Parts 3 and 4

Month 4: "WTF Are These Technical Discussions?"

One thing I hadn't fully anticipated when jumping into Web3 was how technical everything is. Sure, I'd worked with engineers before, but in corporate, they shielded me from deep protocol mechanics. Here? There was no shield.

My first real exposure came during a protocol upgrade discussion. I hopped into a developer call, expecting a high-level roadmap chat. Instead, I got:

• "The current smart contract has reentrancy risks if we don't refactor the storage layout."
• "We should consider modularizing the execution layer to support optimistic rollups."
• "Gas fees spike when the EVM processes these state changes - maybe we batch transactions?"

I just sat there, nodding, furiously Googling words like "EVM storage slots" and "MEV sandwich attacks".

At first, it was overwhelming. I felt like an imposter in my own meetings. But I figured out a few hacks to survive:

1. Admit what you don't know. Web3 devs love explaining things - just ask.
2. Find the right middle ground. I didn't need to write Solidity, but I did need to understand the implications of technical choices.
3. Read GitHub and forum discussions. Most important debates happen in the open. I started lurking in issues and governance posts to see how decisions were made.
4. Use analogies. When devs talked about state changes, I compared them to database transactions. When they mentioned ZK-rollups, I thought of compression algorithms. It helped bridge the gap.

Now? I'm not an engineer, but I can hold my own in a protocol discussion. I know when a feature request will break security assumptions or increase gas fees. And more importantly, I don't panic when I hear words like "modular execution environments."

It took a few months, but I learned: In crypto, understanding the tech isn't optional—it's part of being a great PM.

Ok, now I need to host one more technical meeting and hopefully won't be just a guest nodding to smart engineers talking.

Month 5: "Welcome to DevOps… where the Fires Never Stop"

By this point, I had settled into the rhythm of working in a DAO. Then, I got pulled into the DevOps team for our DeFi protocol - and suddenly, my world became an endless cycle of incidents, upgrades, and security paranoia.

Unlike corporate DevOps, where you have dedicated teams, structured releases, and a predictable CI/CD pipeline, in DeFi, things are... different. Here's what my days started looking like:

1. Morning: Check the monitoring dashboards. Did a whale just execute a weird contract interaction? Are liquidity pools behaving as expected?

2. Midday: Stand in the middle of a heated discussion about whether we should push a contract upgrade or initiate a governance vote first. (Spoiler: Devs want to push, governance wants to vote.)

3. Afternoon: Incident response time. Someone reported an arbitrage bot draining a vault. Is it a bug? An exploit? Just clever trading? We scramble to analyze transactions on Etherscan, Tenderly, and Dune dashboards.

4. Evening: Review on-chain upgrade proposals. Our DevOps team doesn't just deploy features; we coordinate security reviews, test on testnets, and handle timelock execution windows. A simple deployment in corporate life? Maybe 30 minutes. In DeFi? It could take weeks.

5. Late night (optional but inevitable): A governance proposal passed. Now we need to manually execute a multi-sig transaction to deploy the upgrade - while making sure the contract doesn't brick the protocol. No pressure.

The Challenges?

• No rollbacks. In Web2, if a release goes wrong, you roll it back. In DeFi, if a contract is deployed, it's permanent unless you build in upgradability.

• High-stakes incidents. A bug in an API might break a Web2 app. A bug in a smart contract? It could drain millions.

• Coordinating governance. Every major deployment needs community buy-in, which means balancing security vs. transparency. Too much secrecy? People call you centralized. Too much openness? Hackers watch your every move.

But honestly? I love it. It's high-stakes, fast-paced and forces you to think not just about building features, but about security, decentralization and trustless execution. Working in DevOps in DeFi isn't just about uptime - it's about keeping an entire financial system running without a safety net.

And somehow, I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

Stay tuned for the final part of this series - where I'll talk about the people behind all this chaos and why they're actually the best part of working in crypto DevOps.