Hi, I’m lancekey - developer, wrestler, open-source entrepreneur.
My work’s been at the top of reddit, google, hacker news, github and featured by Tim Ferriss.
I also go by Gene (or sometimes Zhenya).
Born in Ukraine, I grew up in Rochester, NY and live in NYC. Let me tell you how I ended up here.
How I Found Steemit
A little while ago I got my Eight-Year club trophy on reddit and was feeling "it’s time to move on".
Unrelatedly, I’d been lurking bitcoin and blockchain subreddits for a while. Finally, on May 8th, I decided to dive in deeper. I bought some more bitcoin, exchanged it into ether and joined The Dao (man, wasn’t Dark Dao fun?!).
And then … I learned about Steemit from 
Woah! Game changer.
Steemit just might be the way to bring cryptocurrency from innovators to early adopters to the early majority.
Source: Wikimedia
We’ll do it by building an inclusive, active community as a beachhead. Just like on reddit …
Source: xkcd
¯\(ツ)/¯
But anyway, that’ll take time, and this is just an intro post. So, now that I’ve told you how I ended up here, let me tell you what I’m up to these days.
Present Day
My interests and work are split between two very different spheres:
Technology and combat sports.
Tech
The area in tech I’m most passionate about is open source. Arguably, blockchain, cryptocurrency and Steem wouldn’t exist without open source. If you’re new to the concept, my favorite primer on open source is “We’re in a brave, new post open source world” by my friend Nadia Eghbal.
I’m exploring this area through my work with wealthbot.io which was the #1 trending project on Github when we launched. Our specific focus is ‘open source fintech for wealth management’.
Here’s a by-the-numbers presentation I gave on why we believe it’s specifically wealth management that’s ready for open source.
http://www.slideshare.net/GeneKobilansky/fintech-open-source
Outside open source, I’m excited by The Art of Learning Project. We were featured on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and Tim and Josh do a fantastic job of explaining what The Art of Learning is all about.
Source: Four Hour Work Week Blog
If you’re a teacher or coach, be sure to check out The Art of Learning Project. Josh Waitzkin is a world champ in chess, brazilian jiujitsu and tai-chi push hands. The movie 'Searching For Bobby Fischer' is based on him. He’s legit and his thorough approach to learning is one of the best I’ve ever seen. You can read more about it in his book of the same name.
...
Nowadays, if I’m writing creatively, I’m just as likely writing in javascript as in English. If you too want to learn web development, I can’t say enough to recommend Free Code Camp. FCC is an open source community that teaches you how to code AND helps non-profits. A win/win/win in my book. A few of my recently completed projects:
Simon Says Game
Basically, the game plays a pattern and you repeat the pattern. If you can do it 20 times, you win. Strict version resets if you mess up, easy version lets you try as many times as you want.
I was working on OOP and some flexbox stuff for this project.
Website | Github
Unbeatable Tic Tac Toe
This one’s fun because I got to play with AI for the first time. I used a really simple Min-Max algorithm to make the game unbeatable. Please excuse the potato quality website, I focused on code over design for this project.
Website | Github
URL kinda-shortener
One of my first attempts on a full stack Node.js project. It works like bitly - take a url (say http://facebook.com) and return a shorter url (like bit.ly/2345 ... except I was too cheap to buy a short domain, so instead it returns fierce-plains-96108.herokuapp.com/2345)
Website | Github
You can find a bunch more of my FCC work here: https://www.freecodecamp.com/gkobilansky
Coding, more than anything I’ve found, resembles my pursuit of flow in combat sports.
Combat Sports
I’ve always been into martial arts, since watching Jackie Chan while I was little kid in Kiev. Did a little bit of karate growing up, but it wasn’t until Coach Pags got me to try wrestling in elementary school, that I got the bug. Been wrestling ever since, wrestled at NYU. Now I coach at NYU.
That’s me with the beard.
Source: Instagram
We did pretty good last year, and we’re bringing in our best recruiting class ever this summer. Definitely aiming for that National Title next year.
I also coach at Evolution Muay Thai and Unity BJJ here in the city.
I even make technique videos for the old Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/user/flowathletics
Being at Unity is so inspirational for me by the way. I’ve been training brazilian jiu-jitsu for the last 8 years. Now, I get to learn from some of the best fighters in the world - Murilo Santana and Paulo and Joao Miyao. You can read about their achievements on the site. They and all the fighters at Unity are great people and incredible competitors.
With the Miyaos, post training.
Finally, as a coach I used to write a lot about nutrition and performance. I’ve had two posts at the top of r/fitness:
- I know r/fitness is a bit back and forth on foam rolling ... but if you're into it, you'll probably love these advanced foam rolling techniques.
- Fix your sleep for perfect performance.
And 2 years later, my post on creatine is still top 3 on google for “creatine myths” AND “creatine truths”.
So to sum up, here’s what I’m doing with myself:
- Learning about open source (through wealthbot.io) and cryptocurrency (through this new experiment with Steemit).
- Learning to code.
- Learning to teach wrestling.
- Learning jiu-jitsu.
I guess I do a whole lot of learning.
A Now For Some Big News
I recently got married to the lovely Vicky!
We’ve been jumping for joy since.
Our honeymoon was in Tanzania ... poa kichizi kama ndizi!
And I’ve gotta brag - Vicky’s photography from the trip is incredible. Here are three of my favorite shots (with permission, of course :) ).
Breathtaking stuff. I’m so proud of her. Should I ask her to help me with a wildlife photography post?
What next?
I definitely don’t want to #introduceyourself and quit. Instead I have a few content ideas in mind and was hoping you’d help me decide in the comments.
- Initially, I was thinking a GitHub hosting tutorial video. Not a ton of people know this, but you can use Github to host basic, static website for free. I wrote a kinda-techy wiki about it here and think I can make a really nice, simple video tutorial for Steemit.
- But
What do you prefer? Let us know in the comments.