Getting to Know the Keep Team: Piotr

We continue our Getting to Know the Keep Team series with a member of our development team — Piotr Dyraga.

Hope: Hi Piotr! Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Piotr: I was born in Poland in the city of Kielce located in the centre of the Holy Cross mountains — one of the oldest mountain ranges in Europe. While I was in high school, I had plenty of ideas about what do I want to do in my life, with some new plan popping into my head each week. I wanted to be a doctor, soldier, lawyer, and an aircraft pilot. I was even interviewed for police detective training! However, ever since I can remember, I was interested in computers and all those other career ideas never worked out because it was my PC that was drawing my attention most. Even when I was a kid in primary school, I remember my brother yelling at me and complaining to my parents that I was wasting time staring at Norton Commander or DOS prompt while we could play together Dyna Blaster.

After high school, I moved to Krakow, the Middle Ages capital of the Kingdom of Poland and lived there most of my adult life. I graduated with a degree in computer science from Jagiellonian University where, besides shaping of my programming skills, I received a solid education in algorithms and discrete mathematics. I truly enjoyed my education there. That’s why, in my professional career, I have always looked for projects doing something more than just database CRUD with some thin layer of UI.

After work, I enjoy mountain biking and I am a regular gym visitor. I have two daughters — Alicja (1 y.o.) and Karolina (2 y.o.) who reshaped our life. I can now also enjoy slides, swings, roundabouts and seesaws again!

H: How long have you been working in the blockchain space and how were you introduced to it?

P: A couple of years ago I attended WebSummit in Lisbon, a large conference in Europe where everyone was talking about blockchain. I must say I was very skeptical at first. The vast majority of startups there had crappy ideas — for instance, who needs a dating service for dogs built on blockchain? When I came back home, I read the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers. I got interested in how it all works and tried to write my first smart contract. It was something new to me, but on the other hand, a lot of underlying math theory is quite old and most computer science students were familiar with foundations of this space before we even knew the word “blockchain”.

Although I worked on some cryptography code in the past, Keep is my first project in the blockchain space. What I absolutely love about this project is that it solves a real problem. I believe the blockchain revolution is still ahead of us but we first need to address issues we are experiencing with blockchain today and fill all the gaps such as scalability and privacy. Without it, a lot of solutions just can’t be implemented on blockchain.

Keep is the answer to the lack of privacy. Do you know that quote: “We were born too late to explore the world, and too early to explore the galaxy?” I agree with it but I also believe, we were born just right to be a part of the technology revolution and change the way how people think about trust, money and privacy :).

H: What technologies and concepts have you had to learn/catch up on as you’ve started doing development on Keep?

P: I would dare to say that blockchain is one of the most rapidly evolving fields, if not the fastest evolving field, of computer science today. I have never seen anywhere else with so many new protocols, theories, projects emerging every month. As an engineer working in the blockchain space, I need to learn new things every week and be serious about it. The biggest challenge is that so many things are happening around and it’s hard to filter those really valuable. I am very fortunate to work with people who are real geeks in this space and can suggest some interesting reads. I never expected I would do it again but two weeks into working at Keep I had to dust off Graham, Knuth and Patashnik’s Concrete Mathematics book and recall some discrete mathematics concepts from there! I also had to learn Golang, but since I already had experience in functional programming and I received enormous support from other Keep developers, that was pretty easy.

H: You stepped into Keep and immediately started work on threshold ECDSA. What work have you done previously that has prepared you for that task?

P: As a young boy, I watched all parts of Rambo series and that gave me some idea how to survive in harsh conditions, hahaha. Seriously, you can’t be prepared for that task. Background in computer science and math was absolutely required but we need to remember that all the papers about t-ECDSA are written by smart scientists who spent years working on this problem. Some aspects that are obvious to them are hard to understand for people seeing the protocol for the first time. For the first month, it was like solving a puzzle. Reading a number of papers, trying to find matching pieces, filling the gaps. I remember I couldn’t find an answer why authors suggested a specific commitment algorithm and one evening when I was brushing my teeth, out of nowhere, it appeared to me! I had to write it down quickly to be sure I would remember the answer the next morning.

H: What use cases for Keep do you find most exciting?

P: All of them! The project is fantastic and it solves real problems hinder lot of emerging ideas on blockchain. The random beacon is a source of trusted randomness for DApps where the number is jointly generated by members of a group which is also randomly selected, with an advanced protection mechanism against adversaries trying to influence the result. We fill a real gap here and answer developers’ needs! Or threshold signatures — think of BTC assets controlled by ETH smart contract, this is a killer feature! We have received a lot of interest about it and that’s incredibly motivating.

H: What is different about working on Keep vs previous products you’ve worked on?

P: We do not own the nodes, the network is truly decentralized and we can’t just roll a quick fix in a matter of minutes in our data centre. We have no central authority validating network certificates of nodes. All the communication between peers, including authentication handshakes, goes through public networks, we need to be extremely careful when designing security protocols. Cryptography is like a minefield, every small parameter matters. Choosing the wrong number as a subgroup generator leads to unexpected, occasional protocol failures or may compromise the safety of the encryption scheme. The bar was never that high on the other projects I have worked on.

H: What tools do you like to use when working and coding?

P: I love Visual Studio Code for development. It’s fast, it’s clear, it has an excellent golang and git integration and it just lets me focus on my job. iTerm and ohmyz.sh are very pleasant as developer’s terminal. Zoom and Flowdock are an excellent choice for team communication. It may sound like some life-coaching nonsense but every morning I write down a list of tasks I want to complete the given day and I scratch them off. It is a TO DO list for the given workday and it helps me to self-organize. I heard about it from my friend and I was skeptical at the beginning, then I tried and must say it works fantastic.

H: You live in Poland! What’s it been like to work remotely full-time?

P: Keep has an excellent remote work culture in the roots of the organization. With the technology and tools we have today it does not matter if we sit next to each other when doing a code review or if we have the Atlantic ocean between us. It is crucial to externalize your thoughts and ideas more than you’d do it in a non-remote setup but it boosts team’s performance in a long run. Having all our decisions written down on Github or Flowdock lets us refer to them in future and our repository becomes a real source of wisdom about architectural challenges and solutions we have considered and made. If you make all those decisions during a chat at the office kitchen and you do not write them down, which is what usually happens, you lose an essential part making the project stable and successful in the long run. Remote work requires very good self-organization but it doesn’t mean the developer is left alone with the problem. We communicate every day, we help each other, we are all equal team members. I believe remote work is a future of software engineering.

H: Anything else you’d like to add?

P: Just that I am really happy to be a part of this fantastic team and I am thrilled to see technology evolution that blockchain will bring in the coming years. Hearing all the sad news about big corporations spying on us and leaking our data with no consequences, I am even more motivated to do my job and build the future of privacy at Keep.

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