Nominee Name

William Katsak

Nominated By

Self

Short personal bio

I am the Chief Architect at Taekion (http://taekion.com) since October 2017. I am also wrapping up my dissertation (Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University), as well as teaching in Syracuse University's online M.S. program in Computer Science. I have over 10 years of combined industry and academic experience, mainly with operating systems/distributed systems, and have worked writing software in the commercial sphere continuously throughput my Ph.D, including multi-year co-op research projects at Bell Labs and Ericsson Research. I am the co-author of US patent (#US9792419B2) from my work at Bell Labs, as well as additional patent applications in process from my work at Taekion.

At Taekion, I oversee the day-to-day development (including 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 systems layer is my main focus.

I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with my wife and three children.

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. I have authored several patches to Sawtooth including adding IPv6 support to the core (which is now actively used in Taekion's platform). Additionally, I maintain a library (https://github.com/taekion-org/sawtooth-client-sdk-go) that greatly simplifies the construction of Golang client libraries for Sawtooth applications. I actively submit patches and code to other 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 well-designed, well-tested abstract layers into optimized, application-specific systems that solve real business issues. I am convinced that Hyperledger is the best place to curate and develop these pieces, bringing tremendous technical diversity to the space while allowing for holistic planning for the evolution of the technology.

If I am elected, 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.

Nominee Name

William Katsak

Nominated By

Self

Short personal bio

I am the Chief Architect at Taekion (http://taekion.com) since October 2017. I am also wrapping up my dissertation (Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University), as well as teaching in Syracuse University's online M.S. program in Computer Science. I have over 10 years of combined industry and academic experience, mainly with operating systems/distributed systems, and have worked writing software in the commercial sphere continuously throughput my Ph.D, including multi-year co-op research projects at Bell Labs and Ericsson Research. I am the co-author of US patent (#US9792419B2) from my work at Bell Labs, as well as additional patent applications in process from my work at Taekion.

At Taekion, I oversee the day-to-day development (including 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 systems layer is my main focus.

I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with my wife and three children.

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. I have authored several patches to Sawtooth including adding IPv6 support to the core (which is now actively used in Taekion's platform). Additionally, I maintain a library (https://github.com/taekion-org/sawtooth-client-sdk-go) that greatly simplifies the construction of Golang client libraries for Sawtooth applications. I actively submit patches and code to other 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 well-designed, well-tested abstract layers into optimized, application-specific systems that solve real business issues. I am convinced that Hyperledger is the best place to curate and develop these pieces, bringing tremendous technical diversity to the space while allowing for holistic planning for the evolution of the technology.

If I am elected, 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.