Josh — ZBD Intern

About Me

Hey! I'm Josh — the newest intern on the ZBD Rewards SDK team. Originally from São Paulo, now based in London and fuelled almost entirely by Monster Energy and cold pizza.

I'm a final-year Computer Science student at King's College London, specialising in distributed systems. I got into Bitcoin through gaming (specifically losing sats in ZBD-powered games) and figured if I couldn't beat the system, I might as well help build it.

My manager Christian has me working through the backlog — squashing bugs, tidying up the dev dashboard, and trying not to break production. Just shipped my first feature to prod: a configurable regional notice banner system. One week in and already in main. No incidents. Yet.

Intern Stats

1

Weeks at ZBD

1

PRs Merged

0

Prod Incidents

Tech Stack

TypeScript React Next.js Node.js PostgreSQL Docker Git Python Tailwind Lightning Network K6 Load Testing Playwright

Education

BSc Computer Science — King's College London (2023–2026)

Dissertation: "Micropayment Incentive Layers in Mobile Gaming Economies" — basically an academic excuse to play games and call it research.

Relevant modules: Distributed Systems, Cryptography, Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction.

Off the Clock

⚽ Brazilian at heart — never miss a Seleção match. Neymar retirement arc is killing me.
🎮 League of Legends (Silver II and proud), Valorant, and whatever ZBD game has the best rewards this week.
🎸 Learning guitar — currently butchering Bossa Nova. Tom Jobim would not approve.
☕ Specialty coffee snob. Will judge your instant coffee silently.
🏋️ Gym at 6am… in theory. In practice, gym at 6pm if the code compiles before 5.
🍕 Competitive pizza consumer. Office record: 11 slices during a Friday deploy.

Things You Didn't Ask to Know

Once accidentally pushed to main on day two. The Slack thread was… educational.

My desk setup includes two monitors, a Brazil flag, and a rubber duck named "Pelé" for debugging.

I keep a whiteboard that says "To-Do: Code, Coffee, Naps" — it hasn't changed since day one because those priorities are non-negotiable.

Christian told me to "familiarise myself with the codebase." I've been familiarising all week. The codebase keeps getting bigger.

First PR merged to production on day 5. Regional notice banners — DB, API, hook, component. The durandal-bot only roasted me three times.