EP. 243 - Programmable Privacy for Real-World Apps with Midnight Network

Jonathan Albert (0:00)

So, the basic premise is, all of your data stays on your device, right? It never leaves it, it never goes on to a centralized server, and we've seen what happens with centralized databases. Employees sometimes mess with the data themselves. We've seen several cases where employees misuse that information, or more commonly in the past, like I want to say, five, ten years, people are being socially engineered to give up information, right? It's important that we first take the data off of these centralized databases, keep them on your device. And that's the key thing, right? Is if you don't have my data, there's nothing for you to lose, for you to hack, for you to give up.

Narb (0:37)

Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. G and Gm, welcome to the show, Jay. Excited to have you on today, man.

Hello, hello.

Jonathan Albert (0:51)

Good morning. Well, for me, I guess it's evening right now. I'm in Da Nang, Vietnam, but it's great to talk to you. I'm excited to be on the show today.

Narb (0:58)

Yeah, likewise, man. Likewise. Yeah, both of us had to kind of move around our schedules a bit to get this one going. But I'm glad we worked out the time zone hell, so to speak, to do it.

But yeah, man. Yeah, really excited to have our audience learn about Midnight Network, about you as well.

I know you're really deeply interested in the Web3 scene. But yeah, I guess I'll throw it to you. But would you like to give a introduction by yourself?

Jonathan Albert (1:31)

Sure. So online, I go by Jay. My phone name is Jonathan, but I go by Jay typically. I am a Solutions Engineer here at the Midnight Foundation. So I am working with our institutional partners and our ecosystem partners to get the ideas across the line. Whether they have bugs that they're running into, if they want to understand complex topics within our network, I'm usually there to help them get across the line.

Before this, I was on the DevRel team, so helping out with docs, some AI tooling, hackathons, and really helping people understand what the network is about. How do you develop apps on the network, and how do you go to mainnet deployment? So that's what I've been doing over the past year. I just recently completed my anniversary and transitioned to the Solutions Engineering team. So I'm excited to be a part of the team and continuing to build with our ecosystem partners.

Narb (2:18)

Amazing, man. Yeah, and I know both you and I, we worked at Lilypad before doing Decentralize and whatnot.

I'm just curious, how did you get into the tech scene? How did you find yourself working in WorkSuite?

Jonathan Albert (2:36)

Yeah, so I feel like I could, I don't know, talk about this forever. But for me personally, I think my dad's side of the family was always interested in tech, right? They were always buying the newest video game consoles, the newest computers, the newest fashion things, right? They were always trying to like be ahead of the trend. So in my house early on, I had a computer and no one knew what to do with it, right? It was just like the cool new thing. Everyone should have a computer in their house. And I was the only one who would tinker with it. And at that time, I remember being in middle school and I would have my own MySpace page. And for me, I would mess with the HTML. That's how I started getting involved. And I had my own music profile and I had thousands of listeners at that time and I was like 13 years old. So I realized really early on that technology is a powerful tool where I can reach thousands of people. I can build anything I could imagine, right? Whether it's music, applications. So I've been fascinated ever since I was middle school.

And I continued studying computer science, computer information systems. And that's what I did actually in college, was learning about computer information systems. At that time, I didn't feel kind of qualified to write code. I felt I had a lot to learn. I was kind of learning all of the business side of it. I went to a business school for it.

And I started off my first career at Oppenheimer Funds, which is a mutual fund in New York City. And there I was exploring a different emerging tech. And I came into contact with cryptocurrencies. And there I started to learn about Bitcoin. I was trading on a few different platforms for a bit. And I was talking to different people about it, no one seemed interested, didn't really see the picture or anything. So I just kept studying on my own. And in 2019, we were acquired by Vesco, another mutual fund. So for me, that was an opportunity to go deeper into technology, learn about what's out there, get more involved. And I started to really accept that I can learn code, right? I can teach myself how to code. I can build things online. And I went deeper and deeper until I started playing video games, VR applications, AR applications. And then around like 2020, I realized there was a lot more here with Web3.