About me
Meowzit 🐈⬛
I'm Ryan, a full stack developer with a passion for building projects with real world impact. As a developer, I approach the expanse of Web3 with the idea that it is essential to understand all components involved in a project. From the user & stakeholder interests, to the UX, to the on-chain architecture, to the offchain infrastructure, the industry sentiment and landscape with the idea that decisions can only made accurately when saturated in context.
As a South African in this space, the ability to uplift people through both working in this space, and providing open systems is why I love Web3.
In my free time, I'm an overly passionate chef, crafter (3rd generation model train builder), juggler, and electric unicycle rider.
/mɪ'aʊzɪt/
exclamation - informal • Feline South African
used as a greeting, equivalent to 'hello' or 'how are you?'
Work experience & startups
Mento Labs is the development team behind Mento, a decentralized EVM platform for launching and operating multi-currency stable assets. Mento Labs strives to advance the Web3 economy with innovative stablecoin solutions, promoting financial inclusion and global adoption of digital assets.
Mento Labs is a small but extremely capable team. My responsibilities span across our stack. From leading development on Dapps, to refining our smart contract architecture, triaging audit results, researching future protocol improvements, as well as taking care of our oracle infrastructure.
ChainSafe is a leading blockchain R&D firm, specializing in protocol engineering, cross-chain interoperability & web3 gaming.
I joined ChainSafe on the back of sunsetting my startup, Protea GmbH, and deciding I would like to explore Web3 beyond Linum Labs & South Africa. This lead me to ChainSafe, and their new goal of developing a suite of products. From developing internal UI frameworks, utilizing my experience with Web3 & Solidity to guide development within our products. Additionally, I was able to explore development in other Web3 contexts, from working on Gossamer(Go variant of Polkadot's Rust based Substrate SDK), to decentralized storage in CS Files & CS Storage. To ChainSafe Gaming, a project very close to my heart, where I was able to focus on creating Unity tooling for interacting with smart contracts. The opportunities to explore Web3 at such an intimate level was the best part of my time at ChainSafe.
Protea is an open-source & decentralized software protocol that provides the backbone for emerging cooperative ecosystems.
At Protea, I was responsible for all smart contract architecture design, engineering & implementation of our smart contracts, front end & back end instances as well as being involved in investor discussions & presentations.Protea is a system to allow
Linum Labs is a product development house for innovative Web3, AI & Machine Learning technology, focused on design, development, and Blockchain consulting.
As lead blockchain developer, I was responsible for leading smart contract architecture design & implementation for our internal and external projects as well as development of the associated DApps. In addition to this, I was responsible for research, generation and presentation of course content for all our training courses, beginner, developer, enterprise, and domain specific trainings.
A decentralised biotech protocol porting intellectual property into web3 and launching biotech DAOs
At Molecule, I was responsible for consulting & assisting in the development of blockchain architectures proposals for Molecule as well as maintaining a knowledge base of technical developments within the industry that could better enable development.
Community & Freelance work
A decentralised biotech protocol porting intellectual property into web3 and launching biotech DAOs
Linum Labs will always be home to me in the Web3 space, whenever they need assistance reviewing a potential partner, potential client, or simply just need a hand developing an architecture, prepping for an audit, etc. I'm more than happy to jump into a new codebase and connect with my team.
Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities posed by Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) to stateful blockchains, starting with Ethereum.
Flashbot's was looking for assistance building out websites for their research documents & company front end. Given my experience with UI work, this was easy enough to iterate fairly quickly with their small UI team.
A bunch of solidity devs going through code, making as if we know a thing or two
Myself, friends and former colleagues basically find interesting projects and go through them together on stream. Some times we invite projects to show off their code bases. But in general, we just try find novel implementations and try to understand them.
We are onboarding the Web3 users and developers of tomorrow making use of next-gen learning techniques on our data driven platform.
Taking my experience from working at Linum Labs, creating & running Enterprise, Developer, and beginner blockchain courses on a variety of different chains & concepts within Web3, we wanted to create a learning platform that was a bit more intimate than existing platforms. This predominantly from my side meant creating the course content, giving recorded lectures on green screen.
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." - Richard Feynman
I have deep appreciation for the mentorship I've had throughout my career. Since entering Web3, and being immersed in the wide expanse of crypto from the beginning. Training my junior colleagues who have gone on to do incredible work within the space. Whether I'm in Berlin, or South Africa, I run free training courses, often with Linum Labs for their student & professional networks. But I also take on training up prospective developers, assisting them in career changes, breaking into Web3. The feeling when you've helped someone find a craft that opens up opportunities in life, especially as a South African, it's extremely satisfying.
Education
Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Systems
2014 - 2015
My degree was largely focused on systems architecture, ranging from low level graphical development, interaction design, software engineering, professional development, emerging technology, interactive design, knowledge management and operations management, in addition to the practical application of these skills.
Edexcel @ CTI
BTec HND Information Systems: Engineering, Information Technology
2012 - 2013
The BTec HND Information Systems: Engineering, Information Technology is a 2 year course that covers a broad range of topics in computer systems & engineering, with inclusion of CompTIA certifications.