islamali

I'm drawn to the hardest problems in software engineering - the kind where correctness, performance, and security all matter equally. For the past few years, that's led me deep into blockchain infrastructure and cryptography.

I build decentralized systems in Rust and Go. Recently, I developed an erasure coding algorithm from scratch for blockchain data availability, designed key management systems that exchange encrypted documents over peer-to-peer networks, and implemented searchable encryption schemes that let you query encrypted data without exposing it. I work with protocols like libp2p, IPFS, and CometBFT, and write smart contracts when the architecture demands it.

Before blockchain, I spent 8 years optimizing game engines and autonomous vehicle systems in C++ - work that taught me how to write code that's both blazingly fast and provably correct. I'm obsessive about testing. Test-driven development isn't just a practice for me; it's how I think through problems. If I can't test it cleanly, I haven't designed it right.

Cryptography fascinates me because it's where mathematics meets paranoia in the best possible way. Designing systems where you assume everyone is malicious yet still achieve security and performance - that's the kind of challenge that keeps me engaged.

I care deeply about code quality, maintainable architecture, and building systems that don't just work today but remain robust under real-world adversarial conditions.