I've been a product manager in the traditional software world for four years, looking to make the jump into becoming a blockchain engineer and entrepreneur. While my formal education is in Economics, I spent nearly all of my afternoons for 2 years after starting my job at my company learning about computer systems and software - reading books, online courses, building small projects, and so on - enough that I could build persuasive prototypes and proof of concepts for analytical and machine learning applications.
In few words, I think blockchain is an incredible technology because it allows people to create complex, precise social arrangements without a legal system and, by extension, without the armies necessary to enforce legal contracts. I am especially interested in governance, and the new and different social realities that could come into existence from this technology.