The Spelunking Podcast
Teemu Paivinien and myself do a (mostly) bi-weekly check-in called The Spelunking Podcast, where we do a deep dive intro decentralized systems and discuss the future of blockchain.
On our latest conversation we wonder about the state of the crypto market, which is coming across as way too skittish considering how massive an advertisement it received from the Trump administration (even if it came in the worst possible form it could take), how Solana won this cycle, and what sort of bets we would be placing right now.
Check it out!
Centralization is a fragile thing
Here’s the original text of a talk I delivered in November 2024 at the Tallinn Digital Summit, an event hosted bt the Estonian Prime Minister around the theme of Securing the Digital Tomorrow.
The audience were policy makers, technologists from outside the decentralization space, and people from NGOs, among others.
Supporting the randos
A few things that we as open source creators need to get better at, including supporting other developers ourselves.
Talk transcript and slides, as usual.
Identity, Privacy, and the Edge
We need a humanistic focus on our architectures - doubly so when we are talking about identity - and we should fight opportunistic attempts at redefining what privacy means. Presented at Techsylvania 2019.
Here are the talk transcript and slides.
The Truth of the Thing
Decentralization, conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, access to tools leading to equality, and a discussion on mistakes I’ve made. Presented at EthCC 2 in Paris, March 2019.
Here are the talk transcript and slides.
The Arrival of a Train
It’s a talk on the difference between Creativity and Innovation, and lessons from the tech and software industries that can help other creative disciplines. I wrote and delivered it at the European Film Forum on “Creativity, Technology, Finance & Democracy for Europe post 2020”.
Here are the talk transcript and slides.
Ledgers: When would you even…
I see many companies flirting with the idea of distributed ledgers. SAP Inside Track Berlin was a good opportunity to give enterprise developers an idea of which cases are a good fit for ledgers as a tool, as well as the trade-offs they should expect.
Here are the talk transcript and slides.
Remember the rubber hose
Privacy is a topic dear to me, so I seized the opportunity when I got invited to speak at DappCon 2018. I wrote Remember the Rubber Hose, a talk on privacy as a sane default.
Stories we tell ourselves
Can you imagine my face when I come up with the perfect talk for a topic on storytelling and technology, spend weeks writing and practicing the talk, deliver it, and only then realize that the title is all over YouTube on other people’s talks?
Here’s the transcript for Stories we tell ourselves.
It’s about the curry
Now, this was a lot of fun.
I wrote It’s about the curry for Monkigras 2018. It’s a talk about sustaining craft, curry vs. sushi, jazz vs. orchestras, and how to focus on the important details.
You can read the transcript here. Slides at Speakerdeck.
Learning Through Mentoring
A talk about movies, mentoring and what you can learn while helping others. Delivered at CodeMotion Berlin in 2017. You can read the original transcript here.
Reading Clojure
If there’s something that trips Clojure newcomers, is its simplicity. Here’s a primer on how to not try to treat it like other languages, as well as how to think while reading Clojure code.
Flexibility Through Immutability
A talk about the functional programming paradigm, the advantages of immutable data, and how to apply them in object-oriented languages. You can read more about it here.
ITAKE Unconference, Bucharest, 2016:
Running Efficient Distributed Teams
This is a talk I gave at Webit Expo, Sofia, in April 2016. I focused on how to run efficient, fully distributed teams, how they differ from local teams, the pitfalls to avoid, and which agile concepts should be re-evaluated.
Clojure All The Way Down
An introductory talk on Clojure I gave at the Bucharest Functional Programming meet up, as well as a companion article talking about Clojure’s usefulness.
Multi-Kinect Motion tracking and interactive installations
Delivered as a masterclass at Nucl.AI 2015 conference. I focused on ways to deal with erratic and noisy input signals, coordinating multiple Kinect sensors via RabbitMQ and offloading heavy processing to multiple computers.
It’s currently available on the Nucl.AI archives for conference attendees and AIGameDev subscribers.