Background
I’m a software developer from Kansas City, MO. For the past few years, I’ve been steering my career to become a Hadoop specialist, but I also find decentralized cryptocurrencies and applications very fascinating. Ever since I took it upon myself to learn Haskell in 2012, I have thought that the statically typed FP style is certainly the best for catching bugs and writing solid code. I end up using Cats a lot when programming with Scala, and I’m definitely still learning the typesafe FP style, but I’m loving every minute of it and it’s definitely teaching me a lot about writing modular and reusable code.
Interest in Cardano
There are many things that make me most excited about Cardano vs other crypto-decentralized planforms that are out there right now.
The first you might already guess; I don’t recommend Haskell for everything (or even often), but I think for something like cryptocurrencies and smart contracts which are very sensitive to bugs, Haskell is absolutely what you MUST choose for this task. I’m equally excited that the smart contract language for Cardano will also promote typesafe programming and be functionally pure.
Another thing that gives me confidence in this platform is the academic rigor behind it in that everything gets peer reviewed. I also think this is a smart move for the same reasons that I think Haskell and pure FP is a smart move; this is simply mission-critical software that cannot fail.
I’m also quite interested to see that the Cardano team has cracked sharding on the blockchain. I’m in part wondering if incorporation of a block-DAG might also be possible to provide a further performance boost to the platform (without having dug far enough into the details yet to really know if this makes sense), but certainly, this is not only a performance win but also a win for storage space.
Plans Concerning Cardano
I think it would be cool to be able to contribute to the project. I’ll certainly at least be reading the source code and, in the beginning, looking for low-hanging fruit that needs to be worked on. I don’t expect any PR’s I submit to be accepted, but there’s not much harm in trying anyway.
I do, at least, have a few smart contract ideas in mind that I think would over-tax the Ethereum platform and which would also be able to directly benefit from functionality that Cardano will have built-in that nobody else, Ethereum included, seems to have plans to include. So at a minimum, I will be working on dApp development when the Cardano platform is ready for it.
Outro
I’m looking forward to getting to know the Cardano community and, hopefully, also becoming a member of it, myself. I’m happy to be here!