Lisk Community Member Spotlight: Hendrik aka Slamper
This week, we’d like to spotlight an incredibly supportive and productive community member. Among his many contributions, Hendrik aka Slamper recently created a site to aggregate a wide range of data and statistics on the Lisk network, and is working on a Golang port of Lisk Elements. Read on to learn more about his background, his thoughts on open source projects, and much more.
Jennifer: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Hendrik: I’m Hendrik, a 19-year-old software engineer and security researcher from Berlin. In the Lisk community, I’m a member of the Ascend delegate pool, whose primary goal is to promote active community members into Lisk’s forging positions. I began programming around the age of 12 and have been in love with all kinds of technology ever since. Currently, I’m working as an Android and Backend Developer at a startup, but am also founding my own company in the IT Security sector. At the end of the year, I’ll commence my studies in Software Engineering or Project Management in Berlin. One of my dreams is to someday build my own blockchain business — currently, my plan is to build a sidechain-hosting platform to help developers get started, but I’d also love to build a sidechain myself.
J: What is a typical day like for you?
H: Haha — currently, I lack a routine since I just finished school and have to get used to keeping myself organized. Normally, I wake up, get some food and go to the gym. After that, I check Lisk.chat, Slack and GitHub and begin doing routine work for the company and my projects. In the evening, I often go out with friends or get caught in exciting discussions with other community members on Lisk.chat, which is also the reason why I often get to sleep really late and wake up when at noon.
J: How much time do you typically spend on GitHub? What projects are you currently working on?
H: Not as much time as I’d like to — probably about 30 minutes to an hour per day. I spend most of my time coding and chatting, and only use GitHub if I have to create or search for an issue. For the future, I’m planning to read more issues and review more code in an effort to contribute more and improve my skills by reviewing changes. The projects are what I spend the most time on. In the last several weeks, I read a lot of Lisk Core code to learn more about its inner workings. That knowledge is required to allow me to work on my Lisk Network Monitor “A.R.G.U.S.”. This tool will monitor the stability of the Lisk network, identify forks and anomalies, as well as allow delegates and people running nodes to get Telegram, Lisk.chat and SMS alerts on missed blocks and if their node is stuck, forked or down. Apart from this, I’m always improving my Lisk-Go library, which allows developers to interact with Lisk using the Go language, which can be statically compiled. It is also an awesome start for Lisk IoT applications, as well as for adding new stats to stats.lsk.party. For node runners, I’m also working to provide templates and tools necessary to orchestrate and monitor globally distributed clusters of nodes using Kubernetes. Most of the tools I’m building are the core for my planned sidechain as a service business, which will allow developers to get their sidechain hosted (for testing or initial deployment) for free without having to buy and manage servers. This is in an effort to make developing, testing and deploying sidechains as easy as possible. I do always appreciate community feedback and ideas for possible improvements to these projects.
J: What are the benefits of open source projects?
H: In my opinion, the biggest benefit is the community. A closed source project could never get that much of feedback and constructive contributions. Also, open source code allows others to learn from it and improve their coding skills — not only by reading code but also by solving easy issues; learning by doing at its finest. Another great advantage comes from the security perspective — open source code is checked by so many people and everyone can evaluate whether or not they consider a project to be secure.
J: How did you first get into blockchain?
H: I don’t really remember how I got in touch with blockchain at first. The only thing I can remember is that I played around with several faucets and collected small amounts of BTC — that was still in the early days and maybe I happened to throw away the paper wallet! Then, my interests shifted for some time until one of my teachers told me about Ethereum in 2016. That’s when I got really interested and worked myself deeper into blockchain technology and smart contract programming.
J: What attracted you to Lisk? What are the biggest benefits of Lisk, in your opinion?
H: It was the same teacher again who told me about Lisk in mid-2017. I have to be honest here because at first, I thought “Javascript + Blockchain — just another blockchain project trying to collect money with buzzwords”. That was until I started to read into it in late 2017. I was impressed by the simplicity yet great functionality and structure of the code base. It was indeed blockchain technology for the mainstream. The more I learned about it, the more LiskHQ’s way of leading the project caught my attention: this was in no way yet another project trying to push half-finished products in order to pump the price. Lisk is managed like a real company working to build a professional, stable product while staying really transparent (I love the vlogs) — that’s really rare in the crypto space. It’s not just the technology that makes a good product. In the end, a blockchain is nothing more than a sophisticated distributed database. It’s a professional team and a vibrant community that makes all the difference. Lisk’s community has been one of the most welcoming I’ve ever joined and it feels great to be a part of it. This combined with the simplicity of building dapps in Javascript, the language known by most developers, will help make Lisk one of the most stable and accessible platforms in the space.
J: What is the potential of blockchain technology? What industries do you see blockchain disrupting in a significant way?
H: Blockchain definitely has the potential to improve and disrupt many industries and areas of our lives. Since most businesses today are data-driven, blockchain’s potential as a decentralized database is nearly unlimited. Decentralization is the future and blockchain will be the keystone to reaching this goal. I see really big potential in IoT, health tech, research, and in governance. In addition, the availability of micropayments will allow people to efficiently monetize their small, home-build dapps and will make previously unreachable markets available to small developers. Blockchain can allow the building of a real, democratic, immutable voting system that will increase the integrity of our voting system, while also simplifying the voting process using digital identities. And finally, public records of data will allow research e.g. in health tech, to reach levels we’ve never seen before. I could continue for hours, but there are so many sources on the internet discussing this topic so I’ll stop here.
J: What developer tool do you find most useful or simply love?
H: I’m in love with ZSH for my shell and all IntelliJ products for development.
J: What is the best physical environment for you to code in?
H: A coworking space where many creative and talented people around, with whom I can exchange my ideas to get instant feedback and support. That’s the most inspiring and effective place for me. Of course, with my headphones and music on as well.
J: What do you do when you get stuck on a difficult problem/design/bug?
H: I can fully sympathize with Aleksey’s answer to this question in the previous community member spotlight. For me, it means a night with almost no sleep; and if I manage to fall asleep, I often even catch myself working on it in my dreams. What I find to be the best solution when I get stuck is to talk to other people about it — they bring in new, creative ideas for solving it and help clear my mind.
J: What is an old project or piece of code you wrote that you’d be embarrassed to read again?
H: Probably my first app, which was a planner for school. Its code was written in a mix of German, bad English naming, and had a horrible structure. But as a programmer, you often see code you wrote just months ago as being bad because you are constantly improving and learning new things. It’s a great way to see your own progress and keeps you motivated.
J: What has been your most challenging project to date?
H: The most challenging work at the moment is the algorithm for identifying anomalies and forks on the Lisk blockchain, which requires a tremendous amount of thought in advance. But in general my most challenging project to date was a visualization software for protein interactions that I once built for a university nearby — especially because it was still in my early developer days when I had little experience.
J: What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
H: I often read the German tech sites golem.de as well as Heise. For blockchain news, I check Lisk Magazine and CoinTelegraph. For other news, the Google Chrome news recommendations deliver quite interesting results from tech, politics, and other categories.
J: What do you like to do in your free time?
H: I spend a lot of my free time either with friends doing all kinds of activities or improving my coding skills and learning/discussing new tech. Learning and identifying new tech is most exciting if done with others, which is why you’ll often find me on a TeamSpeak server or Discord with other developers and friends.
J: What is one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to pursue coding?
H: Team up with others. Learn together and exchange your results — this will keep you and others motivated. Coding is a really awesome skill. I often hear non-coders say that coding is boring — it’s the exact opposite. Coding is like having the superpower to create anything you can imagine. There are almost no limits. For those who want to learn Javascript, I can also recommend codeacademy.com; they have great, free interactive courses. Coding isn’t learned from books; you learn by doing it.
