Ever wondered who is behind the mission to enable people to control and be rewarded for their data? 🚀 

Meet Duncan, our Senior Developer. He’s been a key player at Gener8 for some time now, a real MVP (of the many we have 🙌). Along with our team of awesome Gener8 engineers, Duncan’s responsible for building the browser and its features, making the vision of Gener8 a reality ✊.

🤔 What does an average day for a Senior Developer look like?

There’s a lot of coffee involved – that’s the singular constant. I’ll typically start my day by checking in on our Bugs board & monitoring channels to make sure that everything is still copacetic & no terrible surprises have arrived overnight.

Depending on what I’m focussing on for the day, I’ll either be involved in some design or planning sessions to ensure that we’re all on the same page in terms of what we want to build, or I’ll be knuckling down in the codebase making a reality out of what was previously planned. 

✊ What drew you to Gener8?

User privacy & security is something I’ve always been keenly aware of, and Sam is a very charismatic leader – so as soon as we’d had the first interview, I knew that this was somewhere that I would be happy to work. The chance to take part in shaping the future of a small company & getting to work with a modern tech stack are both major plusses too. 

🤖 What is the most recent thing (skill, technique, theory, or subject) you taught yourself?

During the first lockdown last year, I started doing some online courses in Machine Learning & AI, and using that knowledge I have already built & deployed some simple neural networks in our stack at Gener8.

⚙️ Have you ever invented something?

At a previous company, I wrote an algorithm that would generate several million unique codes in a matter of minutes (think voucher numbers or prize codes you’d find under the lid of a bottle of Coke). I was pretty chuffed with it as the previous iteration of the tool would take several days to generate as many codes.

⁉️ If you were an inanimate object, what would you be and why?

This is a tough one… unironically, probably some sand. Sand is super underrated. Silicon Dioxide has been a key ingredient in multiple major scientific revolutions in human history, such as lenses & the transistor.

👌 Tell us a fun fact about yourself

I made my first website in 1996 using Notepad & Netscape Navigator.

📚 What is something you enjoyed doing but would never do again?

Studying full-time. Being a student was amazing, but by the time I was done with varsity, no love nor money could’ve kept me there.

🇿🇦/🇬🇧 Your home country of South Africa or your new home in the UK?

I’m still 50/50 on this. It’s a very different lifestyle in each country so it’s difficult to compare them directly. I think the fairest answer would be South Africa for holidays & the UK for day-to-day living.

😐 Some historical figures have epithets attached to their names, like The Mad or The Wise. What would you like yours to be?

“Duncan the Concerned”