Hello everyone,
Last week I virtually sat down with Simon and had a happy conversation together.
Who are you Simon?
I started with software development or not software development- it was simple website programming when I was pretty young in school. When I was around 12 years old I created my first websites and got into programming with dynamic websites with PHP, developed my website skills during my time in school, and started to earn my first money with building websites. When I went to university I did not want to focus on programming because I wanted to continue other interests I had from school like math and physics, but later I switched to computer science as a minor.
All this time I did little software projects as a hobby and I continued to earn money by building more complex software, like webshops and so on.
After university, I founded a startup where I wanted to build an alternative to email which was encrypted. Never got successful with this product, but it did the job, what it was supposed to do, it was there that I call gathered a lot of experience with cryptography and especially applied cryptography.
How did you join Confio?
In early 2018 everybody wanted to pull me into some blockchain projects and up to this point, I was not really in touch with blockchain at all. Primarily because I was not convinced that energy consumption of Bitcoin is a thing you should do. Because I did not really look into this space, at that time I missed a lot of the alternatives that were developed along the way, so in 2018 I saw all these opportunities and it got me interested and I thought, oh, okay I have a good background when it comes to cryptography, maybe I should look more into this thing. Then in one blockchain startup, I met Ethan, Martin, Misang, Abel, Will, and a lot of very nice people there, where I worked with them for about one and half years. At some point, people started to leave one after another. Ethan was relatively early, then Martin followed, I followed others, but we kept in contact.
Ethan started to plan to bring CosmWasm from the state of a hackathon project to something that could be made production-ready and I joined him relatively early, This is how I came to Confio
What do you do in Confio?
Most of my time I focus on software development especially CosmWasm virtual machine that runs smart contracts and CosmJS client-side library. Those are the two projects where I’m responsible for, that I focus on more than any other things I’m looking into. , but those are the two big and interesting ones that I focus on. With the transition from Confio OÜ to Confio GmbH, I also became someone who is responsible on an operational level, so I take care of the operations in the background.
How do you work with Confio?
I work four days a week in the European time zone and fully remote, which is super cool. I really enjoy being able to choose where I work from and do not have to leave my home city. I’m also quite flexible with the times that I work. So if I have an appointment during the day I don’t have to justify just leaving for a couple of hours and doing the rest of my day in the evening or something like that. So I really enjoy the flexibility. But at the same time, I think it’s also important to have a good amount of overlap in the working times with my colleagues. So I think it’s good that we are all in the European time zone and work during the week and not at the weekend. So it makes it quite easy to synchronize and make sure everybody’s on the same page.
What do you like the most about working at Confio?
The technology we are building is super interesting. So it requires me to be creative every single day. I don’t have work that is repetitive. So this is super cool.
The second thing is the great team, that we have the great colleagues and it’s really enjoying working with and having talented people around
Wanna join us?
Find our open positions here, and tell us your story!
