Farewell to Isabella Dell

Last week Isabella Dell, one of the earliest contributors to Lisk, left our team. The purpose of this blog post is to show our gratitude and say goodbye. Isabella joined the Lisk project in 2016 as a community member and quickly became a strong supporter for us. While still based in the USA, she took care of Lisk’s server infrastructure and kept the servers online during a time in which Lisk Core was not as stable and robust as it is today.

Due to her contributions and dedication we invited Isabella to come to Berlin and join our team as Lightcurve’s System Architect. We were happy that she accepted the offer. Isabella quickly proved herself as a person who likes to take on challenges, and over the first few months, she held various positions for the Lisk project. Aside from being the initial System Architect, she was also responsible for backend QA, DevOps and Lisk Build, becoming lead on Lisk Core as well. We are very grateful for all the great work Isabella has done during her time at Lightcurve.

We are focused here on professional and personal development of our employees. To grow our company we feel that everyone needs to undergo the change from generalist to specialist over time. In Isabella’s case, we saw that it was essential to once again focus her role on the System Architect position, so that she could focus on what she was best at and what was important for the Lisk project.

As such, we hired a DevOps team consisting of two highly skilled, engineers who were responsible for Jenkins and our server infrastructure. Just recently, our first Backend QA Engineer joined the team and took over the responsibility to test new Lisk Core releases as well as evaluate and review its code changes. These hires, in additional to two frontend developers, five backend developers and a mathematician, were made possible because Oliver temporarily stepped back from Lisk Core’s lead position to focus on hiring. We believe that the eleven new engineers who joined Lightcurve due to Oliver’s effort will contribute to shaping Lisk’s future in an extraordinary way. The new team members significantly reduced the workload on Isabella, which allowed her to focus on Lisk Core, Lisk Build and her position as System Architect.

We want to thank Isabella for all of the beautiful work she contributed to the Lisk project.

The team working on Lisk will soon have over 23 engineers, eight team members in marketing and two in operations, which puts us in a very strong position to make Lisk a huge success. With these changes, Oliver — as Lisk’s CTO — became the lead on Lisk Core again to drive development forward most efficiently. In a push to bring Isabella’s focus back to system architecture, the Lisk Build project was given to our DevOps Engineers.

At the end of November Isabella decided to leave Lightcurve and the Lisk project because the role she had in mind was not in line with Oliver returning to Lisk Core and being in the driving seat again. With a heavy heart we accept her decision and are sad to see her go. The Lightcurve team, Lisk Foundation, and especially Oliver and I, want to say farewell to Isabella. We want to thank Isabella for all of the beautiful work she contributed to the Lisk project. From a business perspective, Lightcurve is stronger than ever and is looking towards a bright future. Although a great talent and friend has left our team, we wish Isabella all the best in her future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Max Kordek & Oliver Beddows