Last month marked Nik’s one year anniversary working on the Keep project, and we feel very lucky to have him on the team! Nik is a software developer working mostly on the Solidity part of our project. Please enjoy the following interview between myself and Nik.

Elizabeth: Hi, Nik! Time flies! How about we begin with you telling us a little bit about your origins?

Nik: Hello! I was born in Siberia, Russia, but traveled a lot with my family since then. We lived in East Germany, Ukraine, witnessed the Soviet Union collapse and then moved back to Siberia, where I finished university. Shortly afterwards I moved to London, where I lived for the last 10 years and recently regained my desire to travel and re-discover the world again. My partner and I recently moved to the beautiful Cayman Islands!

Elizabeth: The upsides of remote work! What did you do before the internet came into the world?

Nik: I grew up with radio engineers in my family and was lucky to have access to their knowledge and experience. So before the internet I was a happy teenager soldering audio devices, guitar FX and synthesizers, I even made a little fortune assembling custom MIDI interfaces for old soviet synthesizers.

Elizabeth: Do you remember the moment you encountered your first PC? Was it love at first sight?

Nik: Oh yes! My very first computer was a ZX Spectrum with 16Kb RAM and audio tapes for storage! It was love hate relationship though. A typical program would take 20–30 min to load from the tape and of course it could easily crash in the middle of loading. Nevertheless it was fun to learn how to program in Basic and later on in Assembler. My true love came later with a Pentium 166Mhz. I spent days and nights exploring it’s inner world. It had MS-DOS installed, Dos Navigator and lots of fun programs and games. We had no access to the internet at that time but there was a cool thing called “BBS”. It’s a computer run by someone in your town or nearby with a multi line modem to which you dial and get some kind of stone age version of the internet. You could download/upload files, chat to other users and so on. Things got much better of course when I got Windows OS and the internet connection. I was blown away by this infinite source of information. It was point of no return for me.

Elizabeth: I know exactly what you mean! What is your work background and what was has been your most memorable work-related experience so far?

Nik: I previously worked as an IT contractor for many different companies, mostly digital agencies, big media companies, banks. Lots of signed NDAs, so I can’t tell a lot of stories here. Wait, there is a memorable one — I had a pleasure to work on a project where I had to commute to work on an airplane!

Elizabeth: I take it you don’t have motion sickness! Aside from contracts, have you ever had your own projects?

Nik: I have had plenty! London’s internet startup scene has been thriving in the last few years. I was lucky to participate in a few interesting projects including a music app, language learning, real estate and even had some success in the competitive sector of dating apps. I’ve proven the 98% startup fail rate stats, but nonetheless it was a great way to learn new tech. I’m glad blockchain is coming to disrupt this space and allow small startups and independent developers create compelling products.

Elizabeth: Very true. Nik, what are the coding languages you know and which ones are your favourite?

Nik: It changes all the time! My favorite one for the web backend was Python with its awesome Django and Django Rest Frameworks. Speaking of frameworks, I was a big fan of angularJS when it first came out but later on I swapped it for a more fun React. I really enjoyed Swift language as well while working on an iOS project. These days it’s Solidity and Go. I’m enjoying it so far in spite of the steep learning curve I had initially.

Elizabeth: And how did you find out about Blockchain technology?

Nik: It was during the famous crypto bull run of Spring 2017. The year of hard forks and crazy ICOs, crypto wild west, exciting times! I eventually started to dig into the tech and instantly saw the potential. There were lots of great blockchain events and meetups in London at that time. Cryptography suddenly became a hot topic and was impossible to ignore. I’ve quit contracting and dedicated myself to crypto full-time.

Elizabeth: I’d add it was the year of quitting jobs :) Where do you see the Blockchain technology going?

Nik: I’m very optimistic that decentralization will win. The new Internet era is coming, community owned and community governed projects will start pushing out the current big players. Transparency of open source software will win. Better privacy and control of your data will win. We also hopefully going to see more adoption in sectors like government, law, healthcare etc…

Elizabeth: So, it is the future?

Nik: I have no doubts that Blockchain technology is the future. The progress is inevitable, speed, convenience and low cost always win, we’re in the early stages but the space is evolving rapidly.

Nik is optimistic even though there are 8 species of sharks commonly found in the Cayman Islands

Elizabeth: And what led you to work here, at Keep?

Nik: I worked with Matt a few years back on one Google project, it was fun and challenging one with lots of awesome developers on board. After the project has finished, we kept in touch and a few months later Matt invited me to work on his and Corbin’s cryptocurrency startup Card for Coin. This eventually led me to Keep. I was really excited to join and to have a chance to work with the recent advances in blockchain and cryptography, contribute to Ethereum core, help dApps adoption and make the internet a better place!

Elizabeth: Is there anything dramatically different when developing in Blockchain? What types of new things are you learning?

Nik: It’s a bit different with Solidity, the stakes for a simple mistake are very high. The codebase is not that complex but you have to pay extra attention to every line of your code, even the order of commands that could be irrelevant in other languages is important in Solidity (hello re-entrancy attacks). You should also study other projects, learn about previous bugs, and keep up to date with the best practices.

Elizabeth: Yes, things evolve really fast in this space. Nik, before we wrap up -there is this stereotype.. Is it quite common to keep bears as pets in Russia?

Nik: Well maybe that was the case in the past but since then they’ve evolved a lot and came out of control, they got into crypto as well and started to manipulate the markets recently!

Elizabeth: Haha! Anything you’d like to add?

Nik: I’d like to introduce you to my friend Misha, he’s a web developer from St. Petersburg. He’s into crypto and runs a few master nodes. He’s also keen to potentially become a Keep staker!

Elizabeth: Fantastic! That’s what we are aiming for at Keep — a widely distributed network. Make sure to invite him to our new Russian Slack Channel! Thanks Nik, been a pleasure chatting with you!

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