2021 Update
I was quite busy in recent years and kind of abandoned my blog so I thought I would do a very condensed summary of what I’ve been up to in these past few years.
I got quite involved with Bitcoin. I developed a web based, “read-only” Bitcoin wallet which was called “ColdMonitor”. The intended market was primarily charities and organisations who wanted to be transparent about their finances. In the process, I essentially developed a full Bitcoin node from scratch in Node.js using Postgres as a data store. I had to learn a lot about Bitcoin’s inner workings. I also pioneered the “proof of liabilities” cryptographic scheme that some exchanges eventually adopted. This was around the time of the MtGox disaster when multiple people started questioning the solvability of Bitcoin exchanges.
The ColdMonitor project didn’t gain as much traction as I had hoped but
it did lead to me joining Blockai, a startup that was using the Bitcoin
blockchain to register and timestamp copyrights (using the OP_RETURN
opcode). The startup pivoted multiple times and was re-branded to
Binded.com. We eventually got acquired by
Pixsy.com.
During my time as CTO and co-founder of Binded, I got to manage a small team of engineers. I did a lot of full stack development with React/Node.js. I also learned a lot about deep learning, computer vision and information retrieval (we built a reverse image search engine for the web). I had to learn a lot of that on the spot which lead me to completing Stanford’s Machine Learning course as well as the Deep Learning specialisation on Coursera by Andrew Ng (I highly recommend both). Since we were a small team, I was also responsible for operations so I got to do a lot of DevOps stuff (Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipeline, Terraform, etc.).
Following Binded’s acquisition in 2019, I did some open source development (e.g. added a new crypto API to Node.js), some consulting, learned Rust, etc. I also got quite lucky with a few investments. I am currently working on a new project at which touches on algorithmic trading, DeFi and cryptocurrency.