The winner at HackMobility 2019 talked about why Python is his favorite language. Fodé Diop works with the idea of launching a stablecoin for the nations in West Africa.
Last July, a Senegalese programmer called Fodé Diop was one of the winners at the first mobility hackathon, which was held in San Francisco, California. He was noted for presenting the development of Litrides, an application that allows paying for the rental of cars as it integrates the Lightning Network invoicing system.
Diop talked about his project during an event on interactivity with the Bitcoin Lightning Network in Python held in Estonia at the end of September, where the Senegalese software engineer gave a talk.
In his presentation Diop provided details about his proof of concept, with which he demonstrates that Bitcoin Lightning Network offers a fast and economical way for anyone, with a mobile device, to ensure that they get around the city without relying on a credit card.
He says to be in love with the Bitcoin protocol and its various second layer solutions, such as Liquid and Lightning Network. Since he learned about the decentralized network for Bitcoin instant micropayments, he became interested in learning enough so as to participate at a hackathon. HackMobility 2019 suddenly emerged as an opportunity to create an alternative to help reduce the saturation of the world’s transportation system. His project was one of the best at the event, which earned him the prize for first place in one of the categories.
Litrides is an alternative for anyone to be able to rent their vehicle, without intermediaries or credit cards, generating economic resources while allowing other people to get around the city paying for the service through the Lightning Network, indicated Diop in his presentation.
As an example, the following is explained in Litrides Devpost: “My name is Alice and I am a developer of autonomous software. Unfortunately, the projects have been slow to arrive and I need to earn extra money to cover my bills. I have recently heard about a service called Litrides, where I can rent my car to another individual and earn a healthy amount of cryptocoins. I visited Litrides, signed an account and made my vehicle available in the short term.”
Having won at the hackathon in San Francisco, Diop adds that he would love to have other people build on his project, which is open source. Now he is working on other ideas, such as a stablecoin for West African nations.
This software engineer talks about his most beloved programming language, Python, which he believes is very important to discuss and learn how Bitcoin works, since it is a simple language.
Diop considers that programmers should not use a complex language to learn a complex subject. The language should be simple to learn a complex subject and this makes it easier to work on step by step, “maybe small pieces for small pieces, like real works of art,” he adds.
A close encounter with Bitcoin
Diop tells about his encounter with Bitcoin in 2011, when he decided to move from San Francisco to Las Vegas to make known an application that he was developing, which allowed using an iPhone to find the best parties in the city.
He had heard of a talk about Linux and Bitcoin, which he then decided to attend. The meeting allowed him to discover that Bitcoin was promising, so soon after he started to read its white paper.
Already in San Francisco, he found it difficult to find a job as a junior programmer, a truly competitive career in that territory. He attended a meeting on blockchain technology in Oakland and continued increasing his knowledge. He even got his first job at a company where he could relate directly to cryptocurrencies.
Several years have elapsed since then, already in love with Bitcoin and Lightning Network, and Diop still experiments in the depths of the network, dreams of meeting everyone, people like Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs and the Australian programmer Rusty Russell, defender of free software, whose work he follows closely.
By Willmen Blanco
