Hello everyone! My name is Ian Ferrell and I am an Arkansas Notary Public. I am a long time blockchain enthusiast and full stack developer. I am very excited to be part of the POA community as I think this is project will be transformative. The potential of this project and current progress are impressive and I’m excited by the prospect of being able to contribute to the project in a substantive way.
I have a Computer Science degree with a Math Minor and have been a professional developer for 20 years. I’ve worked on everything from small open source systems on commodity hardware all the way through enterprise grade systems. From original versions of slackware linux to redhat to ubuntu up through Solaris, Windows Server and even FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. I’ve developed in C, Perl, PHP, C# and Javascript and architected many databases from Mysql and Postgres up to Oracle. I’m hoping to have some time soon to be able to teach myself solidity and other blockchain environments to pivot toward a role with a blockchain company.
I’ve also run many different blockchain nodes over the years, as I ran mining pools and have been into mining at various levels over the years. From bitcoin to litecoin and dogecoin, and many more that are no longer around such as NoodlyAppendageCoin. I currently have a beefy server located in Florida with a full gigabit internet connection connection that hasn’t gone down since I’ve been renting it. Including when Hurricane Irma went over the hosting facility last year.
It’s great to see you here. I know you’ve been following POA Network for a while, glad to see you finally decided to become a Validator. Stay active in the validator’s conversations and hopefully you’ll be accepted.
It is exciting to see someone with your experience show interest in becoming a POA Network Validator. Your background will be a great resource, and perhaps you can help contribute to the Open Source efforts as well. Geographic diversity is also key to maintain the integrity of the network. As you note in your introduction, the threat of disaster strongly encourages a distributed, decentralized network. We currently have no Validators in Arkansas.
With your experience working with diverse blockchains, and with the release of the POA-POA20 crosschain bridge linking POA and Ethereum, what might be a good candidate for a new crosschain bridge, or would you suggest a wait and see approach? It is possible to have hundreds or even thousands of bridges, which increases liquidity in blockchain space. Here’s a link to the POA Bridge launch:
Please update you post to reflect your good standing with State of Arkansas, and feel free to drop me a direct message here if you would like to follow up. Good to have you here at POA Network Ian!
I’m very happy to be here. You timed that perfectly as I just finished up my paperwork today about 30 minutes ago. New bridges… Wow, I haven’t even thought about what should be next. Off the top of my head certainly wanchain due to presumed simple compatibility. Going forward, whoever can prove network stability and adoption. Neo might be a candidate assuming they can get their capacity up a bit. That is definitely something worthy of further thought and discussion.
Thanks to everyone who has reached out, I’m glad to be here and ready to help in whatever capacity I can.
Successfully got my sokol testnet boot node up and running a couple days ago. Took a while before it got stable, it kept a CPU core pegged for a long time and latency to the network was excessive until it found good peers. This was my first time setting up a node for an ethereum type chain, and I found the process interesting. Ended up running it inside a virtualbox VM on a dedicated server I have hosted in Florida. Seems to be happily purring along with 2gb of ram and about 7gb of disk so far. 1gb of memory had it swapping a little more than I liked, but that may have just been during the node sync process as of now it looks like 1gb would be ok.
Welcome to POA Ian! It’s wonderful to see such an experienced developer here. I just called and you’re in great standing as a notary. What projects are you excited about in the blockchain space, and would like to work on?
That’s a great question and I’ve been thinking about it since you posted last night. However, I don’t have a good answer. As is I’m having a good time playing around with random stuff that comes my way from the trader groups I’m a member of. That said I’m not a great trader and would like to help with a single project, specifically POA of course. I’m always down for learning new things, my current side project is a bot for discord that talks to a twitter sentiment database and draws a graph for a given search term. The one thing I want to get into next is solidity development.
I’m honestly not that excited about many of the projects in the space at the moment. So many of them have really tall mountains between them and success. That’s a lot of the reason I’m excited about POA, since the better mousetrap has already been built and the code and philosophy is open source such that other projects will come with time.
FYI, we’ve found 2GB of RAM to not be enough. A 4GB VM stabilizes around 30% memory utilization, so a 2GB should land around 60%, which doesn’t leave much headroom for sporadic peak loads. It’s great that you have the VM on a dedicated server as we’ve also ran into issues with burstable VMs sometimes running out of CPU credits. What seems to work well is a non-burstable instance with at least 2 vCPUs and at least 4GBs. That’s what I’m running in Sokol with great up-time:
