Interview with Donald Patterson
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist of Blockpliance, a company that ensures Secure Transfers of Cryptocurrency
Current Position and Field
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Q: Can you describe your current position and what field you work in?
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A: I have a lot of positions right now. I'm a computer science professor at the University of California, Irvine, and at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. I'm also the chief technology officer of a startup called Blockpliance, which has a couple of sub-products. Those are the main jobs I have.
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Typical Day at Work at Startup Blockpliance
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Q: What does your normal day-to-day look like?
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A: I get up on the early side, around six, take care of household stuff, get the family off to school, deal with the dog. I usually exercise in the morning to get my head straight before jumping into work. I go running or do some HIIT stuff. Over the course of the day, I mostly work remotely. My partner's in New York City, so we're online all day on Slack, doing text instant messaging and face-to-face when needed, along with remote meetings with contractors. For example, we've met with IBM, State Street Bank, contractors in Argentina—very global. We're aware of time zones, as you saw in some of our coordination on LinkedIn. We work globally, with different people at different times and different holidays. I'm aware of that.
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During the day, I use the Pomodoro method, a time management method where you break your day into four sprints. Each sprint has four sub-sprints, and each sub-sprint is 25 minutes. You work for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break to clear your head and reevaluate priorities. After the fourth 25-minute break, I take a 30-minute break, grab lunch, get some air. It's an important technique for me to stay focused.
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What do I do during those slots? Everything. In a startup, especially on the technology side, you have to be able to do everything. I'm making websites from scratch, working with Amazon Web Services to rearrange our database, doing cost evaluation to see how much we're spending on our current technology solutions, and developing algorithms for detecting money laundering in cryptocurrency. Our primary focus is helping banks work with cryptocurrency by providing insights on where the money is coming from, using machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze the blockchain and pair it with off-blockchain information.
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We track things like Hamas funding in the Mideast, scams in Central and South America centered around government corruption in Venezuela, scams involving impersonating the mayoral candidate in Miami, and money moving from North Korea. I'm developing algorithms for detecting these activities, running them when someone wants information about a Bitcoin address, and managing the databases on the cloud infrastructure. I'm keeping all those balls in the air while we try to get enough customers to hire more people and make our business bigger, taking some of the burden off my partner and me.
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Donald's Career Journey Overview
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Q: Can you give us a quick overview of your career journey so far? What college you went to, what got you interested in your current work, and any previous jobs related to your startup?
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A: All my jobs are related and follow a trajectory. There's a statistic that says when you start college, 60% of students will be hired in a job that didn't exist when they started. For example, a social media manager wasn't a thing four years ago. Crypto compliance officer is another example.
My approach is to build up intellectual skills and resources rather than focusing on a specific job. I stay up to date on technical knowledge, try out different projects, so when I want to do a project like my startup, I'm ready because I've built up those skills along the way. But I had no idea this is what I was working towards.
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To answer your resume question, I went to Cornell University in upstate New York for undergrad, did a computer science degree in the engineering school, then stayed for a master's in electrical engineering, focusing on lower-level computing and computer hardware. After that, I went into the Navy, where I ran the Tomahawk missile program on destroyers. We were deployed in Japan and the Persian Gulf in combat. After the Navy, I went back to graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle, got a PhD in computer science, then got a job at UC Irvine, where I was for about ten years. I moved to Westmont in 2015, kept the part-time job at UC Irvine, and now I'm on this new journey of doing a startup in crypto.​
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What is cutting edge about Donald's Career
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Q: What would you say is most unique or cutting edge about your career in terms of its difficulty and the rapidly evolving market it is in?
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A: From a technological standpoint, there are three really big changes going on that are under the radar because consumers aren't using them—they're infrastructure changes. First is graph databases, which are phenomenally powerful and have grown enormously in application, but no one really knows what they are because they aren't used by the general public. Second, blockchains, which people are more familiar with, but the potential for smart contracts is amazing. Third, containers, specifically Docker containers, which allow software to move around the internet flexibly and fluidly. These are enabling technologies for things like ChatGPT, which is incredible and will make all kinds of changes, but there are underlying technologies enabling it and other things.
From an innovation standpoint, the ability to self-motivate and work on your own in remote teams is a huge innovation. Remote jobs require you to manage yourself and get the work done without someone being a taskmaster. Remote jobs are more flexible, allowing you to shift around faster and get advantages from being where you want to be for family or other reasons.
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I code a lot with ChatGPT. You may be told never to use ChatGPT in your classrooms, but I would suggest learning how to use it. It's like a spell check and will be central to your work in the future. However, you still need to know things without ChatGPT because it can hallucinate. I use it to code, and it makes me 20-30% faster.
How ChatGPT Can Help and Harm Coders
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Q: What would you say are some benefits and drawbacks for using ChatGPT to help you code?
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​A: Yeah, it's tricky because the reason why I find it so effective is because I know what I'm doing. Yeah. And so like, it's great for me because like, I know what I'm doing. If I had a research assistant that was a human, I'd ask them to do the same thing, and I'd be managing them and checking their code and everything. I don't know, and no one knows because it just showed up. I don't know how you bootstrap your skills when ChatGPT is present. Yeah, like being an expert in something and then having ChatGPT to help you is great. But becoming an expert in something, it's hard because it's so easy to cut corners with, but you've got to be able to recognize what ChatGPT is hallucinating.
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Emerging Job Opportunities in Data Science
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Q: In your current field, what do you think are the most interesting career opportunities emerging for people entering the job market in 5 to 10 years?
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A: The space I'm in is cryptocurrency. I think of the world more in terms of enabling technologies rather than cryptocurrency itself. You should learn cryptography, but you also need to know coding. It's really interesting to understand how smart contracts work because they are programs that automatically change things in the world in a decentralized way. No one's running them—they're just out there on the blockchain. So, smart contracts are going to be phenomenal.
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There's a science fiction author named Bruce Sterling who talked about the next skills being data wrangling. Being a data wrangler means writing programs that can collect, modify, clean, and organize data, knowing where to find the data, knowing the tools, file formats, and how to process them. If you become the expert in a particular area of data, people will have to hire you to do that. Data wrangling isn't just about learning one technology; it's about building your resources so you can drop into different places and assemble the intellectual Lego bricks you've gathered into something meaningful.
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Advice for Aspiring Data Scientists
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Q: Do you have any specific advice for a young person interested in your field? Any work they should get involved in before becoming more advanced?
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A: I think the first thing is to learn how to program in Python. It's a great starting point. The other thing I would say is get a broad education. Learn about history, philosophy, sociology, politics, and literature. These different ways of thinking will give you a more diverse approach to projects, unlike someone who's only thought about engineering. Computers change the world, so you want to ensure you're changing it in a helpful way. You won't have a good critical thinking tool belt unless you learn a broad range of subjects, especially during a formative time in your education. So don't neglect the humanities and the softer subjects because you're excited about a website. That stuff builds a foundation that will be important ten years from now.​
Career Reflection
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Q: Looking back at your journey so far, is there anything you would have done differently?
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A: That's a good question, and a hard one. Everything builds on what came before, so if something changed, I wouldn't be here, and I'm happy with where I am. What would I have done differently? I wish I had different mindsets at various points in my career. I wish I had a more solid sense of my identity, independent of my job. My identity was often so tied to my job title that it made me less able to move career-wise and relationally. Thinking of myself in those categories prevented me from making decisions that might have made things easier or helped me move faster. So having a more solid idea of who you are apart from your job might be good.
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Future Goals for Donald
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Q: Do you have any short or long-term plans or goals?
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A: Yeah, make a lot of money with my company so I can buy a house and retire. That's one of my goals. But I want to do that in a way that makes the world a better place. I don't just want to make money and buy a house; I want to make money by making the world a better place. Win-win. I also want to take care of my in-laws as they’re getting older. That's part of the reason for the shift to the startup, so I can buy a house that accommodates our family and my in-laws. I’d like to do more work in my community, building it up rather than focusing solely on my career. I'd like to have more time and resources to work with our city government and social programs to help address issues like homelessness and immigration. That's something I’d like to spend more time doing, but you need to make space for that in your life.​
We would like to thank Mr. Patterson for the time he spent speaking with us, and we hope you were able to learn something from the insight he provided
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From,
Finn and Cooper