Hello Aldo. Thank you for joining the Lisk Builders program and our “Lisk Builders interviews” blog series. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Aldo: Hello, thank you for having me. I am a technology enthusiast and have participated in many technology-related events. A long time ago I participated in provincial-level innovation championships and won first place presenting mobile applications. I have also participated in a national hackathon championship in Indonesia and also won first place. As for now, I am engaged in building a startup together with a group of friends.

As you may have noticed technology has always interested me. Although the funny thing is, I don't have a technology education background at all. In fact, my education is in Law Studies and Public Administration Studies. However I am grateful as thanks to that I can see technology from another perspective, which is not the 'computerization' side, but the 'humanization' side. In the end, all technology is made for humans, right?

How did you learn about Lisk and the Lisk Builders program?

Aldo: To be precise, in the year 2017, I was writing my thesis as a prerequisite for my law degree. From the many topics, what finally caught my attention was blockchain, especially because at that time in Indonesia, Bitcoin and other crypto assets did not yet have any legal standing at all.

As part of my research, I decided not only to observe but to experience blockchain firsthand. At that time I was sorting out what crypto to choose, so I read many articles, saw lots of candlestick charts, and watched numerous youtube videos. After digesting all of this information, I finally decided to choose Lisk.

After completing my thesis, I continued holding my LSK tokens and was wondering how to become rich. So I started analyzing cryptos from a research perspective and was also price speculating too, particularly during 2017 when the crypto market was in one of its most volatile phases.

After spending considerable time studying blockchain theory, I began my career in the world of technology in 2020. I started thinking about how to become a blockchain developer and began to conceptualize how to implement my ideas related to blockchain, and that's where I discovered the Lisk Builders program which proved to be an excellent platform to begin turning my ideas into reality.

What was your motivation to apply for the Lisk Builders program?

Aldo: Before I discovered blockchain which was around 2015 - 2016, I was a freelancer and was registered on one of the most famous online platforms. To be honest, I thought I had made a lot of money at the time, and everything was going well. I then had about 3 days off and noticed that the value of my account was falling significantly. As a result, I experienced a very substantial decrease in income, and finally, I was forced to stop my freelancing services. It was a really bad experience for me.

To make matters worse, there was an incident where I was hired by a client and had sent them all of the completed works as requested. However, the client just took my files without paying my invoice, and unfortunately, I was unable to recover these lost funds. Furthermore, I had to endure large fee reductions, including 20% platform cuts as well as withdrawal cuts. So to summarise, freelancing has been a bad experience for me.

That was my main motive for joining the Lisk Builders program. After having experienced first-hand, as a freelancer, how difficult it can be to work in this arena, I didn't want other freelancers to fall into the same trap. Using blockchain technology, I saw that a potential solution existed to solve that problem. Of course, the funds provided by the Lisk Builders program helped bring these ideas to fruition!

How was your development experience with the Lisk SDK?

Aldo: To be honest using the Lisk SDK is very, very, easy. The features available in the form of flexibility, security, quality, and full customization of all blockchain elements, as well as scalability where the infrastructure we build is our blockchain application, and not 'riding' on top of someone else's blockchain (as a smart contract), are excellent.

I think that working with the Lisk SDK is very straightforward and as the programming language used is 100% JavaScript on both the frontend and backend, I did not need to learn any new programming languages.

Do you have any development experience with other blockchain SDKs? If so, please share your experience in comparison to developing with the Lisk SDK.

Aldo: No, I don't have any experience with other SDK blockchains. Building blockchain with Lisk is my first experience in blockchain development.

I did try to learn the Solidity programming language. However, in comparison, JavaScript is much easier to use.

What are your plans with the Collabolancer project? Will you continue to develop it further?

Aldo: Regarding the Collabolancer project, of course, I plan to develop it further. My target is that Collabolancer must be a product that can truly provide benefits for freelancers.

I have even started doing user validation by interacting directly with freelancers and taking their feedback and input into consideration. The findings from this validation will be analyzed in a convergent and divergent manner in the Focus Group discussion and possibly even further to the Expert Panel.

From the results of this validation, I will translate them into Collabolancer features, so that I can be more confident that Collabolancer will be the product that the freelance users want and not just the product that I want.

Do you plan to build another blockchain application with the Lisk SDK in the future?

Aldo: Yes, of course! After I experienced for myself how easy it is to use the Lisk SDK, all my previous ideas related to the implementation of blockchain, which was initially constrained by complex tools and frameworks can now be realized. I will definitely implement them one by one in due course.

I am very interested in developing an NFT project, or even a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) project, using the Lisk SDK, not because of the 'follow along' of the hype, but in my opinion, decentralized finance has already proved it can solve several problems that centralized finance cannot solve. On the other hand, DeFi is not yet perfect.

A while ago I also discovered a concept called DevFi, or Developer Finance, as this is planned to support funding for software developers by empowering smart contracts or blockchain technology. I am also interested in developing this because I think it intersects with the Collabolancer's vision as well.

Would you recommend the Lisk SDK to other developers to build their blockchain applications?

Aldo: Yes, of course. What I would like to emphasize here is that the Lisk SDK has really given us the chance to become blockchain application developers and not just smart contract developers. So we can build our own blockchain, using our own unique configuration!

With Lisk Interoperability coming soon, I believe Lisk will become a very proficient and capable framework! One main advantage here is that Lisk is implemented purely with JavaScript, which is a programming language that many developers are familiar with, so there is no need to waste time learning other programming languages just to start building blockchain applications.

If you have plans to apply for the new program in 2021, follow Lisk on social media channels such as Twitter (@LiskHQ), or subscribe to our Newsletter to know first when the applications are open again.