Meet the team — codeofalltrades
In this article, we will get to know Veil Core developer, codeofalltrades.
In this article we’ll take some time to chat with codeofalltrades, one of Veil’s core developers and the driving force behind Veil’s block explorer and statistics tools.
What brought you to crypto, and when did you make the leap?
I started my crypto journey in in February of 2019. My in real life manager had been pushing me to check out blockchain tech. At about the same time one of my friends had given me his old gaming motherboard and a couple of used graphics cards covered in rat hair and loads of dust. I got my free parts cleaned up, 1 motherboard, 1 corsair 750w psu, 1 MSI GTX 970 4GB and a couple risers.
How did you get started coding?
I’m not really sure how I got started coding. I’ve always been kind of a tinkerer. My parents bought our family are Packard Bell computer of 1999. And from there I installed the CD burner and started downloading MP3s. I started burning Compact Discs (CDs) in high school. After making good money doing that I started looking for jobs that would make good money that dealt with computers and technology.
Can you share a little more about yourself?
I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal. My first job was as a farm hand so I know what hard work feels like. One year of my life I spent working for 25 cents an hour. It was the best 8 hours of the day and made for a solid education in the process. I can drive most things with wheels and some things without. I operate under the belief that everything you see before you was built by a person or group of like-minded people; those people were born no smarter than I was therefore if they can build it so can I.
Do you have any hobbies or passions?
It’s a close toss-up between snowmobiling and tinkering with software development stuff for my number one hobby. I’m also pretty fond of hippie music festivals, golf, word working, and shit posting on Facebook if you consider that as a hobby.
How did you become involved in Veil?
Going back to the free mining equipment I was given, the 4GB graphics card was pretty limited in the number of algos it could mine. Since Veil was relatively new, Feb 2019, my little card produced about 10 veil a day. I remember being so excited about minting my first zerocoin. From there I wanted to know how my zero point staking was doing and some other network stats. That’s when I decided to build out veil-stats.com.
What would you say sets you apart from most other software developers?
A focus on usability for the end user in addition to the amount of support that is needed from QA and customer service after a product goes live. A lot of developers can build something cool. Creating something that runs without need for constant human intervention, that’s a much trickier task.
Veil development is constantly striving to break new ground. How do you meet challenges involved with that?
Being able to take data and put it into meaningful visuals. Data is great but if you can’t see the patterns and visualize it then it’s not very useful. Bringing it to life allows users to make the decisions that are correct for them.
Have there been any software developers, crypto or not, that have left an impression on you?
Yes the first manager I had after I left university. He was a software delivery machine. Every 4 weeks we were cranking out new releases. He wrote an automatic installer service that would install releases to the stage and production environment. Customers would have two weeks to test the changes in a sandbox environment before it automatically installed to their production server.
What mark do you personally hope to leave on crypto?
I can’t give away all my secrets. One of my major reasons for interest in blockchain or crypto technology was the abundance of open source development. I’ve been an Enterprise developer for my whole life. It seems like there’re all these cool things going on in open source and I wanted to learn some of them. What I learned along the long way was that I’m also bringing a fair number of skills and processes back to our Enterprise development team.
With the crypto space as volatile as it is, do you have any sage advice for keeping perspective?
Blockchain is equivalent to the internet in 1990. Try to imagine what the internet was like in 1990 and the value that those people saw in the companies then. Apply that to where crypto and blockchain is at today. Then look forward 20 years.
Are there any emerging directions within software development readers may not be aware of that you’re excited about?
This is a pretty informed crowd. The things I see on the horizon that’re pretty interesting are ipfs, blockchains permissions for managing medical records and access to documents, and utilization of blockchain to secure digital and physical assets (artwork, collectible cards, coins, etc).