"The only one I need to convince is myself."
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Sherry came to Sovereign Engineering through gsovereignty, a long-running Bitcoin friendship from Hong Kong, and a sudden gap between contracts. One day she was ending a job. The next pitch was simple: if you are free now, come to Sovereign Engineering.
The walk starts with the obvious and not-so-obvious labels: woman, Chinese, engineer. Sherry traces the path from math olympiad incentives and China's gaokao into computer science, then back toward Bitcoin and Nostr. She first heard about Bitcoin at university in 2016, treated it for years like a ticker next to Tesla or Nvidia, then met gsovereignty and stumbled into Nostr through Damus before Jack Dorsey made the protocol famous.
The real shift came later, through the culture around the work. Sherry describes asking Nostr why Bitcoin is different from other coins, getting flooded with books and replies, and slowly realizing that no one can orange-pill you from the outside. You can only walk through that door yourself.
At Sovereign Engineering, FIPS was the project that clicked. Watching Johnathan explain it on a whiteboard felt like reading NIP-01 for the first time: suddenly the pieces had a shape. As Sherry put it on Nostr, FIPS reminded her of first hearing about Nostr or diving into how Bitcoin works. Demo days were rough at first, but pairing up made the cohort less like presentation theater and more like showing your thinking through code. Sherry and Arjen worked around Myco, pushing the idea from sharing apps toward sharing files too.
The deeper thread is what happens when a room full of strange, motivated builders makes the outside world's career anxieties feel smaller. Before coming, Sherry worried that not having a normal next job would make people judge her, the old What Do You Care What Other People Think? problem in another form. By the end, the problem had narrowed: the only person left to convince was herself. For women engineers curious about Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, or Sovereign Engineering, her advice is blunt: ignore the label, be an engineer, bring an npub and proof of work.
In this dialogue:
- how gsovereignty pulled Sherry toward Sovereign Engineering after years of Bitcoin friendship in Hong Kong
- why being a woman in technical rooms can matter socially without needing to become the whole story
- how math olympiad incentives, China's gaokao, and a math major led Sherry toward computer science
- why her first Bitcoin memory was a university classmate saying everyone in their generation should learn it
- how Bitcoin looked like a ticker for years before the philosophy started to land
- how an early Damus download made Nostr feel useless at first
- why asking Nostr about Bitcoin versus other coins became unexpectedly famous
- why you can only orange-pill yourself
- how FIPS clicked for Sherry like NIP-01 clicked, echoing her own Nostr note
- why demo day is not a performance so much as proof that you touched the work
- how pairing and team week changed the cohort from intimidating to collaborative
- what Sherry and Arjen wanted Myco to become beyond app sharing
- why White Noise, FIPS, and local-first sharing kept circling the same design space
- why the cohort's weirdness is a filter as much as a cost
- how being surrounded by motivated engineers changed Sherry's relationship to career judgment
- why Asia, especially Vietnam or Thailand, came up as a possible future Sovereign Engineering destination
- what Sherry would tell other women engineers thinking about applying
Related dialogues:
- #27: Separation of Business from State w/ gsovereignty
- #24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan
- #25: White Noise, MLS, and marmot w/ Jeff G
- #30: Napplets w/ Sandwich
- #33: ASMap, nix, and nix-nostr w/ Julien
People mentioned:
Projects & tech mentioned:
Books mentioned:
Recorded at 964,047.