👋 Hey! I couldn't be more excited to announce I'm joining Showtime to help build the best crypto social network.

A short recap of my life until now

I’ve been coding for a while now, almost 10 years. I started with open-source and slowly shifted gears to become an indie maker. I managed to build an audience around my indie journey and my projects, meet amazing people and have lots of fun.

I’m also 19, and while my plan has always been to make a living from writing code, last year I decided I would take a slight detour through college (35% because parents, 65% because it’s nice to have some order and structure in your life for a while). Then, COVID happened and all order and structure went through the window (plus I was already skipping most of my classes to code). I needed a new plan.

While I was thinking about what to do next, NFTs exploded. I started seeing them everywhere and decided to dive a little deeper. I discovered the Ethereum world, and I haven’t been able to think about much else since. I started learning as fast as I could, meeting amazing people, and working on small projects (both by myself and with really awesome people).

I knew I wanted the next thing I work on to be a crypto project. And, after learning and building in public, people were reaching out to me!

Why Showtime

Deciding what project would fit me best was really hard, especially since all of them met all my usual prerequisites for a project (which is why I was considering them in the first place). They were all really amazing projects and aligned with my mission of helping others make a living doing what they love. I ended up choosing Showtime for two reasons:

Firstly, their long-term goal of building a user-owned social network really resonated with me. I’m really passionate about web3 as a way to decentralize data ownership, and have been thinking about open social protocols for years now (I even started building a new social network last summer).

I also feel like an early-stage startup run by young founders (one of them from Europe) is the best learning environment I could ask for, plus their culture (hacker-style shipping) reminds me of how I'm used to working on my own projects.

So yeah, I’ll be taking care of the Showtime website as employee #1! I’m really excited to show you everything we have planned, and I’m sure everyone is really going to like it.

On Making Art

When planning this announcement, I challenged myself to create an artistic piece to go with it. While I’ve been playing with 3D design for a while now, I didn’t consider myself an artist, and felt like pushing myself to create something worthy of this moment would change that.

It has. I’m really proud of this piece, from the story it tells to how it looks. I’m an artist. And I’m ready to start building Showtime for every other artist out there.

What now?

For years, my goal has been to make a living by doing what I love. I feel like I’ve achieved that now, and have been thinking about how I want my life to look like in a few years, and what I should use the rest of my time for.

I’m going to be taking the next week off to settle in with Showtime and build a routine around having a job. After that, I’ll make a proposal with a few paths I’ve been considering for continuing to grow as a creator and indie maker. $MIGUEL holders will vote on which one I take.

Monday will be the first day of a new stage of my life. Thank you to everyone who made it possible. ❤️

You can follow me and my creator journey on Twitter