This article was originally written in 2018. Information below may be dated.
We are excited to announce that Nick Poulden has joined as the newest member of Origin Protocol’s engineering team. Nick started out as an open-source contributor and has already made multiple significant contributions to the Origin platform. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him into his new role as a Senior Engineer at Origin. Nick is based in Colorado and will be joining Stan and others working out of our Boulder office.
As a 100% open-source project, Origin Protocol has always taken a unique approach to hiring from within our community. We prefer to skip the whiteboard exercises and instead evaluate people based on their contributions to the real problems our team is grappling with every day. This has led to us hiring a diverse group of people from all over the world, including many who don’t have a typical software engineering resume. Part of our secret to finding great people is that we don’t just open-source our code, we open-source our collaboration process as well. Everything we do is “public by default”. This culture of open-collaboration makes it easy for new developers to see what we’re working on and start contributing. At Origin, we have all our discussions in public in Discord, we publish our engineering meeting notes to the world, track our progress on a public project board and invite anyone to join our weekly engineering calls. Without this culture of openness, it’s unlikely we’d have ever found Nick or had a chance to evaluate his unique skills.
Nick Poulden on a recent visit to Origin HQ
Nick grew up in England and studied Computer Science at the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Origin, he worked as an engineer at Sencha, C3 Energy Network and most recently at Palo Alto Networks. We’ve been impressed with his skills as a JavaScript developer, his ability to pick up new languages like Solidity and his burning desire to explore new technologies. Outside of work, Nick enjoys traveling and loves to get outdoors to enjoy Boulder’s 300 days of sun. He particularly loves skiing through trees, listening to psychedelic space rock and speculating about the future over a good bottle of wine. He’s on a never-ending search to find an Indian restaurant in the US that lives up to UK standards. Nick was the tech lead for The Leaky Cauldron, JK Rowling’s favorite Harry Potter fan site when it won a Webby award in 2006. You can find him on Github with the simple and enviable handle of @nick.
We first discovered Nick in January of this year. He’d started playing around with blockchain development in December and had forked Origin’s DApp to create his own marketplace for selling tickets. He met up for coffee with Stan who immediately flagged him as a rockstar that we should try and recruit to our team. From the beginning, it was obvious that Nick shared our mission and was a top-notch engineer. Nick started by making several great open-source contributions to our codebase and has slowly gotten more and more involved with our team. Little did we know that it would take us almost a year to convince Nick to give up his full-time job at Palo Alto Networks.
Even before joining full-time at Origin, Nick made significant contributions to our codebase. Nick was the engineer who took the initiative to investigate the ERC-725 identity standard which became the basis for public profiles on Origin. Nick built the first working prototype of the ERC-725 standard and helped integrate that standard into our DApp.
Nick also designed and wrote our current marketplace smart contract which is central to the operation of our platform. You can think of our marketplace contract as the digital town square where buyers and sellers can find each other. It also provides the rules that govern how funds are escrowed and transferred between parties, and how arbitration works if anything goes wrong.
Nick also championed the initial use-case for our token, whereby sellers can “boost” their listings to get them more visibility and give an incentive to marketplace operators to help promote them. While we plan on adding additional use-cases for our token over time, Nick was able to convince us that this simple affiliate model was a great place to start.
As you can see, Nick has already had a sizeable impact on our product and we’re incredibly grateful for the engineering leadership that he has shown. We’re looking forward to working with him over the years to come and seeing whatever crazy ideas he comes up with next. Nick is already an indispensable part of the Origin team and we are excited to finally make it official. Please join me in welcoming Nick to the Origin team!
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