Responding to a need for more stovetop popcorn, verbose hand gestures to explain programming metaphors, and tales of bowling in every state in the union, NuCypher has made the highly questionable and haphazard decision to hire my fellow hendrix core developer, former colleague, and increasingly dear friend Damon Ciarelli.

At a time when we have moved full sail into engineering challenges which we believe we'll be the first ever to overcome, Damon brings a massive and reliably thoughtful boost to our repositories and to our integration pipelines.

Damon is the second hire here at NuCypher made from my personal rolodex - the first being my serial collaborator, school bus engineering compadre, and on-again-off-again roommate Kieran Prasch, though Kieran's hire was done in the dark days before we wrote welcome posts. Or whatever.

The quality about Damon that made me absolutely surefooted in recommending him is his proclivity to do things he has absolutely no idea how to do. Combined with his tendency not to know how to do much of anything, he is a renaissance engineer of the sincerest variety.

Having taught programming skills in a wide variety of contexts, I can say that Damon's reaction to learning something new is the sort that I think we all might aspire to: he forgets what he has learned as soon as he's done with it, but always remembers where to look when he needs to learn it again.

As we continue to play around with our test tokens and networks in preparation to descend into the final dungeon crawl toward mainnet, Damon's inclusion in our team solidifies my impression that we have built an absolute all-star team.

Damon has already added substantially to our Docker virtualization options and is now getting busy adding support for deploying NuCypher nodes via Kubernetes. Here's his contributions page on our Github.

Welcome Damon, and thanks for exercising such reckless judgment as to be willing to work with me again. I know that you had your pick of many awesome opportunities, and my commitment to you for choosing NuCypher is to honor your contributions and use them to deliver cryptological innovations to populations underserved by the orthodox internet, and in so doing, help you be the decentralized change you want to see.