A few words from the minds that build Sylo.

From left, it’s Sylo’s backend development squad: Felix, Rohit, Scott, John, and Paul.

This post is the first in a department by department series in which we’ll be introducing you to the people that make Sylo tick.

You could say that the backend team is the functional heart of a software development house like ours; so where better to begin?

Without further adieu, here are a few thoughts from our Lead Engineer Felix Schlitter, PureScript Developer Rohit Grover, Senior Engineer Scott Twiname, Senior Engineer John Carlo San Pedro, and Purescript Developer Paul Freeman.

Which part of backend development is your specialty?

Felix: Designing and implementing complex systems with a focus on correctness, resource safety and performance.

Rohit: Distributed systems and functional programming.

Scott: Integration, bringing together the various bits and pieces people have been working on.

John: I mostly work on the Sylo Protocol. Which is client side code that acts as a layer of interaction between frontend applications, such as the Sylo app and the various decentralised technologies.

Paul: In general, my specialty is functional programming and algorithms but our backend team is entirely made up of functional programmers. So within Sylo, my specialty is the Elm programming language. This skill has allowed me to become the frontend developer for the backend team. In other words, I make apps to support backend development.

Do your family and friends understand what you do?

Felix: No more or less than what I understand of their jobs.

Rohit: Yes, my wife is able to follow what I do but she won’t be able to write code. The rest of my family doesn’t follow my work beyond the basics.

Scott: Some do, some just think I work with computers.

John: Both my parents are actually developers themselves, so often I’ve had quite technical, in-depth conversations with them. With regards to other friends and family, I try my best to not speak in overly technical terms when discussing my job.

Paul: Most of my friends and family have taken the time to understand what I do — a few of them even find it interesting when I go on and on about it!

Tell us about what you’re working on at the moment:

Felix: Improving performance in the current implementation of Sylo Protocol, while organising efforts to design and implement the next major iteration of the backend architecture.

Rohit: Our distributed storage and lookup system.

Scott: Performance improvements and rewriting the UI for displaying messages.

John: I’m making minor changes to our end-to-end encryption process in order to improve the reliability of messaging.

Paul: I’m currently supporting the development of the first public web app running the Sylo protocol — Sylo Beta for browser, which will be a companion app to the mobile application and will allow users to take their Sylo experience onto their desktops and laptops.

What part of your area of work do you find most challenging and why?

Felix: It pretty much boils down to having to solve every problem without relying on centralised infrastructure, subsequently moving ownership and operation away from a central entity and onto the peers participating in the network, while not sacrificing security, performance, user experience, reliability, and availability.

Scott: Finding elegant solutions to problems.

John: Building a reliable application on a blockchain based backend.

Right now the technology surrounding blockchains is volatile and has yet to receive the decades of iteration that existing centralised solutions already have.

This forces us to develop innovative techniques when building applications that we would not need to consider if we were to use centralised technology.

Paul: Our team uses the PureScript programming language, which is an amazingly powerful functional language for developing JavaScript applications. But it is also, by far, the most challenging language I’ve encountered. I’ve learned so much and pushing my skills to their limit makes every day fun and exciting.

What do you think ‘the next big thing’ for your area of tech will be and why?

Felix: Sylo.

Rohit: I believe we will see code written in languages which enable proofs.

So code would come with proofs of correctness.

Scott: Getting decentralised systems on mobile devices. Currently most decentralised systems are run across servers, they are generally setup as gateways for mobile devices to access them. Having the actual systems running on mobile devices will be a big win towards making things fully decentralised.

John: Scalability is a major issue that will prevent wide scale adoption of decentralised services. Projects that allow dApps to tailor decentralised networks to their own needs, e.g. relaxing consensus in favour of scalability/performance, will likely be an area of focus in the next few years.

Paul: I really think programming languages are entering a bit of a renaissance currently. The pace of hardware development has slowed somewhat and our devices are small, use less energy, and are being asked to do a lot more.

This has put pressure on programming languages to build machine code more efficiently.

The next decade will likely see the emergence of several languages all competing to take the place of old standbys, like JavaScript, Java, C#, and Python.

What issue relevant to our industry concerns you the most right now and why?

Felix: Censorship.

Rohit: Lack of connection with aspects of life outside the digital world.

Scott: Trust — things are way too complicated for most people to understand. There needs to be systems that are trust-less, almost every service or thing you do online has things going on that people are not aware of, and wouldn’t allow them to happen if they knew and had the option to stop it.

Paul: The most concerning issue on my radar at the moment is the spread of misinformation online. Further complicating this is the mistrust of any technology that attempts to filter out content that might not be trustworthy. It’s a difficult problem to solve.

What’s a misunderstood thing about your job that you’d like to clear up?

John: Just because I’m a software developer doesn’t mean I can build your shitty app idea (nor do I want to).

Paul: People misunderstand the opportunities provided by the software industry. Many people imagine boring desk jobs and presume software developers to be a mix of people from the ‘geek’ stereotype.

And while the industry still has a long way to go regarding diversity and inclusion, I think one success of this field has been its ability to provide flexible and exciting jobs to fit into the new culture of the 21st century.

There are many opportunities to live or travel around the world while working remotely, and most tech companies support and promote a healthy work/life balance at levels to which other industries have yet to catch up.

Make a prediction for where technology will be at in five years time:

Rohit: I expect people to be able to decide on things collaboratively. Reliable consensus and agreement will become common.

Scott: I think it’s pretty far fetched, but I would like more of the world to rely on open protocols that anyone can take advantage of. An example being the Sylo protocol. Anyone should be able to build a messaging app on top of it and they should all be able to communicate with each other.

John: I believe augmented/virtual reality will have huge implications on how we consume media in the future.

Paul: Virtual assistants will begin to manage more of our daily lives over the coming years. Instead of browsing websites for things to purchase, curated items will be delivered to us to approve. Daily tasks, travel, and to-do lists will be managed for us.

We should all expect to act as CEOs of our own lives, meaning our apps will work tirelessly behind the scenes and present us with options throughout the day which we will simply approve or deny.

—

Got a question? Wanna keep up with the team?

Get in touch with us now on Twitter or Facebook.