Interview with Justus Perlwitz

Discovering DWeb: From Berlin to Tokyo

Tommi: Your story is so incredible, a German person living in Tokyo and getting intertwined with DWeb… Tell me all about it!

Justus: I'm Justus, I'm from Berlin, and I'm 32 years old. I do cyber security consulting, a lot of software development, and I've been working with decentralized Web stuff for a while. I have also been involved in the cryptocurrency sphere, Ethereum, and Web3 things, and I'm also really into open source software. Two years ago I started hearing about DWeb through my friend Kumavis, who has been with you since the beginning. He introduced me to the whole thing.

Last summer, I was planning to go to DEFCON, as I usually do, but Kumavis told me: "you should totally come to DWeb Camp!" so, instead of Nevada, Las Vegas I ended up at DWeb Camp, and I had a really great time there! Honestly, I didn't go with many expectations, because looking at the sponsors, at the program, and so on it seemed like there would be a bit of something for everyone. Then, when we went there, I was amazed. I spent most of the time with the network people, and I just started messing around with some stuff. It was really cool to see the full Internet infrastructure being set up at Camp, including a 4G cell! These are things I have never seen before, I didn't know you could just set up your own cell!

In general, I really like this kind of environment where there are all those things about which I think I know something, but then I get there, and suddenly it's like "whoah! I didn't know about that at all! You can just do that yourself?" It's like this with so many things at DWeb Camp, and I think that in the DWeb crowd in general there's this attitude of asking whether you can do some things yourself and the usual reply is "why not? No one's gonna stop you." I think this is really really cool!

Because of this great energy, Kumavis and I started talking about opening up a chapter here In Tokyo, and we are already talking to the DWeb Core Team about this, now we just have to set up the dates and everything. As the initial conversation was happening, a couple of months ago, an email went around about a volunteer position to update the DWeb Camp website, and it just so happens that I have exactly the skills that you need to maintain that site because it's mostly made in Django, and I just happen to have worked with Django for most of my professional life so far. That was a wonderful coincidence, that got me taking care of the site now.

Life in Tokyo: Work, Culture, and Community Challenges

Tommi: Wow, you already touched upon all the things I wanted to ask you! Let's unpack them one by one. How did you end up being a developer in Tokyo?

Justus: In 2018, the cryptocurrency boom was happening, so I got a job offer and I got here to work for an ICO, where I did the whole technical management. I stayed with that company for one and a half years. Before, when I was living in Berlin, I was freelancing, and I made my own little businesses with friends. After that first job here in Japan, I started making my own company again, and now I'm freelancing/consulting.

Beyond work, I was always really interested in Japan, I really like the food, I'm really into learning languages in general, so I am familiarizing myself with Japanese, it's fun! Then I ended up getting married here, and I don't really feel the need to move anywhere else anytime soon. Berlin is the only other place I see myself living in, and I try to go back there every year to see how things are going. People complain all the time, but it's still a pretty good place, very interesting.

Tommi: How is the hacker culture in Tokyo?

Justus: There's not much widely connected hacker culture happening here… One big issue is the language divide: a lot of native Japanese speakers don't speak English well, and the same goes for people who come from abroad. If you don't speak Japanese very well, it makes it quite hard for the communities to interact with each other.

I try to meet as many people as I can, in particular in the cybersecurity and hacker spheres. The non-corporate tech sphere, the one of messing with things, trying out tools, and so on, is not so big here. The main language for cool stuff on the Internet is English, and it's not truly accessible. I can tell from experience that if something is not localized in Japanese it's almost like it doesn't exist, it's invisible to people.

I can anecdotally confirm that: when I read a sign and it has something written in the Latin alphabet, even if it's smaller and below, my eyes always go there first, and then go back to the Kanji. As I grew up in Germany, I got used to seeing the Latin alphabet, and I can guess that it works the other way around as well. So there are these little friction points everywhere that make it very hard for people to interact with each other.

When Kumavis, mai, kev and I had the kickoff meeting for the DWeb chapter here, we specifically talked about this issue: most of the meetups that I know of here take place either in Japanese or in English, never both. It's not good, because many people don't feel welcome if something happens only in a language they're not comfortable with.

It's a lost opportunity! If you have something cool to share, the language shouldn't matter. So there are groups on both sides: Japanese-speaking hackers, and English-speaking hackers, they don't really know each other. If there's something I can do to mitigate that, I would really like to try!

DWeb Camp Experience: Technology Meets Community

Justus: At DWeb Camp, everything was in front of me: people brought their little gadgets and tools, some brought Meshtastic receivers, but it wasn't just that. What do you actually do with it, what are the ideas behind the tech? Can we use this to self-organize? How can we make our own "Internet"?

It's not only about the tech! It was so cool to be at camp and witness a good mix of the techie people but also people who were thinking more about what you actually do with it. At a lot of conferences, events, and retreats they don't manage to do these kinds of things.

Coming back to Tokyo: just because there's this little friction here or there it makes it very difficult for people to find out what's happening somewhere else. So I think it would be great to offer some DWeb-related content, but also community activities. Even if it's merely a meetup with three people, proposing a sort of "bridging" both for time zones and cultures would be such a huge value.

That's what personally got me so interested in this story last year, when Kumavis and I started talking about founding a Node. I really see the potential for something like this, I think there are so many opportunities, and if we're able to bridge the gap, we can all learn from each other, and this applies to any geographical location and any culture on this planet.

Philosophy on Open Source and Collaboration

Justus: I think a lot of economic activity is wasted on just implementing the same thing over and over again, instead of just using more standardized components for everything. This is especially the case with proprietary software development: as a developer who's writing code for a company, if you leave it or if that company goes bankrupt, that code just disappears.

Code is not a property that is tangible, like the balance of your bank account, it's an intangible thing, it's mostly an idea in our head, and the fact that all of this code that people might even sacrifice their lifetime for could go to waste is shameful. This applies to many other things, not only to code, but I think a lot of the so-called "intellectual property" (a term that I do not like at all) ends up being locked behind bars for no good reason.

I'm very utopian: I think we should just stay at home, watch movies all day, and get a universal basic income. I think one thing that's keeping us very far from the post-scarcity economy is that we just waste so many opportunities for collaboration, and I see this personally with my job.

On the other hand, another really cool thing that I think about a lot is that an app can be a home-cooked meal, as I read in this article some time ago. Instead of always looking out for the problems that everyone has, to make an app and sell it, to have advertising, and so on, maybe you see your friend who wants to take notes in a certain format on their phone so you write an app for them, just for fun, for one person. You don't try to scale it or anything. It just works for one person, so it doesn't have to scale. If you just make a home-cooked meal for someone, you do it as an act of service for the few people you're cooking for, you don't care about how it can be prepared in a canteen.

In the tech industry, and not only, there's a strong conception of this, how it should be done: we write the code and then we own it. We make our own standards and then everyone has to use them. They can't use anything else anymore. I see yet another opportunity for DWeb to change things also in this sense.

Technical Work: Building the DWeb Camp Website

Tommi: Let's get to the tech talk, then! What did you do for dwebcamp.org, and how is it going?

Justus: One and a half months ago, Arkadiy [DWeb's Tech Lead] and I had a kickoff meeting for the DWeb Camp website renewal. It's made in Django, a framework for making web applications. In our particular case it's being used as a CMS (Content Management System), and with it you can create and edit pages, articles, and so on.

Everything that you see on the DWeb Camp website for 2024, even if it was also used for previous camps, comes from there. It's a bit like Wordpress, but the cool thing about our setup is that using a plugin called distill (like "distillation") you can turn everything into a static website, so when you want to host it somewhere you just have HTML files, image files, style sheets, etc. and you can just upload and host them anywhere.

It has great usability, but since this website has been coded by many different people over a long period of time, there were a lot of things that haven't been maintained very well. Simply, some of the libraries that it was using were quite out of date, so my first step was to update all of them, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to add anything new.

There were a lot of interesting and challenging issues: there's this editor that the DWeb CMS was using, called ck editor. It used to be free software, but it became proprietary. The issue was that we had all the content made with that rich text editor. Switching that dependency wasn't as simple as updating the configuration, but a very cumbersome procedure, as we had to find a reliable alternative.

It's almost boring that I'm mostly talking about libraries, but that's the reality:if you have a really old software project and you have a lot of outdated libraries, you have to spend a lot of time just trying to fix those essential things before you can even get started on doing anything interesting on top of that.

The coolest and most relevant change was integrating the database in the website repository, to avoid the requirement of any server work. So, imagine that you just download a folder, then you double click on a file, and it starts the whole CMS for you. Maybe, if you're on a Mac or on Linux, you don't even have to install anything else. Imagine you can just click on something and have Wordpress open on your computer, then you click a save button to somehow compress that folder, and finally give it to another person to edit and/or to publish. That's the whole idea: a local-first CMS.

Side note from Arkadiy: We previously used PostgreSQL as a database backend, mostly as a holdover from the early days when the site ran like a normal "live" Django instance. This caused us a lot of maintenance headaches and wasn't really the right tool for the job -- the backend doesn't handle any reader traffic. At some point I came across a blog post about legible SQLite diffs in git and a lightbulb went off -- we can use this lightweight file-based DB in "single player mode" during editing, which lets us keep all content changes (templates and markup plus the database diffs) together. CMSes like Django tend to mix code and content, but we came up with a branching strategy solution that I'm pretty satisfied with: the main branch is used for functional development and base templates, then each year's edition branches off from that and the "content" is applied on top. If the core changes significantly, we just merge `main` to the edition branch to "backport" the updates. This means that we can publish a clean version of the repository with just `main` and folks that want to use it for their own events can create their own content branches. I'm excited to release this to the community!

Justus: Lastly, the most important thing I did for the DWeb Camp site is not technical at all: I wrote documentation on how to install everything and how to build the site, because there wasn't a lot of documentation. I understand why it happened, because a lot of people worked on it, and they focused on making the things rather than writing about them. I learned the value of documentation over the last few years, as I develop a lot of software, then I give it to people and ask them to test it for me.

I have a friend who's really good at just pretending that he doesn't know anything, so he asks a lot of questions, even though I think "that's really obvious!" but then it turns out it's not obvious at all. A bit like defensive driving, I do defensive documentation writing, also because the reality is that a year from now I'm gonna look at this project and if I don't have any documentation I won't know how it works myself!

Looking Towards the Future: Building for Longevity and Reusability

Justus: I really care about making things for longevity. I hope that out of all the things I can do for the DWeb Camp site, I can make it still work in 10 years. It's nice if we have enough time to add cool features, but if we can make it a thing that DWeb can use for the next 10 years, that's a great victory. I think we're pretty close to that now.

Gosh, you know what? Out of all the things we've discussed there's nothing cool and flashy. Honestly, it's all about making something that you can give to someone who's not so technically versed and they can edit a page. As far as I know, this doesn't exist yet.

There's a vision for how the site could be a tool that many people can use to make their own DWeb Camp-like websites and all of this to say there's lots of cool connections with a lot of really interesting people. I encounter so many new things and one project leads to another and that's a really cool vibe. That's what I like.

Tommi: Thank you Justus! It was incredibly insightful! We'll be looking forward to the awesome things you will be doing, in particular with the Tokyo Node.

Justus: Thank you! See you soon.