My Kernel Intro - sidcode

Hello Kernel! My name is Sid / sidcode / Siddhant. It means principles / tenets. That is probably why I was naturally drawn to the syllabus ;)

Goals - listening as much as possible, vibing¹, and building together, for a long long time!

Tracks that I’ve been tracking - Security, Fair Launch, Gaming, DeFi, Culture, and of course Learn.

Web3 journey so far:

• First foray: introduced to build on IPFS in 2016 and stumbled upon Juan Benet ² (accidentally). Read the annotated Bitcoin paper too but did not grok the social consequences fully until much later.
• Academic: researching smart contracts, memes, communities, and NFTs via IC3, Cornell University.
• DAOs: GitcoinDAO, Token Engineering Commons, SuperTeam, Algovera, ScienceFund, Verses
• GitcoinDAO: started in Moonshot Collective, helped on the ultimate DAO workers report, tech coordinator for MMM (memes, merch, marketing), a librarian at the Public Goods workstream. Public Goods are good.
• Governauts: researching reward systems for the next wave of DAO coordination on a governauts scholarship with Token Engineering Commons.
• Projects: Silent Auth, DeSchool, contributor to memes.party, Declaration of Interdependence of Cyberspace
• Hackathons: won the first prize and popularity prize at the Singapore Blockchain Innovation Challenge in December 2021 for cross-chain community authentication for DAOs, won the Balaji Srinivasan prize at the Solana India hackathon in September 2021, a special prize at HackZurich 2021, and the overall prize at National Blockchain Challenge in 2019 in Singapore. The real prize in all of these are my friends whom I got to spend those hours with, and the new friends I made subsequently!

Tech / (Computer) Science:

• Security: cyber-physical security for national critical infrastructures at the iTrust Centre for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore University of Technology and Design
• Space: satellite image processing and remote sensing for the Indian Space Research Organization. My first foray into free and open source software.
• Distributed Systems: and Engineering at Goldman Sachs
• Robotics: Worked extensively with mobile robot teams and rovers via Google Summer of Code, Italian Mars Society and Python Software Foundation. Blog link
• Extended Reality: designing explainable security and smart cities for policymakers through VR/AR/MR.
• Papers and Patents: despite their pitfalls, centralized institutions have assembled our knowledge graph reasonably OK so far for getting one’s ideas out there

Economics, Policy:

• Cyber-physical security: actively involved in organizing global and local cyber-physical security exercises- like NATO’s Locked Shields and Critical Infrastructure Security Showdown.
• Startup life: Chief strategy/storytelling officer of Silence Labs. We’ve made authentication invisible while increasing security. Coming soon to web3.
• Pseudonymous work: editor of the sequel to a top Bitcoin and economics book that you may have most likely read.
• Banking: learned a lot about global Investment Management, Banking, Markets at my first job as a strategic analyst at Goldman Sachs.
• Consulting: advising policymakers and companies who’re building the future of society.

Community:

• Complexity Weekend | Facilitator and eusocial participAnt.
• DesignSG | founder and co-admin for a community of 2050+ designers.
• CryptoTechSG | founder and co-admin for a local community of crypto practitioners. Fun fact: I made Vitalik give a shoutout to the community in one his AMAs.
• Better.sg | volunteering as a project co-lead and builder in multiple projects listed here on non-verbal accessibility, safety, and multicultural issues via gaming and interactive fiction.
• Other Singapore-based groups: ProductSG, GatherSG, Creative Technologists
• India-based groups: Climbing (Bangalore Climbing Initiatives) and Skating (Bengaluru Skaters)

Culture:

• Poetry: expressing computing culture by translating classical Urdu/Hindi poetry to English at CodeShayari. Selected works.
• Design: MIT Media Lab design innovation workshop. I designed Smart Textiles.
• Storytelling: bringing stories to code and pull requests (pseudonymoyus stealth project, to be released soon)
• Humanities: involved in multiple communities studying forgotten/current/emerging cultures (around the world in cyber-physical spaces)

Personal:

• Physical Culture: amateur bodybuilding, strength training, calisthenics, martial arts (Kalaripayattu), and all ten foundational domains of fitness
• Longevity: training/nutrition/sleep geek before it was cool
• Food: Love everything and anything about the form and function of food of all kinds
• Generalist: very putty-like | interested in many things
• Sports: climbing, skating, football, frisbee, dragon boating, swimming
• Dance: enthusiast (about music in general)
• Filmmaking and combining hobbies- like this one

Upbringing:

• 90s kid
• a torchbearer of the relay generation, the last one to be proficient with both analog and digital worlds
• mixed culture kid (genotypically and phenotypically)
• moved around quite a bit in different geographies across continents - coast, desert, valley, mountain, wetland, island
• used to sing as a kid in the Christmas choir and Indian Classical Music. Then life happened. Now it is a plan for later.

Socials:

• @sidcode on Twitter
• @sidcode on LinkedIn
• sidcode#1729 on Discord

All the social networks which I’m gradually giving up on before they give themselves up. Once bitten, twice shy. Looking at you, G+

Thanks for reading! If you’ve read this far, ping me and I’ll send you a POAP ;) Fin

1. And to be one of the best contributors in our memepool. ↩
2. Unrelated: I was invited to speak at the same symposium at Stanford 3 years later ↩