Victa Phu

Empathy

conversation turn taking

7 - Seek to understand before being understood. I always try to speak last in a conversation so I can understand everyone’s opinions and views before sharing my own

To build effective teams, the first thing a leader must learn is to listen. Not to hear, but to truly listen. When team members feel they are heard and understood they become more empowered. Give these teams trust and responsibility and remove the blockers and you have yourself a highly effective team. I remember working together with a team to build out a performance management solution; once they had the design done and knew the managers had their backs they flew. We delivered in one sprint what most teams would take 4; and we had fun doing it!

disconfirm own beliefs

8 - While I can be stubborn in my beliefs, and fight for them; the moment I realise I’m wrong or there is a better idea I will accept and champion the new idea

In a recent bit of work with an Australian company focused on empowering athletes, I had designed a really complex system to collect and calculate royalties payments using a combination of stable-coin backed assets and a treasury held by the company in a trust. After much back and forth my colleague asked a simple question; can’t we just use an existing stable coin (like USDC) and provide fiat onramp to our customers; then we remove the complexity of a treasury. I went from fighting his idea to championing it because it really did remove all the complexities (legal and accounting) that a small startup just couldn’t afford. And it was elegant!

self-aware & articulate

6 - This is an area that I need to focus on. I am not always self-aware and have troubles communicating my ideas in a clear and concise manner sometimes

I need to be in the moment more. The challenges I have now is that I have way too many things I’m focusing on. They say life is like juggling a bunch of balls. Some are glass and some are rubber. Know which balls you can let drop. I think if I can sort out the priorities in my life I can gain more focus, self-awareness and be in the moment

share a drink

9 - If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Sharing experiences as a team leads to stronger more coherent team; a gel that keeps the team together and running smoothly.

I’ve been in teams where I ended up doing everything. That was tough; you do work really fast but it cannot be maintained and its just not fun. When you work in effective teams things become effortless. I live for such moments where everyone is working towards a common shared goal and everyone is motivated and enthusiastic. In those moments you literally tap dance to work

spend 10 hours daily together

5 - As a passionate developer, I lose track of time to the detriment of my social surroundings. I’m most comfortable in front of a computer than in a social setting and should really try to achieve a better work/life balance

I’ve been working hard to maintain a work-life balance. At the moment with the workload, I’ve set aside Thursdays as family time. Every thursday my wife gets to choose where she wants to go; and so far she’s chosen Ikea more times than I can remember. Its always fun for us to check out the new displays in Ikea and she always has some random item she wants to buy. I’m planning to set aside more family time as workload becomes more stable

nurture & mentor

7 - My greatest joy is seeing those around me succeed. I like creating an environment where others can fail safely; which leads to innovation, team gel, and empowerment.

I remember fondly watching a young inexperienced developer grow into a senior developer under my mentorship. I learnt a lot while teaching a lot, and it helped form my opinions of what is a team and how to create an environment that best fosters growth in individual and as a team

make everyone shine

9 - When operating highly efficient teams, I found the key is to give everyone an equal opportunity to contribute.

I remember leading an engineering team in Singapore and encouraging the a silent engineer to contribute; her contributions had a profound effect on our solution, helping us solve a problem in a very novel yet expert way. She had a lot of knowledge but was too shy to share it.

people over process

8 - Get the right people onboard, give them trust and responsibility (with avenue to communicate issues and challenges) and then let them do the work.

When I was running my restaurant and we were “in the weeds” (behind on orders and more were coming), I had to rely on each member of the team working coherently as one. However hard things got, the team just had to stick to their task, not panic, and remain committed. If any one of the team panicked the whole line would fail.

dare to disagree

6 - Conflict is hard, and I tend to avoid them when i can. I should learn to challenge ideas and learn to disagree in a constructive way especially if I feel I can contribute.

The loudest person is not necessarily correct. I’ve been in too many meetings where the person was obviously wrong but because they spoke confidently, was my superior, or was the loudest I didn’t challenge them. By the time I had researched enough to rebuke their claims either the conversation already shifted to a different topic or the decisions were already made.

Passion

long-time craftsmanship

7 - I have been a software engineer most of my life. Passionate about development and able to spend long hours devoted to the craft. I learn from experience but I never truly mastered the craft. I wish I had more time to strengthen my fundamentals

My first experience was picking up an Idiot’s Guide to C++ when I was 16. I remember absorbing that book and building text-based adventure games. I had a friend (rival) where we both developed random games using C++ and sharing, bouncing ideas off each other. We used while loops for pauses, horrible hard-coded values, but most importantly we had fun. He grew up to use C and C++ to build physics simulations as a professor and I became a full time developer. We had a CS class using hypertalk and built the most random games in it.

obsess over details

9 - In development and engineering, the devil is in the details. Before releasing anything I obsess over details and make sure to test every conceivable scenario (usually to the annoyance of team members).

I remember the first week on my very first IT job I was asked to test a piece of software for bugs. I was given the functional specifications and access to the user interface. It asked for a login screen and I dragged a PDF document into the textbox and crashed it. My boss was pretty pissed off ...

hungry & foolish

8 - In development and engineering, staying hungry and foolish is the key to innovation. Ability to take risks in a safe environment and to learn and grow from these experiences is what makes me passionate about the field.

When you build a team and give that team a safe space to develop (and fail) it lets team members start to explore, push the possibilities and build truly innovative solutions. I had a junior developer who had a great attitude towards development; but one day he accidentally dropped the customer database in our dev environment. He was almost in tears, but I sat him down and used that as a teaching exercise and we managed to recover the database. This gave him more confidence to test things and learn and now he himself leads a team of engineers. We joke about dropping that table every now and then

share the mission

8 - I share Harmony’s vision for open consensus for 10 billion people and am humbled by our goals. I want to be part of something that can potentially bring about a positive change to the world

Everyone has a yearning to change the world sometime, when the 9-5 no longer inspires and you wonder if there is something bigger you can do. When I was stuck in Singapore during covid I made a decision to be part of something bigger. I think I found it in Harmony’s vision and mission.

optimistic about flying off a cliff

8 - A Decentralised world is one where there is order in chaos. Its an open platform that does not discriminate and is not walled off. I’m aligned with this view and embrace the chaos

There is an entire interdisciplinary scientific theory mathematical branch dedicated to studying chaos. There is a certain beauty to chaos. I remember how I had physics classes in University and they had a demonstration of chaos theory using a system with two components that would spin. I use to play with that thing all the time while waiting for class to start

your 50-year dream

7 - A 50 year dream becomes a North-Star for what you ultimately want to achieve, and should be part of your fibre, your reason to exist.

My ultimate dream is to start, operate and retire with a multi-generational restaurant; started by my father and handed down to my family.

consistent with own actions

6 - I need to be more true to my beliefs and opinions rather than accepting others’ opinions. Must learn to speak up and discuss from a position of knowledge and empathy

I try to create an environment in my teams where everyone is given a voice and a chance to contribute. It helps build trust and strengthens the team. I remember working in a scrum team early in my career where I didn’t contribute because I was afraid I would say the wrong thing. My boss at the time gave me a book called emotional intelligence that helped me open up more. I still find it challenging at times

make tough decisions

6 - I need to work on this area more. I tend to go with the flow always thinking that others are more informed than I am. I need to research more

Letting someone go can never be easy. After working with a colleague for a while and realising they are not a great fit I had to make that decision. We tried putting him positions he liked, giving him more autonomy, and even training, but when a person is not motivated and is not a good fit (expertise or culturally) you sometimes need to make that hard decision to let them go.

admit mistakes

9 - Fail fast and fail forward, always learning from your mistakes and improving. Whenever something doesn’t go to plan I usually reflect, retrospect and absorb the lessons so I don’t make the same mistakes again

One time a colleague dropped the customer table from our development database. He created a script to make testing easier; but part of the script involved dropping and recreating the table. He didn’t understand why I was so angry until I sat him down and explained that his code didn’t work in isolation; that dropping and recreating invalidated a lot of existing indexes, triggers, functions, not to mention the primary and foreign key constraints. I took it as an opportunity to teach him. We still joke about it to this day!

Excellence

top 1% superstar

7 - I don’t consider myself a superstar. I’m always learning and improving. I can do most things to a professional level, but I have always wished I could specialise in a field and become the top 1%.

When I was running a restaurant, the most memorable times was when I watched my dad (head chef) lead the team. He was the top 1% in my mind (at least in the restaurant itself!) and if any of his line chef were struggling he could jump in. From cutting fish, seasoning/grilling meat, vegetable station; he could do it all and you can see the trust and respect the staff had towards him.

effective tooling

8 - As a software engineer I would consider myself up-to-date in the relevant tool-sets and development techniques. But like the point about top 1% I do wish I could specialise in a field and master it.

I fell in love with React when I was building UIs with Java. I can still remember that lightbulb moment when I picked it up and things just clicked. It felt like the language spoke to me and understood me. Hooks made it that much better.

relevant to our needs

7 - Harmony technology aligns with the best practices with sharding, proof of stake, and zero knowledge. I’m expanding my knowledge of ZKP and other technology

In my previous job, I worked with and deployed multiple zero knowledge systems using technology created by the blockchain R&D team (namely nightfall and baseline). We rolled out the technology the technology to demonstrate transfer of trade documents between different entities

10x growth

8 - 10x productivity, 10x growth involves working in highly effective teams where we can build on the strengths of each member.

When a team gels, when everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities, and when team members are empowered it is possible to roll out a large amount of effective work in very short time. We used Scrum and Agile in my previous company to great effect; building out a performance management solution for a T1 operator in Singapore in a very short amount of time

voracious learner

9 - I believe you can make every experience, positive or negative, an opportunity to learn from and to look back on for inspiration. Learn not from what works, but also what doesn’t (and how we can improve them)

When I was running the kitchen side of the restaurant I was always looking for ways to streamline, always improving on dishes based on customer feedback as well as my own (you are your harshest critic). My dad drove it into me that if you can’t eat and enjoy it, its not worth serving to your customers. Pass your own highly critical taste test before serving your customers

contrarian thinker

6 - I’m quite averse to conflict, its one of my biggest weaknesses. I read a book “the disease to please” and I eventually attributed it to my upbringing.

I have challenges contributing in a hostile environment. Recently with a DAO formation I felt my voice was not being heard, and my ideas and thought process were shut down by the loudest members. I must always remind myself that I’m here for a reason and can actively contribute

accomplish important work

9 - I’m always connected to Reddit, Discord and Telegram to understand the general sentiment of users, if they have any major issues / complaints, and any high impact tasks that can make lives of users much easier. From a big picture perspective I believe that “If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves”.

I use Reddit to get a view of current issues. The Approval tool from Explorer was one such example, where a lot of threads in Reddit were being created around the same topic (during the issue with Davinci). I raised this with the team and we created a tool for users to view and revoke token permissions.

activity < productivity

7 - I need to remain committed and focused on the tasks at hand. Context switching is a real problem, especially for developers who need to get in the zone for flow

I found a great way to motivate myself is to create a list of todos, add a few easy ones on the list that i can complete in a few minutes and ‘tick off’ which then gamifies the whole experience. By the time I notice I’ve already been in the zone a few hours and ticked off so many tasks

thrive in chaos

8 - Chaos can instil a sense of urgency that pushes you to your fullest potential. I use it sometimes to push myself to work. But too much chaos can be highly disruptive to a teams’ gel. It should not be used repeatedly because if everything is a priority, nothing is!

When you run a restaurant, EVERYDAY is chaos. When everyone is in sync its like a chaotic symphony between the different chefs in the line, but there will be times when everything is out of sync and its like a battlezone. The trick as the leader is to be able to jump in and unstuck things before they get out of hand, and above all else to remain calm and collected. Its incredible when there is flow