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# When the Plan Disappears

At Coinbase, I was building toward something. I had spent months developing foundational infrastructure for Base, Coinbase's self-custody wallet — implementing EIP-7702 delegation support, onchain analytics, and malicious transaction scanning. I was triaging production incidents on-call, designing low-latency systems for the institutional trading platform, and quietly drafting a plan to transfer internally and pursue a promotion. On paper, things looked good.

But I was exhausted. The job had become my entire world. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped doing the things that made me a curious engineer in the first place — working through system design problems, reviewing algorithms, writing, building things just because I wanted to. I told myself I'd get back to it eventually.

Then 14% of the company was laid off, and I was part of that number.

The loss was real. But what followed surprised me. For the first time in a long time, I had space — and I used it. I started writing consistently on my blog, documenting what I was learning and thinking through problems in public. I went to conferences. At Layer8 in Boston, I competed in my first social engineering CTF and won. I was doing things that genuinely excited me, and I was happier than I'd been in months.

What I learned is that you can't let a job be the only thing. Not because jobs are unstable — though they are — but because if work consumes everything, you stop growing in the ways that matter most to you. A side project, a blog, a competition: something that belongs to you, independent of your employer, keeps the real momentum going.

The layoff didn't teach me resilience. It reminded me what I actually cared about.