Who You Gno – On the Record with Dragos Roua

Dragos Roua is a humble man. If you had the chance to read his article, 5 Things I Learned While Porting Flippando From Solidity to Gno, you’d have seen him refer to Flippando as his “tiny little game” and describe his “surprise,” over it winning the Polygon track of the Glitch hackathon, two subsequent hackathons in South Korea, and piquing the interest of the Gno.land team to offer him a grant. If ever there were an inverse of “the empty vessel makes the loudest sound,” Dragos would be it.

At 54 years old, he’s lived an extraordinary life. Growing up in communist Romania, where scarcity was in abundance, and “everything was in short supply,” Dragos and his peers were “only allowed to learn one coding language,” and it happened to be called “Whatever.” So, when anyone asks in what languages he knows how to code, he always jokes that Romanians can code in “whatever.” Joking apart, his language skills are impressive, to say the least.

Dragos Knows a Lot of Code

“My first production-level code was written in Cobol on punch cards,” he says when he was just 16. He went on to learn Smalltalk, Lua, and “just for fun,” even a programming language called “Brainfuck.” He spent many years programming in web2, iOS, and Andriod, but over the last seven years (since entering the web3 space), has been consistently working in JavaScript, Swift, Solidity (which he learned by creating Flippando), Python, and Go. Despite this, Dragos confesses he still feels more at home within the Apple ecosystem. “I've been building a lot there,” he says.

He Speaks Many Languages

I ask if learning programming languages is similar to spoken languages. “Every programming language has vocabulary and grammar, which is a specific set of rules over that vocabulary, so it’s similar in that sense,” he says. And how many spoken languages does he know? “I can speak five Indo-European languages” (Romanian, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). “Five?” I gulp, wide-eyed, suddenly feeling inadequate for only speaking three. “Well, they all share about 70% of the vocabulary, and the grammar has almost the same rule set,” he shrugs, minimizing his accomplishment.

He’s also learning two Asian languages with varying degrees of success. Korean, a language he understands “some 40%” of, Dragos admits, is a different ballgame. “I've been frustrated for nine months, every day trying to plug away because there's literally no similarity in vocabulary between any Indo-European language and Korean. Literally no word is the same, and the grammar is also very, very different.” He explains that learning a language like Korean means starting from zero and waiting for the brain to forge the neural paths. “It's quite difficult to do,” he concedes.

A ‘Location-Independent’ Lifestyle

I check out the backdrop behind him. He’s taking the interview from an elegant cafe in downtown Saigon with impressive dark wooden walls, large ceiling fans circling above, and a rich colonial atmosphere. “It’s such a posh place,” he smiles, “every day, there are groups of people taking pictures. It has an Indochina vibe.” I can’t help but wish I could teleport over and share a beer with Dragos as we discuss his remarkable life. “How long have you lived there?” I ask, “I don’t live in Saigon,” he replies, “I’m location-independent.”

As I wonder if that’s a more elegant term for “digital nomad,” Dragos quickly explains the difference. Digital nomads typically have no fixed abode, he says, and tend to set up a base for a short period of time before moving on to the next place. Location-independent is someone who has a base but is independent of it and chooses to spend longer periods of time in various places. “So I became a loner,” he says, “and I’ve been location-independent for six years. I spent my first two and a half years in Spain, then from Spain, I moved to Portugal, which is my base right now, and I started to explore Asia last year.”

A Love of the Open Road

I point out how amazing his lifestyle sounds—and also how challenging it must be at times. Dragos loves the freedom that comes with being alone in a foreign land and the master of his destiny. He also thrives on learning from different people and cultures and discovering more about himself. “The more you travel, the more you learn. Where can you stay? Where can’t you stay? What is needed? You learn the logistics, and you become a much better administrator and manager of your life.”

He admits to feeling lonely at times. Being location-independent isn’t for everyone, and certainly not if you don’t like being alone. “It's very difficult to be on the road because you don't have many friends. You don't have a fixed social circle. I'm in a place right now where I'm quite comfortable with myself. I can spend long periods of time on my own without needing close encounters. I have a very limited circle of friends, which I keep in touch with every month or so.”

The cultural differences between Europe and Asia are something of a double-edged sword as well. Dragos likes Vietnam, where the people are friendly and welcoming and talk to him on the street out of curiosity or to practice their English. But he’s felt like quite an outsider in South Korea, where the culture of politeness and restraint makes it harder to establish meaningful friendships.

Astrology, AI, and Other Mind-Blowing Stuff

Talking about human connections inevitably leads to the increasing lack of them—and the topic of AI. I ask how he feels about the prospect of AGI and a potential replacement species. He shrugs and points out that most of what we hear about AI is marketing. He thinks that LLMs (Large Language Models) will hit a wall when they run out of good data to be trained on. He is a little concerned about the prospect of election rigging and AGI being harnessed in the political sphere by nation-states attempting to outmaneuver each other by predicting the next plausible move. “But this is a can of worms,” he says.

“Actually, at the most fundamental level, there is no difference between AI and the process by which we generate ChatGPT or any other language model, and… hold your breath,” he pauses, “astrology. They both take a set of arbitrary features and a set of desired outcomes. After that, they just do a lot of computation, by trying to minimize a cost function between the predicted and expected outcome. That's all there is to it. You take features, add some parameters, trillions of parameters, you run a lot of computation, and in the end, you have the most plausible outcome. LLMs do this in hours/days/weeks of training, astrology did it slowly, over the course of a few thousand years.” I ask Dragos if he hadn’t been a programmer, would he have perhaps become an astrologer instead? “I actually studied astrology and used it for 18 years,” he replies.

I try hard not to fall off my chair. Dragos explains that astrology plays a huge role in his life, and he consults it before making any major decision—such as moving countries or leaving jobs. “I consult it on every major decision and even daily life. So wherever I have to, I use it. When I sold one of my companies, when I decided to move abroad, when I travel, and stuff like that.” He gives the analogy of meteorology and says if he knows it’s going to rain, he’ll take an umbrella to have less friction and move around more easily. In the same way, he applies astrology to his life. This man is a Pandora’s box.

What else does he do in his spare time besides traveling the world, consulting the Cosmos, and writing code for fun? Dragos likes playing pool, socializing, dining out, and dancing. “I was a tango dancer back in Romania. I had a tango school for a year.” At this point, I’m hardly surprised.

Dragos on Gno.land

I met Dragos last year in Seoul at a Gno.land event hosted with Onbloc during BUIDL Asia. That’s when he spoke to Manfred about Flippando and subsequently applied for a grant. We were still building the specs for the Grants Program at the time, and Dragos was our first grantee. Since then, he’s embarked on a whole new journey learning Gno and building the airplane as it flies, delivering Flippando last month and regularly helping the team with Gno.land core issues.

Dragos has since submitted a second grant proposal to port his project management app to Gno. “It uses my life management framework, which I call “assess, decide, do.” The name of the project is ZenTasktic. There is already an app on iOS that I wrote,” he explains. You can read more about his grant proposal here and be sure to test out Flippando today.

I apologize for taking so much of Dragos’ time, but he assures me it isn’t a problem. “I don’t work today, I'm not busy. I'm just enjoying my afternoon in this coffee shop.” As Dragos sips on the local tipple and drinks in the sights and sounds around him, I can’t help but admire his outlook on life and the choices he’s made—and I look forward to seeing what he's up to next and what else he builds with Gno.

Tags: #whoyougno #flippando #community #interview

Written by christina on 08 Feb 2024

Published by g125em6arxsnj49vx35f0n0z34putv5ty3376fg5 to gno.land's blog