Interview with Jonn Mostovoy Co-Founder at Serokell
Hayden - Nice to meet you, firstly I’d like to thank you for taking the time to complete this interview, I really appreciate it! I’ve taken some time to research your background & experience, as well as Serokell, but for the sake of context, would it be ok for you to introduce yourself & the company in your own words?
Jonn - Thank you for having me! I started programming because in my school there were a lot of people who were attending an extracurricular club called “fortech”, which was later renamed to “progmeistars”. The first language I used to build real systems was PHP, bundled with easyPHP bundler for Windows. I started selling my software while studying in high school, then got hired into a software development company https://very.lv, which was making a social network for professionals for the Russian-speaking market. We had to scale from zero to tens of thousand unique users to a million. It was an instrumental experience in industrial programming. I first started learning Haskell while at very.lv, because my colleague looked at my PHP code and said that I should check it out. Afterwards I worked in banking software using C# and Linq, which enabled me to use some of the aspects of functional programming in an industrial environment. When I got tired of the “bloody enterprise”, I switched gears to startups. Having a decent experience with solving a wide range of problems in Erlang language, I caught a wave of mass exodus of node.js projects switching to Erlang, thanks to Facebook hype. I managed to position myself well in the market and that’s how I started to get my first senior / tech lead positions. Then, over the course of three years, I saved enough money and practiced enough Haskell to implement my dream. With a friend of mine with whom we met on #nixos channel in IRC, we have co-founded a Haskell consultancy and an outsource company called “Serokell”. We have implemented several interesting systems: a secure linux distribution, a bitcoin exchange, and then we got hired by IOHK to implement the settlement layer of their cryptocurrency and bootstrap their genesis block. It was a ton of fun and we’ve done it successfully under quite a time pressure. Now our primary focus is biotech and data science, but involvement in blockchain projects still remains rather great. We regularly perform security audits of smart contracts and develop a huge chunk of the Tezos ecosystem -- from Tezos Agora (the main coordination website for everything Tezos, with blockchain integration) to ergonomic programming languages for Tezos Smart contracts. As you can imagine, Erlang and Elixir are very much used by us and me personally. Our product, https://pont.ee,