I’m thrilled to announce that Tom Linton is joining the Origin engineering team full-time.

Prior to joining Origin, Tom spent 8 years as the sole founder of a startup focused on providing search engine analytics to users. During this period he also freelanced on other projects and completed two Masters degrees in Distributed Systems at the Technical University of Berlin and KTH in Stockholm.

Hanging out with Tom in our San Francisco office

Outside of work, Tom likes spending time with his family and exploring his home country of New Zealand. He enjoys snowboarding, trying to surf, and hiking with his two dogs. Tom travels a lot, and particularly enjoys spending time in Mexico where he has family. He speaks Spanish and excels at eating tacos!

Tom on a recent visit to San Francisco

Tom is a great example of a top engineer that we discovered through Origin’s unique hiring process. Back in July of this year, Tom started contributing to our platform by submitting a few pull requests. As a warm-up, Tom refactored our phone attestation service. Then he tackled the bigger challenge of implementing a reliable and easy to use local development environment for the entire team. Again, Tom quickly delivered a solution that we call “Origin in a box” — a set of containers that developers can use to get a working development environment for the Origin codebase in a matter of minutes.

Tom’s work clearly demonstrated several traits that we highly value in Origin’s engineering team: high-quality code, good unit test coverage, attention to detail, moving fast, and a “can-do” and always ready to help others attitude. Given the scope and strong execution on these projects, we invited Tom to be a part of Origin’s “extended engineering team” as a contractor.

In mid-August, while the whole team was preparing for our Mainnet launch, Tom took on the ambitious challenge to completely redesign our production environment. Our backend platform used to run on an eclectic set of AWS dedicated servers and Heroku deployments. Our IPFS and messaging clusters were on AWS, but our attestation and indexing servers were on Heroku. Meanwhile, we needed to add additional servers before the launch for our Discovery service and Testnet token faucet. We didn’t have any automation for deploying code and also lacked monitoring of the health of the various services that were running. Tom quickly came up with a clean design proposal to move our entire stack to use containers orchestrated with Kubernetes. There was some apprehension from the team on moving to a completely new system so close to our launch target — but Tom alleviated all of our concerns by whipping up a quick prototype and systematically walking us through the various aspects of it.

Again, Tom excelled and implemented a production environment in record time, giving us strong foundations for the future growth of the Origin platform. Thanks to Tom, we now have:

Tiered deployments: We have 3 tiers: dev, staging, production. Our code graduates from dev to staging. Once it is ready to ship, the code gets pushed to our user-facing production environment.

Flexible configurations: We can easily add new services, then configure and deploy them. We used this capability to launch the Origin faucet and Discovery servers.

Monitoring and alerting: While we currently only have basic capabilities in this area, we plan on beefing this up by integrating with Prometheus. In addition to standard system level statistics monitoring (CPU, disk, network, etc), we want to add fine-grained application level statistics. This will allow us to detect and alert on anomalies that may occur in any service on our platform.

So here we are, a couple weeks after our Mainnet launch. Our production environment has been running smoothly, and we are looking forward to the next set of improvements: continuous integration and daily automated deployments, monitoring and alerting, and self-serve tools. But one thing is clear: we’ve all been incredibly impressed with Tom’s work. It was an easy and natural decision to extend him an offer to join our engineering team full-time.

Tom is our first full-time engineer in the southern hemisphere and this illustrates how we are quickly becoming a truly distributed engineering team with engineers in Europe, New York, Boulder, San Francisco, and now New Zealand.

I asked Tom why he was excited to join Origin. Here’s what he said in his own words:

Working at Origin almost feels like I’m not working. I think the reason for this is primarily the team. They are such a great bunch of people (and also great at what they do). Going into the office is like going to hang out with your friends. On top of this, the tech is interesting and challenging, and the product that we are producing really could make a big impact on the world. Joining a project where you believe in the vision is very motivating.

On behalf of the entire Origin team, I would like to extend a warm welcome to Tom!

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