Who are you?
I grew up in the Canadian Rockies and moved to London, England at the age of 18. My travelling career of being a lifeguard started to wear on me after a while (no one ever needed saving), and I ended up working at a call centre for a couple restaurants. That turned into my first career - coordinating and later managing the Learning & Development program for the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group. After 7 years, I moved back to Canada to learn to code - a dream of mine that always seemed out of reach without a degree. I took the Lighthouse Labs bootcamp program, and started working at a small games studio in Vancouver as a Junior Backend Developer.
Last year I joined the Dapper Labs team as a Backend Engineer, and have been working on NBA Top Shot ever since! I helped build one of the starting prototypes and I’m pretty sure there is still some cat themed legacy code lying around somewhere.
What lured you into the world of blockchain?
Funny enough, the Blockchain side of things didn’t lure me so much as the technical stack, and the wonderful people - but working at an industry-leading Blockchain company has certainly been the icing on the cake. I worked in Go at my first dev job, and when I found out that Dapper was hiring for Go developers I jumped at the chance. I’d heard by word-of-mouth that they were a great company to work for and I was really intrigued by the things they were doing with Blockchain that seemed so outside of what the rest of the world was using it for.
What is it about building a product with Flow makes you excited?
I think what is so exciting about Flow is how accessible it is to people who aren’t already (self-proclaimed) crypto-nerds. Blockchain and Crypto have always seemed to have a higher barrier to entry, and I think the things we are doing are really going to be reachable by the mainstream. The feedback that I’ve seen from developers using the Flow Playground already has been overwhelmingly positive and I think that’s a huge testament to the Flow team and how hard they’ve worked to make a really accessible product.
What should I read next?
For Non-Fiction, I’ve been reading Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin. I think it’s a really important book to read if you are responsible for putting technology into the world.
For Fiction, the last book that stuck with me for a while was The Traveling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. It’s very simply just a beautiful story about a man and a cat.
I’m also just a huge fan of anything by Margaret Atwood - I recently finished her MaddAddam trilogy, which was great, but frankly (in true Atwood fashion) a little on the nose in the current state of 2020.
What’s the last thing you bought for under $50 that you love and use often?
I recently just bought a Pocket Rocket stove for bikepacking adventures, and it’s the neatest little gadget. It fits in the palm of my hand, and boils water super fast! Although I’m clearly jumping on a bandwagon, because all of the fuel canisters to power it are completely sold out in Vancouver.
