sidcode

I’m Sid / sidcode / Siddhant. My name means principles / tenets. That is probably why I was naturally drawn to the Kernel syllabus ;) Soon after my block wrapped up for me as a Fellow, I was asked if I wanted to be a Steward. I accepted this gift of a responsibility to best map out this unparalleled community of care that is building the heart of our interdependent web. This post is an attempt at mapping my meaningful meanders. I’m evolving just like our society evolves with its interdependent pillars- This post maps out my life among each of web3, technology, culture, policy, economics, and personal aspects. This post has been salted and peppered to perfection with links for you to dig deeper into all these rabbitholes. Here we go-

Web3 journey so far:

• First foray: introduced to build on IPFS in 2016 and stumbled upon Juan Benet ¹ (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.

• NFTs : At IC3, we (Sarah Allen, Prof. Ari Juels, Prof. Mukti Khaire, Tyler, and me) published a pretty extensive Primer on the past, present, and future of NFTs. I was also interviewed for NFT Mania by Wan Wei.

• DAOs: GitcoinDAO, Token Engineering Commons, SuperTeam, Algovera, ScienceFund, Verses

• GitcoinDAO: I’ve been fortunate to be a Steward at GitcoinDAO and help build sustainable rewards systems for building the open web. I started as an early contributor of the Moonshot Collective, helped on web3’s first ever ultimate DAO workers report, tech lead for MMM (memes, merch, marketing), a librarian at the Public Goods workstream. Public Goods are good and It is all coordination.

• Governauts: researching reward systems for the next wave of DAO coordination on a governauts scholarship with Token Engineering Commons. Here’s a talk I gave on CommonsWTH - measuring the wealth, truth, and health of our commons.

• Projects: Silent Auth, DeSchool, contributor to memes.party, Declaration of Interdependence of Cyberspace, The Truth Wins - a censorship-resistance project with Reporters Without Borders, DDB, and Hyperinteractive Studios.
• 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! I’ve also judged quite a few hackathons during this journey and am finding ways to reimagine and improve how hackathons are designed. In 2022, I am helping find a better way of building impactful hackathons with better.sg - a tech4good non-profit in Singapore. Hackathons should not be a winner-take-all.

Tech / (Computer) Science:

• Security: researching, speaking, writing, and building cyber-physical security systems 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. Also worked on astronaut-rover interactions with Italian Mars Society that liaises with the European Space Agency (described below in Robotics)
• Distributed Systems: and Engineering at one of the best systems teams 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 well so far for getting one’s ideas out there. It is also important to build and explore decentralized infrastructure for science (DeSci). An early attempt at that is this DeSci paper that a bunch of us collectively co-authored to help wayfinders figure out this dichotomy. This is a first in many aspects. I publish in the fields of security, critical infrastructures, cyber-physical systems, decentralized systems, artificial intelligence, big data, science, education, and training. I re-cognize that there are a few buzzwords in there so I implore you to reach out to me to gauge how superficial/deep my knowledge is in each of these fields (and more). Re-search is its own wonder-full reward.
• Education: I gave a talk on established and emerging aspects in Education (including how cyber-physical campuses and metaversal learning unfolds). My friends and I are helping build the grassroots infrastructure for better schooling that goes beyond conventional EdTech companies built around capturing the attention, retention, and intention economy. These aspects are all covered in DeSchool.

Economics, Policy:

• Cyber-physical security: actively involved in co-organizing and contributing to global and local cyber-physical security exercises- like NATO’s Locked Shields and Critical Infrastructure Security Showdown. I gave a talk about it here at CyCon, a NATO conference.
• Startup and Venture life: helping build more secure and usable authentication systems for anything, advising companies, building teams for companies at all stages.
• Pseudonymous work: editor of the sequel to a top Bitcoin and economics book that you may have most likely read.
• Banking and the World Economy: learned a lot about private/public investment management, banking, securities, and markets at my first job as a strategic analyst at Goldman Sachs. I keep learning the rest from many different legendary voices on different sides of the table (Lyn Alden, Ray Dalio, Rob Breedlove, Raghuram Rajan, etc).
• Consulting: advising policymakers and companies who are building the future of society in different aspects.

Community (local):

• DesignSG | founder and co-admin for a community of 3100+ 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 - 1100+ members, GatherSG, Creative Technologists
• India-based groups: Climbing (Bangalore Climbing Initiatives) and Skating (Bengaluru Skaters)

Community (international)

• 1729 | Contributor to DAO and Security discussions, hosting Singapore events.
• Steward at Kernel and Gitcoin.
• DWeb | Helping steward the Singapore and Bengaluru nodes.
• Superteam member | not as active as I’d like
• Complexity Weekend | Facilitator, eusocial participAnt, and co-organizer.
• Active Inference Lab | curious student of this emerging field and have contributed to a DeSci paper and a robotics livestream.

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 aiming for the foundational domains of fitness
• Longevity: been a training/nutrition/sleep geek since 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, and soon table tennis (thanks to a friend)
• Dance: enthusiast (about music in general)
• Filmmaking and combining hobbies- like this one where I combined climbing, photography, and film production. Here’s the link to the full documentary which was showcased at a few film festivals.

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, and soon in a network state (maybe).
• 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

I’m gradually giving up on all other social networks 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 gift you my personal POAP ;)

Fin

1. Unrelated: I was invited to speak at the same symposium at Stanford 3 years later. Here’s the link to that talk :) ↩