Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT) technologies. Next up is Alexander Shenshin, Software Architect at DSR Corporation.
I'm one of the core members of the Decentralized Systems team at DSR Corporation and actively work on Decentralized Identity, DLTs, and full-stack application development. Currently, I'm focused on building decentralized identity infrastructure for Agentic AI and leading identity initiatives for Hiero, a ledger project hosted by LFDT. My work includes contributing to the new Hiero Heka Identity Platform, a subproject of Hiero.
I developed my interest in decentralized technologies back in university years. I got a great opportunity to get involved when I joined the DSR team and have worked with them ever since. For me, decentralized technologies are a natural advancement for the scale and reliability of the systems that we build. They also provide unique properties for building trust and governance models. I believe that we'll see even more widespread adoption for these technologies and related use cases in future.
Currently I'm one of the active maintainers of the LFDT project Hiero, which is an open source, vendor-neutral distributed ledger technology (DLT) used to build Hedera public ledger. Specifically, I'm leading recent initiatives for expanding Hiero support for Decentralized Identity use cases as a core maintainer of Hiero Decentralized Identity specifications, SDKs, and Hiero Heka Identity Platform.
For me and our team, open source contributions have always been complementary to our work. We're authors and maintainers of a number of open source components and actively use them in development. Personally, I saw a significant value in collective development effort and opportunities that it provides for each contributor and industry in general.
My first involvement in the LFDT community goes back to Hyperledger Foundation days. I started by becoming an active user and implementor of Hyperledger Aries protocols. Despite rapid development of protocols and implementations, the whole process was (and remains to be) open and community-driven, so contributing our work back to the upstream felt completely natural. My further contributions to LFDT included Aries implementations (later moved to OWF), Hyperledger Indy infrastructure, and the current long-term contribution to Hiero. LFDT provides infrastructure and governance that make it much easier to get involved. When I talk to developers who believe that open source "doesn't work", I always encourage them to take a look at LF projects.
First of all, it's a public good that significantly benefits developers and their projects built with open source components. Collective effort and contributions help to achieve impressive speed and flexibility of development, while still providing each contributor/team opportunities to implement features specifically needed by them. In most cases, getting the same development speed for a proprietary component would require significant investment. Apart from that, working in a broader technical community is a great experience.You get to know a lot of great engineers and can see a project from different perspectives.
I encourage each developer/team who actively uses and modifies open source components to at least consider contributing back to the projects. This is not limited to code contributions - ideas or design for new features, bug reports, and other input are very valuable.
How can others get involved?
LFDT Discord and project user group meetings are the best options to join the community of any LFDT project, including Hiero.
If you're interested in building decentralized identity project using Hiero / Hedera and don't know where to start, the Hiero Identity Collaboration Hub repo is a great starting point as well
Not an easy question, but I'll pick the advice that I received back when I was a student: "Even the smallest details of the solution serve a specific purpose. If they don't, then something is wrong either with the solution or with you."
"Solution" here was used in a broad context. It may be a specific project, framework, programming language or other tool.
There is nothing special in it. However, it highlights that superficial understanding is not enough and there is always a level of personal responsibility for understanding things correctly. I believe that both concepts are especially important at the start of the engineering career and will probably become even more important with further advancements of AI-assisted development.
None and all of them at the same time. Technologies are just tools, but I'm still an engineer...