaching.

That journey would see me spend four years as head of that leadership academy, setting up a number of programmes which are still running today, seventeen years later, and have produced some exceptional political leaders at a national level. From that base I shifted into the private sector, designing programmes for large corporates initially, but as time went by working more and more with smaller, nimbler companies, particularly those with a tech focus.

Along the way I would start two businesses of my own - one in solar water heating installation, and one in mindfulness programmes for organisations. Both enjoyed a measure of success and both taught me a lot about business and leadership.

I would also take a year and a half out to shift my focus back to markets and technology. I independently developed forex trading algorithms in a language called MQL4, and helped a friend start a business in quantitivate portfolio management - learning Python and basic data science to process and backtest reams of financial data. But coaching and leadership consulting remained a core thread in my career.

Until two years ago, that is. I reached a point (in a conversation with my own coach, funnily enough) where I realised that I needed to find a way back to the things that I’d been so good at and enjoyed so much when I was younger - maths, technology, problem-solving, software development, and if possible, finance and markets as well. I even contemplated the masochistic route of tackling a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) qualification. When I discussed this with a good friend in the startup space, his only comment to me was, “Why spend all that time learning about the old world of finance, when all I’m hearing about at the moment is how DeFi is going to upend the financial industry?”

And so began my personal journey down the rabbit hole of crypto and DeFi. That same night I signed up for a bunch of courses on the Moralis Academy website, took a deep breath, and dove head first into learning about blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Next I immersed myself in the world of DeFi as a user. These were the days of the initial DeFi summer, and I tried out most of what was on offer - yield farms, vaulting platforms, bonding protocols, lending, borrowing, algorithmic stablecoins, perpetuals - it was all fascinating and pretty exciting to be a part of. The more time I spent in the space, the more I developed a sense of excitement about the technology, and a conviction that blockchains in general, and smart contract platforms in particular, would have a huge impact on our world in years to come.

Still, this wasn’t an obvious or easy move to make, career-wise, especially with a family to support. Fortunately, I had the benefit of an electrical engineering degree, as well as that year and a half that I’d spent building trading algos in MQL4 and portfolio management tools in Python, as a solid base to build further programming skills on. I also had the early years of my career in corporate finance, as well as my own continued reading over the years as good grounding in financial concepts. DeFi looked and felt like a space where finance was being reinvented in a way that I liked and could get behind. I decided to take the plunge, and chose Solidity development as the area where I believed I could quite quickly build a set of skills that would make me a useful contributor in the space.

As my Solidity skills improved, I started building my own micro-projects, sometimes in support of my own DeFi activities, and entering those projects into hackathons. My BentoBox Auto-Balancing Dapp finished as runner-up in the Encode Hack Africa Hackathon. A month after that I got invited to help solve some Solidity challenges for a new entrant to the yield farming space on Polygon. And then in November of that year I responded to a bounty challenge from another startup called OptyFi to build a smart contract adapter for them. Both of these opportunities snowballed into longer term involvement with these companies, as I became part of their core teams and helped them build out their projects (more details on these on the Projects page).

As I look back on this time, I feel super fortunate that I’ve been able to build up the amount of experience that I have over the last two years. From using Git and GitHub professionally as part of a broader team, to coding in Solidity, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python, to understanding concepts like yield farms, algorithmic stablecoins, ERC20’s, and protocol-owned-liquidity, to learning how to build, deploy and debug smart contracts using tools like Truffle, Hardhat, Openzeppelin, and Tenderly, to taking a complex set of smart contracts through a full auditing process. I feel like I’ve really packed 5 years of experience into 2 (which I think is what working in crypto feels like to a lot of people!).

In addition, as a more mature entrant to software development, and given my background, I like to think that I bring to my work not just technical problem-solving ability, but also an ability to communicate clearly, both verbally and in written form, an ability to collaborate well with a diverse range of individuals, an ability to work autonomously, to take responsibility for my work and keep those around me informed of my progress and my blockers, and to contribute meaningfully in technical and strategy discussions with everyone from the CEO to the product manager to the most junior of developers.

So whilst I love Baz Luhrmann’s advice in the quote above, it does feel great to be able to say that my path forward is crystal clear to me. Whilst I still reserve around 10-20% of my time for a few carefully selected senior coaching clients, the rest of my time is dedicated to becoming an excellent contributor in the software development space, specifically in Solidity development. Mediocrity has never interested me, and so I keep myself on a pretty intense learning regime to make sure I’m getting better all the time.

When I’m not coding or coaching, I’m kept pretty busy looking after my little girl, and when I’m not doing that you’ll find me either surfing, trail running, mountain biking, or just watching a good series.

If you’ve made it to this point, thanks for taking the time to read about my circuitous career journey thus far. And if you happen to be in the market for a passionate, committed, and capable Solidity developer for your team, I’d love to jump on a call with you and see if I might be the right fit.

Oh, and here’s a copy of my resume, which tells the same story, but in a different form:
Richard Jamieson Resume