AMA with Brian Bondy

Yes, sure! I’m a coffee drinking Canadian living in Ontario and working remotely as Brave's CTO.

In 2015 I co-founded Brave with Brendan Eich.

Work life:

I’ve worked for a bunch of great companies and learnt a lot from them, the companies include: Khan Academy, Mozilla, Evernote, Army Simulation Centre, Corel, and dozens more that I’ve done contracting for.

In 2004 I ran a small software company for nearly a decade which I eventually sold to a bigger company in Toronto.

I’ve been a hobbyist programmer since early high school, in the early days I coded a lot of network protocols, file formats, and compression algorithms by reading file formats and standards.

Personal life:

I grew up on a gardening farm, where I learnt the meaning of hard work.

I currently have a family of 5 (or 7 if you count my 2 dogs), 3 boys, 2 of which are twins.

I took Meibukan Goju Ryu karate for over a decade until the dojo closed.

In my spare time I like to run, last year I did my first 50 mile ultra, I haven’t been "brave" enough to try a 100k yet but I'll get there

What I do at Brave:

At Brave I do a little (or maybe a lot) of everything. In no particular order: payroll, management, product management, project management, planning, lots of coding and more.

Over time I’m shedding some of my old startup duties like payroll to focus on CTO things.

Close to a year ago we started re-writing Brave from the ground up, a lot of my recent energy has gone into that.

Our next release on Android will have a Brave token in the User-Agent HTTP header. We want to make sure that we have enough scale so that the entropy gained from fingerprinting the browser UA is low. I think once we get onto the Brave Core desktop rewrite in October adoption will come fast and we can add that token there as well. iOS rewrite won't be far behind either and adoption there will be higher too.

Beyond just developers, here are some things that come to mind. I'm sure this list is not exhaustive.

• We have a big team working on Brave Core, the re-write of the desktop browser.
• We have another team working on maintaining and enhancing the currently released desktop browser.
• We're working on a native ledger library and we're re-using that code in mobile and desktop, this will become the BAT SDK eventually.
• We're working on a new browser rewrite for iOS based on WKWebView, our iOS browser which is currently based on UIWebView. This will help fix a long tail of crashes, and give us better web compat and is generally more performant.
• Our QA team is working on ensuring we deliver quality products and services
• Our design team is working on improving existing things and adding new features.
• Our research department is working on various projects including a new way to do reader mode, intelligent tracking protection, better ad blocking and ad detection systems, machine learning and more.
• We're working on user model machine learning libraries for use with our opt-in ads.
• We're working on settlement fraud detection.
• We're working on the next version of how contributions work, as well as the ability to do "tips" to websites and posts that you like.
• We're working on 2-way wallet support.
• We're working on new UIs and UX.
• We're working on stats and growth projections.
• We're working on our ads interface both advertiser facing and back-end facing.
• We're building out our publishers site, both publisher facing and back-end facing.
• We're working on BAT features in our mobile browsers.
• We're starting to work on IPFS and Dat integration.
• We're working on offering even better user support.
• We're working on finishing cross-device user encrypted sync.
• New features for referral promotions.
• We're working on a native Ethereum wallet and dapp support.

Fast native UI.

1.0 is more about full extension support, creating a long term no-risk maintainable code base that can easily keep up to date with new Chromium versions, better security and a more performant UI. We'll have our own look and we'll be doing UI work beyond our initial release.

I won't limit the possibilities to what I can come up with myself. So generally, whatever our team and community make it to be, we're hiring by the way: /jobs/

In 5 years I can personally imagine having a visible stake of browser market share.

• I see us causing other browser companies to step up their game.
• I see us influencing privacy on the Internet at large.
• I see BAT used in many products and services.
• I see us working at standardizing BAT.
• I see user private ads understood and widely adopted.
• I see us branching out into various different products and services.

During this time we'll develop more of the ads infrastructure and launch it, we'll get on Brave Core, we'll get on WKWebView and more.

Some specific dates:

• Start of September - Dev channel builds for brave-core released
• End of September - Beta channel builds for brave-core released
• 2/3 through October - Release channel builds for brave-core released

Shortly after this, we'll get to our 1.0 release.

Around half of our work force is remote, and I'm one of those remote workers. We regroup around Sack.

I get pinged a lot for questions ranging from basic HR things to very technical implementation details.

I like to lead through example, so I'm very hands on. It's not atypical for me to have 10-20 different code commits in a given day or to review people's code. I'm lucky to be supported by a team much smarter and better in various ways than I am. So I'm learning from them over time.

Latest decision? Whether to delay the release of the new desktop browser rewrite Brave Core for 1.0, or whether to release with something that is better than what we have.

We decided not to wait for 1.0 and to release with Brave Core's 0.55.x version which is expected to be released 2/3 through October.

1.0 will come soon after that. New releases after 0.55.x will come every 3 weeks and will follow a time based train schedule.

We were going to ship an ETH wallet on the current desktop product but we decided we wanted it to have a higher quality bar. Initially we were running geth in the background. We took a step back and we're planning something much better. The new design and architecture will apply to mobile and will appear on brave-core as well, the desktop only initiative for an integrated ETH / DAP wallet was transformed to be cross platform including mobile.

We’re refocusing a lot of effort into mobile. I think you probably heard September for Android and not iOS, it'll come to Android before iOS.

Most features we deliver in the future will be cross platform. Sometimes iOS has limitations, so sometimes it will be later than Android and desktop platforms.

Mobile isn’t being left behind, there’s significant work being done for BAT support today.

Getting something from 0 to 1 is hard enough on its own, so desktop is probably the easiest way for us to try things. 1 to many is the next step, and other products and services is the step after that. We've learnt a lot from the ledger in desktop as well as from our ad trials program.

With Brave Core you'll go from feeling like you should use Brave, but you still want to use Chrome to wanting to use Brave no matter what.