Daniel Keane – Managing Director at Predict Ecology
BSV Academy: You’re an ecologist by training, but the Predict Ecology platform is built on blockchain. Do you have blockchain developers on your team?
Daniel Keane: I started my undergraduate university degree in computer science and physics, so blockchain doesn’t scare me that much, particularly from the mathematical and coding side. But I do work quite closely with my collaborative partners, Paul Chiari (the founder of Weather SV and Metastreme) and my business partner, Dr Helen Mason. Beyond that, we employ a fellow ecologist with blockchain development skills.
BSV Academy: Do you need more blockchain developers in your business?
Daniel Keane: I’m certainly looking to employ developers in the future. At the moment, Predict Ecology is only a relatively small business, but as we get funding and scale, our need for blockchain development skills will grow.
BSV Academy: What skills are you looking for in a developer?
Daniel Keane: It’s crucial for blockchain developers to understand the nuances of a particular industry so they can create integrations that make sense in business and real-world scenarios. Knowledge of hard coding is not the only important skill set. It’s about building mechanisms that are flexible and general enough to be able to record the sort of information that relates to our industry.
I prefer to teach a specialist general skills rather than teaching a generalist specialist skills. The ideal blockchain developer is rooted in a particular field to tether their blockchain learnings to an industrial application. I came out of university as an ecologist, to which I tethered all manner of skills; machine learning, botany, remote sensing, physics, geochemistry and a whole heap of other things. I could do this because I had an understanding or a grounding in a discipline. I’m excited to see which individuals end up retraining to become Bitcoin developers and their backgrounds.
I find that diversity indicates the value of an employee. If we are to realise Satoshi’s vision of Bitcoin as a reimagining of, dare I say, Nikola Tesla’s worldwide brain (supercomputer), we’re going to need people from diverse cultural, social, and technical backgrounds as well as the entire range of theoretical and practical disciplines to bring value to the Bitcoin ecosystem – simply because they can see its application to former or current life experience.