Harry Bairstow.

Hi, I'm Harry. Currently I'm 17 and based in the United Kingdom; working towards my A-Levels and looking for a new engineering opportunities while researching for Felicis.

While I've had this domain since December 2021 its never really been used; finally I decided to change it with the most recent "re-design". Hopefully it can now become a time-capsule for my thoughts! I thought whats a better place to start then re-capping everything up-to this point!

Lets start at the start, I was 8 and living in the middle of no-where so with no too much to do so I was given a book. This book started my interest in programming and taught me the basics of python with the final output being this; a basic python game.

Building on that python knowledge I began to learn more with my interests being Minecraft mods - as many people - and Discord's API. The first I left alone for the while but the latter I decided to explore and started learning discord.py, this started to expand my knowledge of Python as well as Discord. Getting to use discord.py I started my first "job" aged 12; by freelancing on Fiverr. I continued this for 2 years completing 1 project every week - mostly making discord bots but some clients requested other services i.e. management services integrated with game servers.

After working for 2 years I decided to take a break, both to focus on my studies and explore the wider programming "world". This lead me to discover Rust & Go, later Elixir too. These now make up my favorite languages out of the 25+ I took the time to play with and build something.

The only bit of advice I have from learning is, just do it! However bad that joke was it's true - force yourself to make a project with something new and you'll have to get an understanding of it...

With my new found knowledge I decided to learn what "open source" was and how I could become a part of this. At the time I had very little knowledge of VCS never-mind Git and GitHub... To cut a long story short, I made my GitHub account and started using the "pseudonym" harryet which is actually derivative of my name.

Aged 14, I finally started my open source journey with the foundations of Git and Dart in my pocket. I decided to build on the work I had done with Discord's API and started contributing to Nyxx - the Discord API library for Dart. I helped with loads of features there and thanks to Szymon Uglis for the massive amount of help with Dart, Nyxx and GitHub. Working on Nyxx really helped me learn how to work with others and contribute to a project used by other people.

In October of 2021, now 15, I started looking at Supabase and how I could contribute there. After finding their authentication service GoTrue, which as the name suggests is written in Go, I decided I'd tackle a couple small issues there. Lets add some new authentication providers and with that my first PR to Supabase was made.

Everyone always says "Hard work pays off" and in my case it did, my work on Supabase didn't go unnoticed both by the Supabase team and by external parties; one of which reached out on Twitter to ask if I'd be open to some Sponsored work.

This was the start of a productive relationship with WalletConnect; I worked on #282 for roughly 6 months as a contractor getting to work with the WalletConnect team as well as SpruceID, people connected to the Ethereum Foundation and amazing auth engineers at Supabase. tl;dr the PR ended up being closed a year or so after completion for a mix of reasons 😞 but I was provided with some feedback and there was an open dialogue the whole time!

After being a contractor with WalletConnect I decided I'd try get an internship/summer job with them for summer 2022, I dropped it into conversation while talking about hex conversion for the pull request and that was that!

After I started, I worked for 2 months integrating the GoTrue work I'd done into the cloud app and managed a successful launch! To round off the 3 month role I started working on the new Rust team and helping the company set-up the migration from TypeScript and Go projects into a new Rust one along with forming a new team of Rust engineers.

As the end of summer came and went I was asked to stay part-time which I gladly accepted! By the end of 2022 I'd had a productive start with the following stats collected on the 31st of December.

• ➕ Lines Added: 62955
• ➖ Lines Removed: 21562
• 📦 Repositories Work On: 19
• 🧩 Features Launched: 4

I continued to work part-time while starting my A-Levels at Sir John Dean's Sixth Form College - studying Maths, Electronics and Computer Science.

As we came to Summer 2023 I joined the team full-time again to continue working on Push Notifications; need to know about APNS, FCM or E2EE notifications feel free to send me a message @theharryet... 🤣

When I got to the end of that Summer it was finally time for my to part ways with the WalletConnect team; I'd decided I wanted to explore the wider ecosystem and focus on finishing my final year of school. It had been an amazing 2.5 years where I'd meet some brilliant people and got to travel to 8 countries including France, Portugal and Cape Verde.

As I started working as a contractor again, the Supabase team reached out with a question. "Our investors are looking for someone to help out - maybe a student" and I excitedly accepted the offer. This is how I managed to get my current contractor role as a researcher with Felicis Ventures. The team there are amazing and I've enjoyed working with Dan & Eric to learn more about Venture Capital and the wider research field.

So now we're here, April 2024. I have just over 20 days till my first exam and about 60 till I'm done. So I've decided it's time to get start my "working" career which is quite funny to say with 6 years of experience behind me. While catching up with friends who I hadn't spoken to much over my time out of the Crypto space I was speaking to Miguel; the next day he sent me a link to a tweet and it launched my job search into space 🚀

Following this I've had loads of amazing chats with some crazy smart people! Hopefully soon i'll be locking down my next role and I'll be excited to share the process from interviews to take-home tasks as well as the company and role I've accepted as soon as I can.

So thats me and my story till now, hopefully this blog can continue to provide an insight into me and maybe even help some people along the way.