The Swirlds team is excited to announce the addition of Lead Developer Advocate, Ken Anderson! Ken brings 20 years of experience in system design and software architecture to the role and is a serial entrepreneur. He has a diverse background ranging from strategic business planning to solutions development for information systems. Ken is passionate about distributed ledger technology and a distributed economy. He is experienced in writing smart contracts in Solidity and wants to make getting involved in distributed ledgers as simple as possible. In other words, he is the perfect person for this role.

As the new Developer Advocate, Ken will better equip developers in our community to build distributed applications and help build the distributed web. His focus will be on serving local, national, and international developer communities. He will lean on his vast technical knowledge, extensive experience, and engineering background to debug production applications and provide suggestions for improvement. To put it more simply, he will make sure that every developer finds building on hashgraph to be engaging, accessible, and user-friendly.

Ken is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of LaunchBadge, a software development and maintenance firm that specialises in business management, software engineering, and information architecture. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of Mingo, a gateway application for non-cryptocurrency users to join the cryptocurrency community, where he handles strategic technology relationships and high-level system architecture.

Previously, Ken was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Concordus Applications, where he was the lead contributor to the TM Forum’s REST API design guidelines, which is now used throughout the multi-trillion dollar global telecom industry. He was also a Senior Project Manager at Tagachi and consulted at Watermark Studios. Ken graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in Management Information Systems from California State University and was an Intelligence Sergeant in the United States Army.

Ken Anderson — Developer Advocate, Swirlds

“It’s my job to make sure that no developer ever has to wonder how to engage with hashgraph again. I’ll be formalizing developer learning and resources. I’ll be engaging the developer community directly to build a strong understanding of the existing platform and seek input for how we can do things better…” — Ken Anderson, Eat. Pray. Hashgraph.

We are excited to have Ken join the team and look forward to him collaborating with our developer community on new distributed applications. He is an active voice on Telegram, both in the Community channel and in the Developer channel, where he is always eager to discuss any technical questions that you may have.

If you are seeking to test out and build an application with the Software Development Kit, then you can download it here. You can also learn more about the hashgraph consensus algorithm and download the whitepaper here. Note that both the SDK and whitepaper were written for permissioned networks by Swirlds, who are currently implementing the technology in enterprise projects. To apply for a license for a permissioned network, contact sales@swirlds.com and the Swirlds team will get back to you.