It is my great pleasure to announce that Rick Dudley has joined Eris as a developer on our platform team. He started on Thursday last week (and he came not a moment too soon) and will be working out of our New York office.
I met Rick during a (now) humorous turn of events. I cannot remember exactly if it was the first or the second time we were on /r/bitcoin. But I do know it was a “bloody” time in the history of the fuzzy little ground squirrels. Either way, at some point I saw afdudley saying sane things about us. He didn’t totally get what the marmots were up to at that time but at least our vision was somewhat comprehensible to him. He also didn’t mind sparring a little bit, which made me smile. After that we chatted for a bit on IRC and generally saw each other around.
The night I met Jan actually was also the first night I met Rick in person. Over the months we’ve had a decent amount of chat and during the course of those interactions I have grown to respect Rick’s opinions on a good many things.
So I was delighted the moment we received his application for Cloud Operations Engineer on the Platform Team. Although we have a multi-faceted, not entirely quick, hiring process, Rick sailed through and achieved consensus within our team in record time. We already knew he was a marmot. Indeed, we knew he had been a marmot for a little while. :-)
Although he has done much thinking about consensus mechanisms and distributed computing applications, Rick’s self-confessed bread and butter is sysAdmin. Together this makes him a natural fit to work on improving our systems which have most of those characteristics that he enjoys pondering alongside the real world challenges of his “professional” life. This harmony we hope will lead to some amazing results as Rick gets settled in.
Rick will be helping us in two primary areas.
First, Rick will be taking over as our Operations Lead. In this capacity he will be assisting with the complex environments which our clients demand for their applications to be run. We have a wide range of clients, many who have quite strict security requirements extending both to on premise and cloud based environments. In this capacity Rick will have a range of devOps and sysAdmin responsibilities helping us properly integrate with (and troubleshoot where necessary) environments not administered by ourselves. He’ll also maintain ops responsibilities over our hosted services (mainly our compilers and ipfs gateways).
Second, Rick will be working as product lead on our Managed Engines product (which is what we used to call Hosted Chains). We have a lot of ideas for how to improve a “managed eris” experience for our clients. We will be working on a product offering which will not only be true to our roots (hint, there will be smart contracts involved) but also actually addresses real world pain points that our users are about to face and will likely face in the future.
We expect that he will also be working to craft tooling and identify pain points which arise when running complex environments and larger applications that embrace the eris philosophy of a plurality of chains. And, as if that wasn’t enough, he’ll probably (as my Scottish wife likes to say) “get his neb” into eris chains a bit as we continue to refine and adapt that product offering to meet market demand.
We look forward to great things from Rick. Your ops team (and the rest of y’all’s team) should too! Give him a shout on Twitter and if you’re in new York feel free to buy him a coffee and let us know how we can best help your organization get up to speed with the next generation of data and process management infrastructure.