Justin Myles Holmes

Error creating thumbnail: File missing Holmes at his house in scene::St. Pete, playing his Thompson Guitar.
Holmes at his house in St. Pete, playing his Thompson Guitar.
Scene	St. Pete
ENS	justinholmes.eth

Justin Myles Holmes...

...is probably best known in bluegrass circles as "that throatsinging dude/guy"
...released his debut record Vowel Sounds using a blockchain-based application called Revealer, which was written entirely by bluegrassers and which reached the album's funding goal in six days.
...plays guitar, mandolin, melodica, and tin whistle in his touring, rotating bluegrass band, The Immutable String band.
...has been learning and practicing Tuvan Throatsinging and other overtone singing styles since 2004.
...has contributed thousands of patches to open source projects, in Python, PHP, Javascript, Solidity, and other langauges.
...first became a prominent performer through software demos, often including writing code in front of a live audience, at python and ethereum events around the world
...is an avid cyclist, has trained in acro yoga for several years, and holds a stale brown belt in isshinryu karate.
...is a founder, and the first editor, of PickiPedia.

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Holmes in Seoul, South Korea, at a traditional sesame oil making class

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Justin Holmes and Fibonacci Emery Holmes

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Holmes playing EthDenver with Jake StargelError creating thumbnail: File missing, and Christian WardError creating thumbnail: File missing

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Holmes and David Grier during their Drowsy Maggie session

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Holmes with Skyler GoldenError creating thumbnail: File missing and Cory WalkerError creating thumbnail: File missing, the evening of the Nanny State Fiddler session

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Holmes, with Jakub VysokyError creating thumbnail: File missing, Shaka Lei Kaumaka, and David Flores Pradillas at the Centre Convencions International Barcelona in Barcelona

Early life and Education

Holmes was born in Binghamton, NY on May 1, 1982. He attended Chenango Valley High School, followed by Broome Community College, and then SUNY College at New Paltz. He began playing guitar at age 17. He modified and built computers through his teen years, but did not beginning programming until his mid-20s.

Student Government leadership and conflict with SUNY

Holmes was elected Chair of the Student Senate in New Paltz in 2004, and then won election to Presidency of the student body in 2006 amidst frequent antagonism from the SUNY Administration toward both the student and faculty governments. Immediately following Holmes' election, Holmes and now-fellow-PickiPedian R.J. Partington III, himself a former student body President, along with another colleague, state-wide student government president Daniel Curtis, were expelled by the SUNY administration in what later turned out to be a bizarre plot against them.

Shortly after their expulsion, several faculty members announced that they had been present at meetings where SUNY administrators had openly requested their participation in attempts to frame Holmes, Partington, and Curtis for offenses which could lead to expulsion. This led to large protests on campus, and pronouncements of support for the expelled students by faculty members, former administrators, and local elected officials, including then-mayor Jason West, who spoke to several hundred students who went on to storm the administration building.

Shortly after this incident, a federal court issues an injunction, ordering the SUNY administration to reinstate the students. After returning, Holmes went on to receive a BA in 2008 with a major in Political Science, and minors in both Philosophy and Psychology. He also held a seat on the legislative council of the New York State Student Assembly, and was also President of the New Paltz chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

"My time at SUNY New Paltz has had a life-long impact," said Holmes. "It was eye-opening to see how petty and short-sighted some of the administrators were, and in everything I do, I remember that, if it hadn't been for some very brave members of the faculty who blew the whistle, a lot of people were not prepared to believe that the administration was capable of conspiring against students or faculty to affect the course of the politics of education."

Post-college nomadic life and software career

Immediately following his college graduation in May of 2008, Holmes hitch-hiked (at times thumbing for rides, and at others arranging them on craigslist) from New York City to Denali National Park in Alaska. While working as a temporary breakfast chef, he sat in with a house bluegrass band for two nights at the KOA campground in Great Falls, Montana - these were his first bluegrass shows, and his last for 14 years.

Holmes returned to New Paltz following his Alaska trip, where he taught himself rudimentary programming techniques and began taking short contract jobs working on Wordpress plugins, through the New York City and Hudson Valley areas.

In 2009, Holmes founded slashRoot, a combination software development house and live music venue in New Paltz. slashRoot remained in its brick-and-mortar location for three years, before drawing down to a simple volunteer open-source maintenance organization. At this time, Holmes performed a one-year contract with WNYC, working there every third week. He developed a syndication framework which delivered Radiolab, Studio 360, and The Moth podcast (all of which had unusual episode formats at the time) to streaming services. Holmes was also the founder of the team that won the 2013 New York Public Media hackathon; their entry was the "Cicada Tracker", a bot that detected the emergence of that year's brood of cicadas.

Python, Cryptography and Blockchain Engineering

From 2012 to 2014, Holmes made several contributions to open source python projects, including fixing a long-standing bug in the Django project in version 1.4. Holmes co-authored hendrix, an early asynchronous WSGI server based on Twisted, prefiguring uvicorn and asynchronous django. Holmes gave several talks about this topic, including a talk at Buzzfeed in New York City, which became an early model of his live demo performances.

In 2017, Holmes joined NuCypher, a privacy-focused project delivering hosted, decentralized cryptographic primitives (principally proxy re-encryption and Shamir's secret sharing) to the ethereum blockchain. Because the NuCypher project ran on its own nodes, and used its own node discovery, it was relatively difficult to quickly understand for prospective adopters. The 2018 ethereum bull run brought many fake or misleading projects, leading more serious projects like NuCypher to favor live, in-person demonstrations of the software to buttress their claimed features. Holmes performed many of these demos, and began adding live music to augment the cryptological stories of the codebase.

In 2018, Holmes and several colleagues who, like many cypherpunks, were bluegrass fans, saw Stewart Brand deliver the devcon keynote in Prague. "That was really a big moment for me - and I think a lot of people - in realizing that my interests in cryptography and bluegrass and the Grateful Dead aren't separate parts of me - those are part of the same thread of traditional music as one of the quintessential drivers of internet culture", Holmes said. "Although I had seen John Perry Barlow deliver the PyCon keynote a few years prior, it wasn't until Prague that the Bluegrass-Blockchain Origin Story started to become part of my thoughts."

"I had been a bluegrass fan my whole life - I was immediately magnetized by The [O Brother, Where Art Thou?]] soundtrack and started playing some of those songs, and I had seen Bryan Sutton live in 2008 at The Station Inn, but it wasn't until 2018 in Prague that I began to set an intention to learn bluegrass guitar," he said.

In 2019, ethereum events organizers began booking Holmes twice: once for a tech talk and once for a musical performance. The first such event was EthCapetown, the largest cryptography event that had been held in South Africa up to that time.

Revealer, Vowel Sounds, and Music Career

Transition from programmer to musician

See also: User:JMyles/My Long Forgotten Dream

"On my 40th birthday, I decided to just go full-on midlife-crisis and finally become musician first, programmer second," He wrote. "It's something I had been telling myself I was going to do for almost 10 years prior."

In May of 2022, Holmes and Skyler GoldenError creating thumbnail: File missing were introduced to one another by Andy Lytle, who thought their mutual interest in music and blockchain tech (Holmes as a cryptographer, and Golden as a shitcoin connoisseur) made them likely collaborators. Lytle also introduced Holmes to Cory WalkerError creating thumbnail: File missing. A few weeks later, Walker appeared on Holmes' first bluegrass single, Nanny State Fiddler, which Golden co-wrote and produced.

"We released Nanny State Fiddler totally free via IPFS," Holmes said. "So we weren't really aware how much traction it had gained until we started playing it at shows and people were singing along - that was the first time that had happened to us."

Soon after, Holmes, Golden, and Partington started making plans to record an album-length record, which became Vowel Sounds, and began devising a system to distribute it, which came to be called Revealer.

Walker spearheaded recruitment of the studio ensemble, which included Jake StargelError creating thumbnail: File missing, Christian WardError creating thumbnail: File missing, Harry ClarkError creating thumbnail: File missing, Jakub VysokyError creating thumbnail: File missing, and Allen CookeError creating thumbnail: File missing. Shortly after recording wrapped in February of 2023, Kuba Hejhal, Kieran Prasch, and R.J. Partington III joined the effort to release the record, and wrote the first version of Revealer at the EthBarcelona 2023 hackathon, where it won the Gnosis prize.