This article was originally written on Medium in 2018. Information below may be outdated.
How did a commercial real estate broker in Norman, Oklahoma become an integral part of a cutting-edge blockchain team? In short, it’s about passion, skill, and community. Today we are happy to announce that Micah Alcorn is the newest member of Origin Protocol.
As an open source project, Origin Protocol has always taken a unique approach of hiring from within our community. Instead of the traditional approach of candidates submitted a resume, taking a coding test, and then an hour of answering questions in a conference room, we get to interact on real issues in real time. Origin being an open source software project means people “apply” to work on Origin by joining our Discord, checking out or Github, and working on open issues and submitting pull requests. This allows for a diverse group of people all over the world (many of whom may not have the typical software engineering resume) to start working with Origin. This diversity of viewpoints and contribution is incredibly important to us and we are engineering our protocols and platform to be open and permission-less just like our engineering community is.
Micah was one of our very first open source contributors, making his first pull request in January, fixing a particularly nasty CSS issue. From there his contributions just got better and more technical. Soon he moved on to web animations, React, and Javascript. He also learned new libraries with astonishing speed, including Flask, PyBabel Localization, and Web3.
We on the engineering team we were asking, “Who is this Micah guy that is contributing such great code, and such a joy to work with?”
The story begins years ago with Micah looking to improve his real estate firm’s marketing efforts. He built a small website. He amazed his customers with a Google-Earth fly-in. He inadvertently learned Javascript as he added customizations. He started attending a Ruby on Rails Meetup. And before you knew it, he was doing more coding than real estate!
An entrepreneur at heart, it wasn’t long before he teamed up with a cofounder and built WellAttended, a box-office management platform for independent theaters and arts organizations. This led him in 2014 to attend Boulder Startup Week where he met Andrew Hyde. Since then, Micah has attended Startup Week every year.
Micah on a hike in Boulder with his cofounder in 2014
So when Andrew joined Origin Protocol in December, Micah took notice and began to follow our progress on Github. Soon he was making his first pull requests, and the journey began.
Micah has become an indispensable part of the Origin team and we are happy to make this official. Those of you who have attended our weekly open engineering calls will recognize Micah as the guy who keeps us all in order and has his finger on the pulse of our many repos, pull requests, and issues. He’s also an integral part of the product team, working out UI/UX issues with our cofounder Matt Liu and our designer Aure Gimon.
If you are also passionate about what we are building at Origin and want to work alongside some amazing coworkers, please reach out. We’re looking forward to your first pull request!
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