If you have been following our progress over the last few months, you know that we have recently been expanding our team. Today, we are proud to announce the next addition to the ARK family. Please say hello to our newest Core Developer — Joshua Noack. Joshua will be joining the ARK team full-time starting today, 3rd of September 2018.

Joshua has been a programmer for most of his life. His interest in programming began back in 2005 when he discovered the RPG Maker XP and learned Ruby. From there, he experimented with a lot of different languages and frameworks. From Gosu, a Ruby gem for 2D game development, to HTML5 game development via Phaser, and finally to C++/ GDScript using Godot Engine. Game development was the catalyst which made him fall in love with programming. In 2009, he discovered Linux and was soon absorbed into the open source world, compiling Gentoo, and breaking things until settling with ArchLinux.

He became more professionally involved 5 years ago as a .NET developer for Software IT house in Germany. During that time, he learned to work reliably, even when under stress and through critical times. Some of his responsibilities included every aspect of code, ranging from back-end to front-end development, writing documentation, and providing technical support. As a result, he became a versatile developer who knows how each stage of development is handled and completed. During this time, he learned Visual C#, VB.NET, MySQL, SQLite, Git, Jira and much more.

After the initial job, Joshua continued his work for one of the companies developing embedded devices. He developed a serial communication protocol which was also used to implement a remote scripting interface to run automated tests in a production facility. This experience is indicative of following modern programming practices, which includes writing well tested and documented code - a necessity when dealing with sensitive projects like blockchain protocols, where preparing proper testing suites can save not just time, but can prevent an unrecoverable situation.

Before joining ARK, Joshua worked as a full-time developer on C++/Qt embedded systems. He created a custom Yocto Linux distribution and ported one of their older systems to a newer technology stack which included C, C++, Qt, Python, tons of shell scripts, systemd, PostgreSQL, SQLite and dealt with Makefiles, showing his work with a lot of low-level as well as high-level programming languages.

Last year he took cryptography and security related courses, and continued to invest a lot of his spare time to learn, master, and contribute to open-source development. Here, he found his new home at ARK by participating in the GitHub Development Bounty Program. With his contributions, he showed the experience, knowledge, and code quality that is essential when dealing with sensitive projects like our new ARK Core.

Joshua is eager to start hammering away at our Core code and we are delighted to have him. Joshua, welcome to the ARK crew and your new family.