Community Spotlight: Meeting Aidan

We kick off the first community spotlight of 2020 with our very own developer advocate Aidan! When Aidan isn’t busy being a technological whizz on the Arweave Discord Developer Server, he can be found plotting world-conquering AI bots (sort of), exploring the world of blockchain, and building dApps such as: Decent-a-Forums and PermaPaste. Read on as we jump into the world of Aidan…

Country of residence:

Ireland

Occupation

Developer Advocate at Arweave

What do you like to do with your spare time?

What is this ‘spare time’ you speak of?

How did you find out about the Arweave permaweb?

A couple of friends of mine were participating in the Open Hackathon building some dApps for Arweave (Scribe & Hotdog Rhythm Station) so I jumped in too. I wanted to learn a bit of Vue.Js and do some fun dApps, and ended up sticking around in Discord learning more about Arweave, helping people out, and then getting hired by Arweave to perma-help-people-out 🙌

What piqued your interest in decentralisation and the blockchain space and when?

I noticed it a few years back, read bitcoin.pdf, briefly did a bit of mining and bought a few random coins, and have been mostly just watching the space from a distance since. I appreciated the technical elegance and simplicity of bitcoin and thought ‘hey this stuff is not going to go away’

Why did you choose to build Permapaste?

This dApp was a fun way to learn some new things, a bit of frontend with Vue.Js making it a PWA with a mobile friendly UI, and a bit of cryptography in making the pastes optionally encrypted and shareable.

You also created Decent-a-Forums — do you plan on developing this for further use?

I might do! I still consider it only an alpha version since there are so many features I’d like to add, things like rich-media posts and the ability to start threads about any content on the web. I’d like to experiment with making it embeddable on other sites, and with incentive mechanisms for rewarding good content threads by posting fees going back up the chain of replies.

If you could build any dApp, what would it be and why?

Probably some zany generative Ai thing that consumes content and entropy to produce more content and entropy in an infinite recursion until it eventually becomes sentient and we all have to run 😆 At the moment though, I’m interested in helping people out to build dApps, improving the developer and user experience of dApps and making them more accessible to the everyday user.

What does a decentralised future look like to you?

I see decentralization as a way to stop the aggregation of information and power into a few huge and centralized entities, to increase the resilience and diversity of our networks and systems, and reduce the ‘anti-fragility’ factor of our world overall. I think this is mirrored in real-life and we are already seeing people want to move back to more community like structures, so I hope in the future more people can recognize the value of this type of thinking, and the work we do on a decentralized internet can flow back and influence the wider world.

Where can people follow you/your work?

You can follow me on GitHub: https://github.com/aidanok or drop in to the Arweave Developer Discord https://discord.gg/fHnMXGg for a chat!