“And how do you get Euros out of this thing?”
That was my wife. I had been explaining Aave to her. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Aave is one of several platforms where you can deposit an amount of cryptocurrency and gain interest on it as it is lent to other people. Most if it is in the form of stablecoins - tokens whose value is pegged to a particular fiat currency (normally the USD).
It’s easy enough to understand: you add an amount of USD-valued tokens, get a variable interest rate, and can withdraw into the same wallet you deposited from whenever you want.
So far so good. But she wanted to know about the next step: the moving parts involved on how to get from there to a bank account, or to pay rent, or the supermarket. Once I started answering her question, talking about keeping an eye on gas costs, wallet backups, and other things to keep in mind, I saw her eyes roll.
She’s smack down on what I’d expect to be our target when talking about financial inclusion, having grown up with a depreciating currency no other country would accept. She has mental bandwidth to figure out this stuff. She’s demonstrated the required patience to put up with my shit. And still she saw it as annoying busywork.
Do we expect that interest rates and speculation are going to bring regular people in?
We need to talk about this. I don’t think we have built a tool of financial freedom yet that’s simple enough to be wielded by the people who’d need it the most.
Are we giving them something whose value is immediately obvious and the conceptual overhead low enough for them to adopt it before they are forced to?
What would that look like?
Let’s talk about some things that we as open source creators need to get better at, including supporting other developers ourselves.
(A talk I delivered at at the first CodeDAO meet-up during Berlin Blockchain Week in August 2019, about sustainable open source development).
My goals for this talk are to:
A talk on conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, while discussing mistakes I’ve made.
Creativity, innovation, mash-ups, and science fiction writers… as a lens on lessons from the software industry.
I delivered this talk at SAP Inside Track Berlin in September 2018. The audience was mostly enterprise developers, almost all of them specifically working with SAP as a platform.
Given how many companies I’ve seen flirting with the idea of distributed ledgers, I thought it would be useful to give people an idea of which cases I see as being a good fit for them, to give them a leg up the next time it enters the discussion.
I delivered Remember The Rubber Hose, a talk on privacy and distributed applications, at DappCon Berlin 2018. Skipping the introduction and going straight to the beef…
Last week I had the privilege to speak at infiniTIFF Summit, a part of the Transylvanian Film Festival dealing with technology, storytelling and experimental narratives.
I wrote Stories We Tell Ourselves for the summit. Below is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave.
I got invited to speak at Monkigras 2018, a superb conference on software, technology and craft. This year’s theme was “Sustaining Craft”. I wrote and delivered It’s about the curry - you’ll find a (close enough) transcript below.
I’ve been advising a startup on the data transformation space. As part of this, we re-wrote the core engine in Clojure. The new version is, at the worst case, 16 times as fast in the same hardware, and in some cases over 200 times faster. And it does it with a fraction of the lines of code.
We did this in under 3 months of part-time work. We couldn’t focus our entire attention on it, as we had other concerns as well - I was involved with general team and management tasks, and the second developer was helping on other internal projects as well. To further raise the bar: we had to keep it functionality-compatible with the current version, so I had to get acquainted with the existing feature set, and it was the other developer’s first Clojure project.
Clojure made our lives so much easier. But this is not a post about why Clojure is cool.