Welcome to the 11th journal of our weekly “Ambassador Stories” series!

Every week, you’ll be able to enjoy the various, unique stories of our Cardano Community Ambassadors: what motivated, and still motivates them, to be part of this amazing and wonderful community?

The Cardano Community Team would also like to thank the Ambassadors for all their continued efforts and participation in sharing their stories with us.

Please read all about Alex Ludden (@coddlybear) down below!

** Alex - Ambassador Translator**

Quiet on the outside, hard at work on the inside behind the scenes. Most of the Ambassadors and community’s foundations are based on and around people such as Alex. His continued efforts to help translate useful Cardano information in not only one, but two(!) languages - French & Spanish - is very much appreciated and welcomed! Alex is actually also helping to translate both IOHK Udemy courses (Plutus & Marlowe), that are currently available! One Udemy course has been completed, the other is still ongoing and appears to be finished sometime soon! Thank you for all that you do, and we are looking forward to more valuable translations and contributions!



1) Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?

I’ve been in computers since punched cards! My first language was P/L I, which ran on the IBM 370 at Cornell University. I then went to work in the real world and got the company I was at, to buy one of the first TRS-80 Model II computers, which was a “business” model. It had an 8" floppy drive and a huge(in size) 8.4 Mb hard drive. I wrote a whole accounting system in Basic, which only allowed 2-character variables. I spent the rest of my career as a healthcare IT developer and consultant. I also spent 10 years as a travel and landscape photographer, and other projects involving GPS and mapping. Currently I run the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum we inherited from my Mom, which has more than 20,000 salt and pepper shakers on display, and is located in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Come and visit! It’s pretty amazing.

2) How did you get interested and involved with Blockchain/Crypto?

(One of the computers Alex worked with during the early computer days)

I was interested in stocks, and attended a meetup whose organizer was into crypto. Pretty soon I went down the rabbit hole and started reading and watching every video I could on blockchain and Bitcoin. I currently run a Bitcoin node.

3) Why Cardano?

I was looking at the various altcoins, and ran into Charles’ videos. I was impressed by all the research that went into Cardano, and the whole approach of peer review and formal methods made perfect sense to me.

4) How are you contributing to the Cardano Ecosystem as an Ambassador?

I have been translating videos into Spanish and French, and correcting the English transcripts. I translated most of the Marlowe Udemy course, and about half of the Plutus course. I am currently translating the great Blackboard Series of videos made by Adatainment. I also do Cardano presentations at crypto meetups.

5) What is your future vision for the Cardano Ecosystem?

I think the plan of working and creating relationships in developing countries is spot on. We can apply Cardano where it will do the most good, and at the same time prove the viability in various use cases.

Also, providing training is an excellent way of increasing adoption - the more students we train, the better it will be for Cardano. We should increase those efforts 10-fold!

I am very bullish on Marlowe - I think it has the potential of being the Lotus 123 of crypto (I am dating myself!

We need to create lots of domain-specific languages like that. In all the organizations I have worked with, the brightest ideas and useful projects always come from the people on the ground that are doing the job every day - not from programmers. If we give those people the tools, it will be huge…

6 ) What is your personal message to the Cardano community?

We are at the very beginning of a huge transformation, and it will take us into so many directions we can only fathom. It won’t happen overnight, but the future is very bright. Hang in there!

Don’t forget to like, follow or share Alex’s hard work! He can be followed and found on the Cardano Forum!

—The End

Such motivated community members we have in our ecosystem! Thank you all for reading, and don’t forget to leave your comments/likes and give our Ambassadors some Cardano community and follow their work!

Until next week, with new people and new Ambassador Stories!