Justin Myles Holmes
 | |
|---|---|
| Holmes at his house in St. Pete, playing his Thompson Guitar. | |
| Scene | St. Pete |
| Instruments | guitar, mandolin, tin whistle, melodica, wood flute, piano |
...is a founder, and the first editor, of PickiPedia.
...plays guitar, mandolin, melodica, and tin whistle in his touring, rotating bluegrass band, The Immutable String band.
...has been practicing and training in the art of Tuvan Throatsinging and other overtone singing styles since 2004.
...has contributed thousands of patches to open source projects, in Python, PHP, Javascript, Solidity, and other langauges.
...first became a prominent performer through software demos, often including writing code in front of a live audience
...holds a brown belt in isshinryu karate, is an avid cyclist, and has trained in acro yoga for several years
Early life, Education and Software Career[edit]
Holmes was born in Binghamton, NY on May 1, 1982. He attended Chenango Valley High School, followed by Broome Community College, and then SUNY College at New Paltz. He began playing guitar at age 17. He modified and built computers through his teen years, but did not beginning programming until his mid-20s. He studied a variety of liberal arts and sciences subjects in college, receiving a BA in 2008 with a major in Political Science, and minors in both Philosophy and Psychology.
Holmes was elected Chair of the Student Senate in New Paltz, and then won election to Presidency of the student body in 2006. Holmes and fellow PickiPedian R.J. Partington III, along with another colleague, Daniel Curtis, became the target of a plot by the SUNY Administration to expel them. Several faculty members exposed the SUNY administration's actions, and a judge ordered the SUNY administration to reinstate them. Holmes also held a seat on the legislative council of the New York State Student Assembly, and was also President of the New Paltz chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
Immediately following his college graduation in May of 2008, Holmes hitch-hiked (at times thumbing for rides, and at others arranging them on craigslist) from New York City to Denali National Park in Alaska. He sat in with the house bluegrass band for two nights at the KOA campground in Great Falls, Montana - these were his first bluegrass shows, and his last for 14 years.
Holmes returned to New Paltz following his Alaska trip, where he taught himself rudimentary programming techniques and began taking short contract jobs working on Wordpress plugins, through the New York City and Hudson Valley areas.
In 2009, Holmes founded slashRoot, a combination software development house and live music venue in New Paltz. slashRoot remained in its brick-and-mortar location for three years, before drawing down to a simple volunteer open-source maintenance organization. At this time, Holmes performed a one-year contract with WNYC, working there every third week. He developed a syndication framework which delivered Radiolab, Studio 360, and The Moth podcast (all of which had unusual episode formats at the time) to streaming services. Holmes was also the founder of the team that won the 2013 New York Public Media hackathon; their entry was the "Cicada Tracker", a bot that detected the emergence of that year's brood of cicadas.
Python, Cryptography and Blockchain Engineering[edit]
From 2012 to 2014, Holmes made several contributions to open source python projects, including fixing a long-standing bug in the Django project in version 1.4. Holmes co-authored hendrix, an early asynchronous WSGI server based on Twisted, prefiguring uvicorn and asynchronous django. Holmes gave several talks about this topic, including a talk at Buzzfeed in New York City, which became an early model of his live demo performances.
In 2014, he attended PyCon, where he briefly met John Perry Barlow and attended Barlow's keynote address. Holmes later said that the event had been pivotal in his comprehension of the bluegrass-blockchain origin story.
In 2017, Holmes joined NuCypher, a privacy-focused project delivering hosted, decentralized cryptographic primitives (principally proxy re-encryption and Shamir's secret sharing) to the ethereum blockchain. Because the NuCypher project ran on its own nodes, and used its own node discovery, it was relatively difficult to quickly understand for prospective adopters. The 2018 ethereum bull run brought many fake or misleading projects, leading more serious projects like NuCypher to favor live, in-person demonstrations of the software to buttress their claimed features. Holmes performed many of these demos, and began adding live music to augment the cryptological stories of the codebase.
In 2019, ethereum events organizers began booking Holmes separately for both tech talks and musical performances, starting with EthCapetown, the largest cryptography event that had been held in South Africa up to that time.
Revealer, Vowel Sounds, and Music Career[edit]
Transition from programmer to musician[edit]
- See also: [[User:JMyles/My Long Forgotten Dream
"On my 40th birthday, I decided to just go full-on midlife-crisis and finally become musician first, programmer second," He wrote. "It's something I had been telling myself I was going to do for almost 10 years prior."
In May of 2022, Holmes and Skyler Golden were introduced to one another by Andy Lytle, who thought their mutual interest in music and blockchain tech (Holmes as a cryptographer, and Golden as a shitcoin connoisseur) made them likely collaborators. Lytle also introduced Holmes to Cory Walker. A few weeks later, Walker appeared on Holmes' first bluegrass single, Nanny State Fiddler, which Golden co-wrote and produced.
"We released Nanny State Fiddler totally free via IPFS," Holmes said. "So we weren't really aware how much traction it had gained until we started playing it at shows and people were singing along - that was the first time that had happened to us."
Soon after, Holmes, Golden, and Partington started making plans to record an album-length record, and began devising a system to distribute it, which came to be called Revealer.
