John Newby - (Mostly) tech stuff

I've been working with the internet since the very early 1990s, and making websites since 1995. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Linux in '93, and I've concentrated on free software since the beginning of my career. In that time I've used a bewildering number of programming languages, starting with C and C++, moving though Perl and Python via various less well-known languages for purposes such as smart contract programming. As with most of us, I have become less enamoured of object-oriented methodoligies and use the functional paradigm a lot more frequently these days. At the moment my favourite programming languages are Rust and Common Lisp for production and prototyping respectively, but in general I am not dogmatic about the choice of technologies.

In the last five years I've mostly been working with blockchain. I am not particularly partisan about blockchain and was grateful to have spent the last few years working with the Tezos, the original proof of stake blockchain, which avoids many of the environmental issues. I had the privilege of working with a number of artists on NFT issues whilst at TZ Connect, which was an experience that I treasured. In the future I am happy to work with blockchain again but I'd be very happy to work on projects with real-world impact.

Since we sold our company to Google I've been living and working in Berlin, and got my German citizenship last year. I believe my German is good enough for business. I've been more in management roles for the last several years but I am not too proud to get my hands dirty. In general my programming skills are more suited to prototyping than to creating production code, but I am able to turn my hand to most things.

If you would like to see some of the things that I have worked on, here are some paid and some personal projects.

• Que Pasa is an indexer for the Tezos blockchain which converts the updates in the Michelson language into SQL for insertion into a Postgres database. I wrote the initial prototype for this, and Mr Rick Klomp took it over and kicked it into shape.
• Æternal was an indexer for the Æternity blockchain. It was my first big Rust project.
• Hifive Test During Lockdown I, I played with RISC-V embedded boards. This was an attempt to figure out how to talk to the embedded ESP-32 SOC.
• The source to the pigeon cam.
• a motion JPEG proxy.

If you feel you'd like to work with me, my contact details can be found on the main page.