Why I Joined SKALE

New Year’s Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. It affords us the opportunity to not only reflect on our past twelve months, but also time to plan and make resolutions for those ahead. Last year, I decided that my shortlist for potential 2018 resolutions would include:

• Moving to Australia.
• Taking a woodworking class.
• Taking a motorcycle racing course.
• Getting back into skydiving.

And while each of these was truly exciting to me, none could stack up to the sense of purpose I felt in making a career shift to the blockchain industry. With a career focused on developing integrations between various businesses’ disparate systems, I completely understood the value in decentralization and disintermediating industries.

And I wasn’t alone — a few friends of mine were already busy building their own blockchain technology solutions. They told me that the industry was growing rapidly and there was an increased need for helping with adoption amongst new users. So, on New Year’s day, a plan started to take form on how to transition my career into the blockchain space.

Background

Before ever becoming interested in blockchain, I spent the first part of my career developing software for the Department of Defense (DoD) through government contracts near Washington, D.C. My responsibilities rapidly grew over the course of weeks with my appointment as the lead full stack software engineer responsible for ensuring the success of a system that was already behind schedule by a year.

My job consisted of developing system designs to be submitted for approval by the DoD, and then coding the system to completion with teams of 1 to 50 people. It was while building these systems that I recognized my lack of communication with customers as serving to prevent my understanding of what really mattered to them and hinder my ability to build great products. So, I packed my bags, moved to California, and pivoted away from software development, into solutions engineering.

Solutions engineering was perfect. My time was split between understanding customers’ true needs, working with the product management team, and developing software prototypes. For me, this is the perfect blend of writing code, leading workshops, hosting webinars, and speaking to customers.

Diving In

The dilemma I now faced was in pivoting from a space where most of my energy and time had been spent into one which I admittedly knew very little about. So, I looked into a few online courses.

Within a few weeks, I had applied for and received a scholarship to ConsenSys Academy’s 11 week course on blockchain. ConsenSys Academy provides developers with all the building blocks needed to learn about blockchain technology and even gives you all the instruction needed to build a fully functional dApp. The course left me feeling confident and ready to tackle the problem which everyone seemed to be buzzing about — Scalability.

SKALE

As I began my journey into the blockchain space, it became immediately evident that there were a number of factors serving barriers to entry for developers new to the space. And the further I delved in, the more I worried if I had made the right decision — there seemed no easy way to onboard new people that made the high cost, sluggishness, and general esotericism worth it. So, I decided to reach out to friends to get their opinions on the matter.

One of my friends heard me out and said that they knew just who I should be talking to — Jack O’Holleran, CEO of SKALE Labs; so, I set a date to chat with him. While chatting with Jack, he completely resonated with the concerns that I was raising and provided a compelling vision for how the SKALE team intended to address each of them through their blockchain scalability solution.

The vision that Jack laid out was a ‘Layer 2’ solution that allowed dApp developers to utilize SKALE side chains to increase network speed while also decreasing the cost of running a dApp. One of the focuses of SKALE was to make it easy to get started with your existing setup, this is why it was crucial to allow developers to be able to deploy their existing smart contracts written in solidity directly onto the SKALE network. From there, an improved Proof of Stake model is run on the network to allow for higher throughput and decreased costs.

Note: For more information about the SKALE architecture, check out SKALE’s Tech-Stack.

After explaining the high level of the network, Jack let me know that he needed to fill a Director of Solutions Engineering position at SKALE. Now, while my original plan involved building my own dApp, Jack helped me to realize that I could have a much bigger impact in the blockchain space by helping to address the biggest problem currently plaguing it — scalability. This prospect deeply resonated with me, so I asked him what the next steps would entail.

The first thing would be getting to know the rest of the SKALE team. Who are the people behind SKALE, what is the culture like, and how does the company stay connected between two offices in San Francisco USA, and Kharkiv Ukraine?

The Team

Getting to know the team felt like chatting with old friends. It was clear to me from the beginning that Jack was not solely looking to solve his short term problem of hiring a Solutions Engineer — he was thinking about the long term and focused on building a core team with a shared vision and passion. Beyond his career success (founding multiple successful machine learning companies), Jack also makes time to coach other aspiring founders as they navigate the early stages of starting their own businesses. His success, coupled with his compassion for wanting to help others, made me realize that a lot could be learned from Jack as a member of his team.

As a next step, he had me meet with the VP of Product, Chadwick Strange, and the CTO, Stan Kladko. As a Solutions Engineer, you end up having to converse directly with the Product Management and Engineering teams almost every week. Needless to say, my first impressions of Chadwick and Stan mirrored my first impression of Jack. These are two guys who have an eagerness to share their blockchain knowledge with the community, and a desire to build a product that will change the narrative on the scalability issue in the blockchain ecosystem.

Beyond working with an incredible group of people, the chance to get in on the ground floor with the team poised to potentially bring blockchain to the masses was not something I could pass on. And soon enough, I found myself on a plane to Berlin to attend the ETH Berlin Hackathon as the new Director of Global Solutions Engineering at SKALE.

In Berlin, half of our core engineering team attended the hackathon, and we hacked on a project together over a span of 72 hours. Shortly after, the team attended Devcon 4, where I was able to meet the remainder of the core engineering team. Since then, our team has grown, and each additional hire reinforces my confidence in deciding to join SKALE. Each new member brings their own unique background, energy, and enthusiasm that maintains the great culture at SKALE today.

Looking Ahead

Only three months after having joined SKALE, I find myself once again crafting New Year’s resolutions. And while signing up for a woodworking class is still on the list, my focus this year will be to ensure a successful product launch for SKALE. If you happen to be heading to any of the ETH Global events, let’s meet up to talk about how SKALE can help your project with scalability.

SKALE’s mission is to make it quick and easy to set up a cost-effective, high-performance sidechain that runs full-state smart contracts. We aim to deliver a performant experience to developers that offers speed and functionality without giving up security or decentralization.

Want to learn more? Start here.