Make 2022 The Year of Innovation and Learning

Make 2022 The Year of Innovation and Learning

Did you know that REM really struggled to make an impact before Automatic For The People? They had recorded many albums, but, while they were critically well-received, the band struggled to make any real impact. And so for Automatic For The People, they swapped instruments and changed their whole approach to making music. And from that change, came a classic album, and they never looked back after that.

The horizon of the greatest era of humankind

And, so, we stand on the horizon of the greatest era of humankind. It will be an era that properly builds the greatest machine ever created: The Internet. But, what have we been doing for the past four decades? Well, we have basically been booting the machine up. The next generation will make it work properly. And at its core will be security, resilience and trust. This machine is thus too precious to fail at any time, or in revealing our secrets.

Overall, I missed contributing to the start of the Internet, but this time I want to play a part in building it properly. And so, we need to learn like never before, as any flaws in this machine will bring it down. So my little tip to you is to learn like never before, and force yourself out of your comfort zone, and learn how this new machine will actually work, as you wouldn’t trust a mechanic to fix your car if they didn’t know how the engine actually works.

Also, over the past four decades, we have been building a cryptographic toolkit that is now fully formed, and we have the environments to properly integrate it. With Golang and Rust, we have the programming language that break away from the DDL/Lib approaches of the past and allows us to build systems that scale and where others can contribute. The days of large companies driving the industry should be past, and the days of skilled engineers sharing knowledge and contributing to the building of the machine are here. It will be an infrastructure without the control of large organisations, or one protected by patents. And, if you are looking for areas to learn and to innovate within, there’s no better place to look than these 25 future-looking projects:

How to learn the fundamentals?

And how do you learn about building these new systems? For me, it is still the old pen and paper way of abstracting things and getting them to make sense in my head. And one of the best things to learn in creating trusted systems is how a digital signature is created. In this case, for me to learn it fully, I just turn to a pen and paper approach to learning how the Ed25519 digital signature is created (by Bob) and verified (by Alice)[here]:

For me, pictures and abstractions mean so much more than text. Only by writing this down in my trusty Collins diary can I actually make sense of the methods involved, and then code into LaTeX (and Golang) [here]:

To me, the process is typically to get the code running (as someone has fully tested the code against test vectors), and then sit down and write out the maths. I then cross-correlate the two, and until I can see how the maths turns into code. I then typically read the research paper, in order to see how the methods defined in the paper lead to the code. Unfortunately, the major barrier in this is often the translation of the work from the paper into code, but if that barrier can be broken down, there’s a whole lot of learning to be had.

Conclusions

Go force yourself to learn about what’s under the hood. Learn new things and open your eyes to the most amazing machine that will ever be created. You do have the opportunity to contribute to its building, so don’t miss the opportunity, and innovate like never before.

And, remember, your brain needs to exercise as much as your body does. Go feed your brain …