Meet the Writer: HackerNoon's Contributor Ally Haire, Developer Relations Engineer

If you’re seeing this interview draft, it means you’ve recently published on HackerNoon a story that the community found interesting and/or valuable. For this reason, we would like to help the community get to know you better as well as find out some writing tips from you.

While this template is automatic, our interest in the answers below is genuine and our human editors (and some cyborg wannabes) will review it before publishing.

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

G’day, all! I’m Ally and I work as a Developer Relations Engineer - currently in the decentralized web space (aka web3). Since you can’t hear my accent through the screen - I’m from Melbourne, Australia (maybe the g’day gave it away though ;P).

I’m super passionate about helping others build their dreams and also interested in personal growth and what makes for good company culture. I also love all things France - the language, the people, the traditions, the food, the history, and the culture.

Fun fact also, I used to run a cafe before I went back to university at 30 and spent 6 years doing a double degree in Mechatronics Engineering and Computer Science (I’d never touched a line of code outside of >dir /w before this!)

Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?

My latest story was titled “Building Your Own AI-generated Art NFT DApp with Bacalhau”. What I’m seeing as a strong focus across the entire technology landscape is that AI has really become a major talking point and hit a major adoption phase.

It’s a super fascinating topic and one that I’m interested in finding good use cases for in my other favorite technology space - blockchain.

Bacalhau is the perfect example to me of keeping compute distributed while still enabling AI & ML use cases to be run off-chain for blockchain.

While I loved building this particular example (and it’s still really valuable for anyone getting started!), I think it’s perhaps only really scratching the surface of use cases we could see emerge with these 2 technologies and I’m looking forward to exploring them further - in fact, I’m currently working on a Bacalhau bridge that will enable people to call Bacalhau jobs (AI, ML + more) directly from their smart contracts!

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

I write on a variety of topics but predominately like to write full tutorials on how to build things with decentralized technology. Though I’m also interested in human cooperation, personal growth, and building good communities and workplaces.

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

Sporadic!! Though I’m working on making it a much more prominent habit this year. I’ve always enjoyed writing and it’s just such a great medium for corralling your thoughts, honing in on your ideas, and open-sourcing them all for community input.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

Just starting!! I think some of my own tips (that I need to start adhering to more!), is 1. Keep a Trello board (or similar) of topic ideas and 2. Make a writing goal for each month - make it achievable and realistic and commit to spending x minutes (not hours!) per day on it :) - Make it an atomic habit and make the processes for ideas collection easy.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

I’m aiming to solidify my smart contract skills (hehe pun intended) and also level up my DevRel career to a management role.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

Pizza - it’s always pizza for me :P

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

Ahh, my favorite hobby at the moment is spending time with my adorable nieces. I live quite close by and I love watching them grow and learn and see how they view the world :)

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

I’ll be back soon with a new edition where I run an AI script directly from a smart contract!

What’s your opinion on HackerNoon as a platform for writers?

HackerNoon isn’t just a blog platform, it provides some really great community-building features and ensures quality of work :) My experience so far has been a delighted surprise! Thanks, HackerNoon :)

Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead