An Interview with NEM Core Developer Bloody Rookie

It’s liberating to find your tribe. Like many of us, when I first stumbled upon NEM, it was through the lens of an investor. My husband and I are game designers and we were exploring new avenues for how we should invest our boardgame royalties into other investment platforms (such as gold, silver and the stock market.) In the beginning, we looked at alt coins that had a low coin price, were established before 2015 and had a large market cap — XEM was one of the few that we found. Then our focus shifted to looking at NEM through the lens of the advancements of the platform and blockchain technology. It was through this research that it became clear to us that NEM was ahead of the game with their features, use cases and ability to scale. The turning point for me, however, was NEM’s welcoming community. I decided to actively become a contributor (not just an investor) to NEM’s community because it aligned with my personal goals and I believed in the platform. Not to mention the mods are fantastic and wield their hammer to keep a toxic free environment where real conversations can thrive. Of course what sealed the deal for me was the devs. I read through various forum posts from the very beginning of NEM. These devs were different: approachable, insightful, inspiring. Not to mention active in the forums and chat groups. Their expertise helped me get to where I am today as a NEM community contributor so it’s pretty fun for me to share with you the interview this week with NEM’s own original dev, Bloody Rookie.— Alexandra

First appeared on medium

1. What’s your role on the development team?

I have been in the team from the very beginning. From 2014 to 2015 I have been one of the main developers of the NEM Infrastructure server. Since then I am one of the three cpp developers that develop Catapult. Besides coding I spend a lot of time reviewing the code that gimre and jaguar0625 have written as well as discussing new features for Catapult.

2. Why should developers choose NEM for their projects?

I think our API is easy to use. There are many developers that have experience with a REST API approach. Also our coders Quantum_Mechanics, Aleix and Guillem and Kaillin have provided libraries to help with coding.

3. What do you think the NEM technology does better than other blockchains?

NIS already has extraordinary features like multisig, namespaces and mosaics. It is just matter of a few clicks to create your own coin on the NEM blockchain.

With the introduction of Catapult, we added more features like cascaded multisig and aggregate transactions. With the latter, you can bundle multiple transactions and it is guaranteed that those transactions are executed atomically meaning either all of them are executed or none. This allows a whole bunch of new applications like atomic swaps and services that enable you to transfer mosaics without even possessing any XEM for paying the transaction fees. Also we have split up NIS into several components, peer to peer servers that are responsible for generating new blocks, api servers that feed the database and the database itself, all of the components can be on separate servers which allows scaling each part individually.

4. Catapult has been doing a lot of user testing. How are you integrating user feedback into the product?

That depends on what kind of feedback it is.

In case of a bug report, we simply have to check if it really is a bug and then fix it.

If the user is asking for a new feature it is much more work. We have to thoroughly discuss the feature within the dev team (to evaluate if it is technically possible and not undermining any other behavior of Catapult) as well as forward it to the NEM Foundation to see what their opinion is. This procedure can take quite a while. Finally, if approved, we can schedule it for some future milestone of Catapult.

5. What can the community do to help NEM succeed?

There are mainly three things i can think of:

a) be active in the NEM forum by participating in discussions and helping people if they have problems / questions.

b) help make NEM known to the broad public, for example by writing blogs or create videos showing features of the NEM blockchain.

c) build some business on top of the NEM mainnnet blockchain or contribute to a NEM library.

Unfortunately there are way too many members in the community that only hold XEM and speculate on a price surge without actively participating in one of the above ways.