About

Hi everyone. My name is Decker. I've been in IT for more than 25 years and in the blockchain industry for about nine.

My path as a developer started with Object Pascal. And yes - I've seen Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and I still remember Turbo Pascal and Norton Commander. My son hasn't yet asked me, "Dad, did you ever see dinosaurs?" - but I figure it's coming.

Over the years I've tried on a lot of hats: systems and network administrator, coder, manager of a small IT outsourcing shop, web designer. Honestly, I've lost track of half of it.

Then in 2017, more or less by accident, a friend suggested I take a look at a project called Komodo and its ICO. That's what eventually landed me on the Komodo team.

At Komodo I worked directly on BarterDEX, Agama Wallet, and later Komodo Wallet. I'm also the co-author - and eventually the sole maintainer - of KomodoOcean, the native GUI wallet for KMD and its asset chains. For its time it was a pretty solid piece of software, mostly because Komodo was effectively a fork of Zcash (ZEC) and shipped with no user interface at all. Ocean and I bolted the Qt wrapper from Bitcoin Core onto komodod (the Komodo daemon), and that's how komodo-qt - better known as KomodoOcean - was born. I've written about how all of that started somewhere on this blog; the post is around here if you go looking.

The team at Komodo was excellent. I'm still struck by how good the people I worked with were, both professionally and as human beings. I'm still in touch with some of them, and after Gleec's acquisition of Komodo I'm still working alongside others - now on Gleec Wallet.

Which is why you'll see a lot of mentions of Komodo and Gleec technology on this blog. That isn't me "advertising" anything. It's just that this is what I actually spend my days on, and I think it's worth sharing.

For a number of reasons, most of these products - Komodo Wallet / DEX among them - never found broad commercial traction or delivered the returns we hoped for. At least not yet. But at Gleec we're continuing to work on some of them, and I think they can still find their audience.

Gleec Wallet (formerly Komodo Wallet) implements something I'd argue the wider community still undervalues: atomic swaps that let you exchange one UTXO coin directly for another - BTC for DASH, say - with no intermediary token and no counterparty in the middle, and also swap against assets on EVM chains. Whether that technology ends up being genuinely in demand or stays a footnote in crypto history, time will tell. But as things stand today, it's just about the only working production implementation where that's actually possible.

That said, this blog isn't only about that.

My time at Komodo and Gleec pushed me to grow. My stack now includes C/C++, Rust, Node.js, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Dart/Flutter, and plenty of other tools and technologies I'd never touched before. Some of it I know well. Some of it, less so. And some of it I can only really handle with AI in the loop - which, lately, is more and more of the time.

So: this is a blog about technology and about solving problems. Some people may read it as an ad for specific products. I won't argue the point. I write here when the mood strikes, about whatever is front of mind for me at that moment. So if you see yet another post about Gleec Wallet, it means I've been deep in it lately and have something worth sharing.

Either way - I hope you find it interesting.