📢 Introducing @jcvernaleo, a scientist, home brewer, UNIX nerd, father of two, lifelong New Yorker, horror movie fan, and a not-so-great guitar player.

🛠️ At Hemi, he handles engineering across the core network, infrastructure, and apps, focusing on coordination and design.… pic.twitter.com/Zuy00kPZWg

— Hemi Network (@hemi_xyz) August 5, 2024

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a scientist, home brewer, UNIX nerd, father of two, lifelong (more or less) New Yorker, horror movie fan, and not-so-great guitar player (in no particular order).

Tell us what you do for Hemi?

I do a wide variety of engineering “stuff.” I have my hands in the core network, infrastructure, apps, pretty much everywhere. Less (but not no) direct coding from me these days and a little more coordinating and designing, but still actively involved in nearly all parts of Hemi’s stack. 

What is your tech background?

By training, I’m an astronomer. I spent a long time doing large simulations of black holes and galaxy clusters in FORTRAN. Somehow I eventually drifted from that into startups and open source work, eventually ending up in crypto over a decade ago and I’ve been here since. I’m one of the original authors of btcd (the go implementation of bitcoin, the first real alternative implementation to what eventually became called bitcoin-core). And I still miss perl some days.

What is in your dev toolchain?

Go is my preferred language, but I happily do things in NodeJS, Python, and Solidity. The one constant is that I still do it all using emacs.

What’s next for cryptocurrency?

Now that Bitcoin L2s are becoming a real thing, the next thing will be more and more people building projects on bitcoin itself, something that other than a few tentative steps like lightning, really hasn’t been possible on a large scale before. There’s no predicting what those projects will be, and most of them will not survive more than a year or two, but there should be some really interesting Darwinian pressure going on and it will be very interesting to see what comes out the other end.

There’s been a lot of talk about AI. How is Hemi working in that space?

Hemi deals very heavily in finality and certainty, two areas that current LLM and ML-style AI are particularly weak. So we’ve got our sights set there.

What’s your favorite bit of crypto trivia?

Early bitcoin used IRC (as in the chat network) for network detection and discovery. It just shows that despite how modern so much of bitcoin and crypto feels, they started out with some pretty old tech that many current users might not even recognize.