Goodbye WalletConnect

After 1.5 years, 3 job roles and 2 hackweeks I've left WalletConnect.

Before I start, I'd like to preface this blog post by saying that I have - in my opinion - left on good terms with everyone at the company and hope to stay friends with many people I met there.

If you don't care about everything I did during my time there and just want to know about the end you can skip to here.

The Beginning

Not many people external to the company know how I secured my initial role, so lets share the story.

Hey Harry! How awesome that you are adding new auth providers to supabase! Would you be open to being sponsored to add another one?

This was the initial message I received from a PM at WalletConnect who had noticed some open-source work I had been doing within the Supabase community. Just goes to show open-source can pay off...

Now although I had been burnt by a company within crypto before, I decided that the worst thing that happens to 15 year old me here is that I add something to Supabase but don't get paid. I'd still be getting something so I decided to go for it and started as a contractor with WalletConnect in 2021.

Being a contractor

While contracting, I got to work on supabase/gotrue#282, this was a pull request to add SIWE support to Supabase's GoTrue. Primarily, this was a feature they needed internally but it soon attracted some community interest.

This motivated the project to continue and it carried on as I finished my GCSEs. I continued to get support from the WalletConnect, Supabase & SpruceID teams as we pushed the PR closer and closer.

Changing Role

After finishing my exams I decided I would try find an internship position for my summer holiday. I reached out to a few people before realizing WalletConnect could potentially be a good option, so I bit the bullet and just asked during a conversation with Pedro

I wondered if WalletConnect ever does summer internships? This year I finish school a month early so I have from June 27th to around the start of September; So was hoping to try find a summer job/internship for those 3months

To my surprise the answer was yes, and I would start as an intern on the Cloud Team on the 27th of June 2022 as roughly team member 14.

The Cloud Team

While with the cloud team for the summer I shipped SIWE support in the cloud app and it still stands today - all be it more production ready now with a service that isn't our GoTrue fork.

Along with shipping that I got to travel to Paris to finally meet the team, watch Pedro's EthCC[5] talk and attend the boat party that was being hosted.

Founding the Rust team

Originally WalletConnect was using Go as the primary backend language, the decision was made to switch to rust towards the end of August. I stayed on and helped create the Rust team along with the CTO, Head of Engineering and a Go engineer who was transitioning to Rust.

It was a fun change from working on the cloud app and allowed to me finally work on distributed systems like I had wanted to.

The End

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and as of the 1st of September I no-longer work at WalletConnect. I'm still in contact with several people there and hope to continue positive relationships with people.

Going Forwards

Hopefully going forwards - even after this post - I can remain on good terms with everyone there and I hope I've made some life long friendships with some of my colleagues.

As for my next step, that is being finalized over the next few days and I'll share more in the coming weeks as to what I'm going to do and the rational behind it.