🔍 About

who am I?

My name is Emilio Ziniades. I am a South African. I was born in Johannesburg and live in Cape Town. I studied an undergraduate degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, followed by an honours degree in Economics, at the University of Cape Town. I graduated in 2019. You can find my full resume here.

economist-turned-programmer

Being in lockdown shortly after graduating gave me the space I needed to explore computers and programming languages, with which I had always been fascinated.

I learnt Python from an amalgam of textbooks, online courses, documentation and YouTube videos. After using Stata at university for econometrics projects, I found that processing and analysing data in Python was like breathing fresh air. Its aesthetically beautiful syntax appealed to me, there was a vast package ecosystem, and once I had picked up the language's idioms, coding in Python felt like writing English.

My exploration then spread to a variety of other topics and languages. I learnt about the web stack: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I taught myself React, and learnt about static site generators via Gatsby. I even learnt some PHP so that I could customize a Wordpress website I had built for my teaching business.

After that, I became more interested in backend engineering, and so decided to learn Go. I realized how little I knew about computer science concepts such as Big-O notation, algorithms and data structures. A combination of pursuing my own personal projects, combined with coding puzzles like Advent of Code and Project Euler ensured that the theoretical concepts I was picking up were applied to practical problems.

what do I do?

During my time at the University of Cape Town, I worked as a tutor in the Economics and Philosophy departments, teaching, marking essays, and co-ordinating course activities with the lecturers.

For the last three years, I have worked for myself, offering tutoring lessons to both university and high school students. I love teaching, and find it very rewarding to help clarify concepts for others. It also forces me to constantly learn new things, and helps me consolidate my own knowledge.

At some point, I also began to pick up some freelance programming jobs. I helped an artist build a Wordpress website to display his work and offer it for sale. I also assisted people who wanted to purchase some Bitcoin from exchanges and store it safely in a hardware wallet. I did a few seed and passphrase recovery jobs, which required some brute force searching on a rented AWS server. I helped someone recover BTC that he had sent to a LTC address by tweaking the derivation path in an Electrum wallet.

I like data analysis and crypto

Coming from an economics background, one of my interests is data analysis. I pursued a variety of projects gathering and analysing data, often producing accompanying visualizations and sometimes writing about them. You can find more information about my projects on the code page.

I have also learnt a lot about cryptocurrencies. I was lucky to be introduced to some excellent teachers online, such as Andreas Antonopoulos. And through his textbooks, I learnt a lot about Bitcoin, the Lightning Network and Ethereum. As an economist-turned-programmer, this nascent field grabbed my attention. It changed the way I view money. It became apparent to me that cryptocurrencies represent the merging of economics and computer science. I realized the importance of an interdisciplinary approach. And I wanted to get stuck in.

Growing up in South Africa, I am very sensitive to social and economic inequality, and this perspective informs my approach to cryptocurrencies. Whilst they have enormous potential, I also recognize the very real risks of wealth concentration that exists. I wish to help my fellow South Africans understand and use cryptocurrencies to replace the burdensome and costly payment infrastructure that exists currently, and reduce our dependence on state money. In particular, I believe there is an opportunity to use the Lightning Network to facilitate payments in South Africa's economy, a large portion of which is informal and cash based, but where everyone has an internet-connected phone.

maybe we could work together?

Currently, I am in the process of looking for work as a data analyst, software engineer, developer. I am open to remote work. If you are interested, please do contact me.