Welcome to catnotes!

Greetings, dear reader. Thank you for making the journey to my blog. While X/Twitter is good for engagement and pithy takes, there's a lack of deep - or sometimes any - thinking there. This is a place for longer form writing, thinking and, hopefully, reading.

I don't have a crystal clear picture of what I want this blog to become. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all, I just decided to stand something up and see where things go. Of course, as a developer, I took the opportunity to learn a new tech stack - Nuxt3 - instead of just starting something on WordPress, so there might be some growing pains. I plan on writing somewhat regularly on all sorts of topics. All thoughts and opinions are my own and may or may not reflect the views of others or cats in general.

I, the proprietor of this blog, am one of the core developers of the NEM and Symbol blockchain projects. Prior to that, I've worked on all sorts of software projects imaginable - computer graphics, packaged server applications, cloud applications, phone applications, artificial intelligence, etc. I fell into the world of cryptocurrency almost by mistake in late 2013. There was a lot of buzz about Bitcoin at that time, and I decided to look into what the fuss was about. I came across a few new coin projects that seemed interesting - XCP and NXT - and participated in the communities. Eventually, I was recruited to help develop a new coin based on NXT. It seemed like a good opportunity to learn something new, so I agreed. Within a month a few more really good developers and people had joined, and that's how NEM was born.

After a decade or so in the cryptocurrency industry, I've experienced multiple cycles and lots of highs and lows. I feel like it has strayed quite far from its early principles. I would like to explore some of that with you.

I also hope to teach you some things. I plan on writing some tutorials as well as doing deep dives in some existing code. For reasons that should be obvious, these will initially be primarily focused on Symbol.