Keeping Pace with Development: Fredrik Harrysson becomes CTO
Almost three years ago we started Parity Technologies with the aspiration to build the fastest and most secure software for Ethereum and the decentralised web. Over the years, we’ve broadened our project base in order to make that decentralised web a reality. Now with a sizable technology stack and 50 developers in nine countries, it’s been necessary to add an additional role to keep pace with development.
Gavin Wood, co-founder and the original CTO of both Ethereum and Parity, will continue leading Parity’s technological innovation. As Chief Whitespace Overlord, Gavin’s focus is on ensuring that the only leading whitespace across the Parity repos are tab characters. When he has spare time from this valuable activity, Gavin helps orchestrate delivery of Polkadot, the interoperability platform of public/private app-specific blockchains to power a decentralised web 3.0 that will disrupt centralised internet powers and provide a platform for developers to create more equitable, peer-to-peer societal institutions that are not possible today. (For more on Gavin’s vision for Polkadot, see the whitepaper and his presentation at Ethereum London.)
To allow Gavin to focus on whitespace and technological innovation, Fredrik Harrysson (Twitter, Github) will step in to oversee development execution (though will recuse himself from any formatting-related activity). A developer for over 20 years, Fredrik has worked in everything from freelance web development to fintech, working in most popular languages from PHP to Haskell. Prior to joining Parity, he was co-founder and CTO of several startups. He has a Masters in Engineering Physics from Lund University, Sweden and co-hosts the popular Zero Knowledge podcast.
“I love programming languages — I’ll read up on most new languages coming out and have worked professionally in over half a dozen of them. I had a long-standing interest in Rust and was coincidentally also interested in Ethereum. So when I saw Parity announce they were going to build an Ethereum client on r/Rust I thought ‘Fuck yeah, awesome.’ Almost a year later when I was looking for my next big thing to do, Parity was at the top of my mind. I studied the codebase and looked into the company and what I saw was a really high quality codebase with a really high quality team, and I wanted to be a part of that.”
I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work with Fred and therefore I’m very happy to announce Fred as Parity’s CTO. Fred directs product strategy and implementation, coordinates development across the dev teams and various open source and commercial projects, oversees hiring to ensure there’s appropriate project coverage, and ensures developers have what they need to do the work they enjoy.
Stay tuned to hear more from Fredrik on his vision for development as well as what it’s like engineering at Parity.
Originally published at paritytech.io on August 6, 2018.
