A little about me, where I'm coming from and what I've done.
The theme that ties it all together, and what everything I do centers around, is learning. I want to help people be powerful learners, and the things I've learned are towards that goal.
I was born in Muscat, Oman, and from there went to Kuwait, then Dubai, then Nairobi, and finally back to Dubai, where I graduated high school.
I did most of my growing up in Nairobi, and at the International School of Kenya, where I had the privilege of learning with and getting to know incredible teachers, administrators, and students.
Fathom is a project built around a peer-to-peer credentialling protocol that aims to break the stranglehold educational institutions have on learning.
I started working on it in my junior year of high school and have been commited to it essentially full-time ever since.
My initial focus was on p2p learning systems, ways of putting people who could support each others' learning together. Quickly I discovered that if I wanted to make a system to organize people for learning, it had to have some notion of knowledge, which meant some notion of assessment.
This prompted a 2+ year diversion to creating an assessment system that could scale to all the p2p learning system's I'd want.
With that foundation now set, in 2019 I'm getting back to the learning systems!
I joined ConsenSys in October 2016 to continue my work on fathom and to research how it could integrate with and be built on the Ethereum Platform.
At ConsenSys I slowly built out a team of 5 awesome people working on fathom. The team operated in a transparent and flat manner, with each member taking on responsibilities that made sense for them and as needed.
We worked to prototype different applications that used the fathom assessment protocol along with social features including:
My first language was Python, but somehow I've fallen in love with Javascript and use it for damn near everything.
I'm pretty solid with:
I've done a lot of work on smart contracts, both on the implementation side with Solidity and on the design side, dealing with this new-fangled cryptoeconomics thing.
I've also worked a lot with IPFS and to a lesser extent Dat and SecureScuttleButt.
Generally speaking, working with these tools, I've prioritized practicality and utility over ideology, but I do believe that they are some of the most powerful tools available today for affecting change in the world.
For things I've worked on see my Gitlab page and Fathom's too.