Hi. I'm John, a self-proclaimed energy nerd. I'm currently studying for a Masters in Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the optimisation of power-to-heat and thermal energy storage in district heating systems, under price and heat demand uncertainty. I'm supervised by Dr. Koen Van Dam and carrying out the research with Green Hedge Infra GmbH.

Prior to going back to school, I was one of the first software engineers at Axle Energy, flexing domestic energy assets like EV chargers and home batteries to respond to price signals and grid constraints. I built the dispatch, market integration, settlement and all the other systems needed to scale a team from 5 to 25 employees and a portfolio from couple of hundred to a few hundred thousand energy assets.

Before Axle, I helped establish Gridcog's UK and European presence as they developed their energy modelling software for new markets and use cases.

In my pre-energy days, I worked for many years on Bitcoin Core and other open source projects in the Bitcoin space. I was employed at Chaincode Labs and then set up Brink in 2020, raising over $4 million to support open source Bitcoin development. My technical focus was on the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, and all the fun and knotty problems of dealing with denial-of-service, partition, sybil and other attacks in a decentralised and permissionless network.

I also spent a lot of time mentoring and coaching newer contributors and supporting the broader Bitcoin developer community. Over the years, I ran or founded several initatives, including:

  • Bitcoin Optech: helping Bitcoin businesses adopt scaling technologies and bridging the gap between the Bitcoin open source community and enterprises using Bitcoin.
  • BitDevs Socratic Meetups (NY and London): providing spaces for Bitcoin developers and enthusiasts to meet and discuss Bitcoin development.
  • Chaincode Residencies: mentoring and onboarding newer Bitcoin developers.
  • The Bitcoin Core PR Review Club: helping newer contributors learn about the Bitcoin Core review process.
  • Many talks and podcast appearances: sharing knowledge and experience with the broader Bitcoin community.

When I'm not behind my keyboard, I enjoy taking Toshi the dog for long walks, climbing and learning languages.