Nominee Name

William Katsak

Nominated By

self

Short personal bio

My name is William Katsak, and I’ve worked as the Chief Architect at Taekion (http://taekion.com) since October 2017. I am also currently in the final stages of a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University, with a focus in computer systems. I have 10 years of combined industry and academic experience mainly with operating systems/distributed systems. and have worked writing software in the commercial sphere continuously throughout my Ph.D, including multi-year co-op research projects at Bell Labs and Ericsson Research. In additional to my graduate school teaching duties, I have also taught Operating Systems at the graduate level at Syracuse University. I am the co-author of a patent (#US9792419B2) written during my work at Bell Labs, and of several additional patent applications in process from my work at Taekion.

At Taekion, I oversee the day-to-day development, do hands-on programming, as well as lead strategic architecture planning for Taekion’s data integrity platform (which is built on Hyperledger Sawtooth). My main focus has been building a foundational blockchain-based data layer using Sawtooth for the US Department of Energy, the US Air Force and our commercial clients. The use of blockchain as a core application layer is my main focus. My main day-to-day programming languages are Golang, Python, and C. I am also competent in Java and C++.

Short personal pitch

I’ve been “hands-on” with Hyperledger projects since joining Taekion in 2017, first with Fabric, and then with Sawtooth (both after evaluating and prototyping on several other blockchain platforms). I’ve gained extensive experience with Sawtooth through the course of building out our product prototypes, and have worked to interface with the development community whenever possible. My operating system background has proved invaluable to working on blockchain design with Sawtooth, Ursa and Transact. I have authored several patches in various stages of acceptance to Sawtooth including adding IPv6 support to the core. I am currently working on a Golang implementation of part of Hyperledger Transact, which will be upstreamed as soon as is practical. I actively submit patches and code to open-source projects whenever I feel my improvements are useful, and have even contributed a bit of code to the Linux kernel.

My architectural focus at Taekion has been using the blockchain building blocks provided by Hyperledger to construct a finely tuned commercial application. I believe the future of blockchain-based applications is in tightly coupling abstracted layers into applications that solve real business issues. I have found that Hyperledger, like Apache, is the best place to abstract these layers into stand-alone functions that allow programmers to build the best code for their particular application. A great commercial blockchain is one that combines these tightly-defined, highly-scalable functions together to solve real business issues.

I believe that I would bring the “hands-on” perspective of a small, but technically advanced, startup to the TSC, and am willing to commit time to help make Hyperledger the best it can be.