📡 Team Interviews: Yahya, Paratii’s P2P Lead Engineer

On the marvels of peer-to-peer, watching online videos in Egypt, libp2p X ÐΞVp2p and taking our networks to the outer space.

courtesy of ©Alecrim :)

Paratii: Can you start by telling about yourself - who are you and what is it that you do at Paratii?

Yahya: I’m Yahya, a software engineer from Cairo, Egypt. I’m building the Paratii P2P video network infrastructure.

PTI: What’s your story with code?

Y: I fell in love with computers as a kid, built my first machine when I was around 7 years old. It took me a lot longer to discover the joy of programming. My first piece of code was in QBasic. It was very hard back then because I couldn’t even read English. Luckily I figured this English thing out, which made coding so much better :)

I currently work with Javascript - it runs everywhere and it’s the web’s native programming language. In the past I worked on building analytics and algo-trading software, having also ran a “market watch” for the local stock market. In the ethereum space, I had been playing with an implementation of state-channels over libp2p, based on uRaiden’s still unreleased code, before joining the Paratii team.

PTI: And with peer-to-peer? Is there any connection between the subject and your personal trajectory?

Read more about the history of P2P content distribution in the recap we did here.

Y: The idea of P2P has always been fascinating to me. A P2P system is usually less prone to attacks compared to centralised systems. The first P2P system I used was BitTorrent, which remains resilient after all these years, and it allowed me to personally access a large selection of content and information that wasn’t available before due to geographic location (think 2003 in a 3rd world country, no credit cards, 32Kb dial up connection, and no streaming).

PTI: What’s your academic background?

Y: I studied software engineering in Petronas University of Technology, Malaysia. It has an impressive campus designed by the legendary Norman Foster.

PTI: Any interesting past experiments you’d pinpoint / share?

Y: With my best friend and coding partner, we built the first local algo-trading platform for the Egyptian market. Didn’t take off commercially as we hoped, but we did beat the market index for about a year, having learned a lot about automation, scraping and realtime data processing along the way.

PTI: As a consumer of video/digital content in general, where would you say your average experience could be improved the most?

In Yahya we trust.

Y: I consume a lot of digital content on platforms like Youtube and Soundcloud, and that content depends fully on ad money to capture some of the created value. This means the content creators are motivated to create content that won’t get demonetized or flagged for copyrights, above anything else, limiting freedom and forcing content to appease companies that pays for ads in the first place, instead of focusing on appraising the content consumers.

Self-censorship is subtle, evil and maybe more dangerous to freedom of speech than actual censorship.

What we’re doing is not about pushing anyone out of the game, but rather about making it transparent and open for anyone to participate in it to any extent.

PTI: The Paratii team is working on a first pilot of the product to be made public. What are the important things it’s gonna finally bring to testing ground?

Y: From a technical standpoint, I’m curious to see how the P2P video network will grow and scale in comparison with a centralised one. Traditionally, the more popular a video gets, the more it costs to serve it, while here it’s the opposite: popular content will only get more well seeded instead of getting “penalised” for going viral.

PTI: And what are some of the toughest challenges you’re currently facing, or foresee facing soon?

Y: Dealing with the limitation of the web browser is a tough one. From browser throttling background processes to storage limitation, there is a lot of moving parts that needs to be optimised so the user can get the seamless experience he’s expecting.

PTI: What excites you most about Paratii and Ethereum technology in general?

Y: There is a lot to be excited about!

Have you ever wanted to watch a video and got that “Content is not available in your country” response? That’s because the companies who pay for the ads aren’t in your local market, and decided that your view isn’t worth it :D

Paying for pay-per-view content sometimes isn’t that straightforward either, because many people (outside the western world) don’t actually have credit cards. Paratii can solve that. You can upload your content, anyone can consume it and pay for if needed, no middlemen required :)

What a useless and powerless viewer might look like.

I’d say I’m mostly excited by the shift of power from the middlemen (platforms) to the content producers and viewers. Creators will be able to get value in return for their work regardless of national borders or someone’s approval.

PTI: What’s your vision for the digital content distribution landscape in a medium-term future, in terms of power distribution, alternative channels and user behaviour?

Y: It’s probably still too early to tell. I believe small creators won’t care about the decentralised aspect of things in the beginning, but the more established ones, who already built an user base, will start migrating their content to alternative networks like Paratii, slowly. Why? Because they will see it’s possible to get more value, or a bigger piece of the pie, in comparison to the centralised platforms they’re used to.

PTI: Can you tell us about your workspace and the peculiarities of working with a distributed team?

Y: I work from home: all I really need is an internet connection and electricity. Oh!, and a VPN. This site — Medium — is blocked over here, I gotta pretend to be from Europe : ).

Working with a distributed team actually has a lot of advantages. For example, it’s not as distracting as an office. And yet you can always discuss things or bounce ideas off each other in our gitter chat, when you feel like. It also means I never have to deal with rush hour traffic :)

PTI: When not working, what do you do for fun?

Approximate period in which Yahya had fun for the last time.

Y: Last time I had fun Obama’s hair was black. I rarely have free time, but if I do and I don’t have a side project I’m working on, I’d usually spend that time catching up on my reading or fixing something around the house.

PTI: The most peculiar peer-to-peer application you have seen (or can conceive)?

Y: There is this P2P network where you can transact value, enforce rules, authenticate users, notarise documents and run organisations with no central management. It was created by a kid who is into unicorns and cats and goes by the name of Vitalik Buterin, I think :)

PTI: How would a comparison between ÐΞVp2p and libp2p go?

Y: libp2p tries to be a thin waist protocol so all the things like transports and discovery can hook up to it, and applications can use it to switch the network stack seamlessly. This is hard to achieve but not impossible. There are a lot of knicks to iron out, though.

ÐΞVp2p on the other hand is highly opinionated, it doesn’t work with everything, doesn’t have a plugin for every network transport, it just has TCP / UDP as transport and that’s it. It comes with RLPx only, no Protobuff or cbor or other formats for binary data exchange.

So libp2p is like a Toyota: all the buttons ’n sh*t are made to serve as many purposes as possible, so as to fit in all models.

ÐΞVp2p is more of a sports car: every part is there for a reason, no frills. And it needs maintenance because if you want a feature you gotta make it, and maintain it, and figure out why it isn’t working.

A graceful comparison between two popular decentralised networking protocols.

PTI: The most curious place you could think of embedding a decentralised video player?

Y: Long flights, ships & offshore oil rigs. In these places, connection is usually very slow and expensive. A decentralised system like that underlying Paratii would guarantee you’ll only download a video once, and if other users on the same network want to watch the same video they can do so without grabbing it from the outside.

Spaceships and other planets (Mars? :) ) too, because the delay would make a centralised service completely unusable, depending on where does “centralised” implies to you (if it’s on Earth!). I think that’s one of the ideas behind IPFS, anyway, and why it’s called the InterPlanetary File System :)

Yahya is a software engineer and a geek. You can find him on Twitter (@ya7ya) or look at his code on github.com/ya7ya. Paratii is building a network for curation and monetisation of videos.

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