Ripple Labs

I've now been living out here in the San Francisco bay area for nearly two months today. I first arrived back on July 5th for an interview with Uber which went sour a few days later for various reasons. A friend threatened to quit their job there, so lets leave it at that, hmm?

Shortly thereafter, I went on circuit and started to get interviewed at a number of other places. My return flight to Akron was scheduled for July 12th, but there were a few things stacked against me at the time:

• Akron had become a toxic environment for me, due to events at SYNHAK. Harassing e-mails and phone calls drove me initially to consider bay area employment.
• A number of my friends were already out here on the west coast, and a good number of old synhakkers were considering leaving Akron for good after what transpired.
• I was broke, and my robotics startup wasn't getting anywhere near enough investor attention in the economic climate of Northeast Ohio. Though for better or worse, shortly after I had a go at this things started to sprout up a lot more.
• Did I mention that I was broke and starting to burn through whuffie?

Enter Ripple Labs.

I was given a suggestion from a KDE friend of mine, Jeff Trull, to apply for Ripple Labs. I've been a C/C++ engineer for as long as I can remember, and wasn't one to get sucked into the current big wave of web development and centralized services. Decentralization is where its at, my friends.

I responded to the job posting and was contacted almost immediately. One phone interview and it jumped to an on-site the very next week.

My position as a C++ Engineer started there on August 11th, 2014 after a brief period of negotiating. After almost four months of no discernable income (three of those by my own decision), I am once again gainfully employed.

In the very near future, I hope to write about the neat things I've been working on there at Ripple Labs. Namely, a bunch of improvements to RocksDB and building tools to enable financial freedom to folks all around the world.

Cryptocurrency isn't really something I'm known for. If anything, it is my endeavors in electronics, python tooling, and multimedia engineering. That seems to be changing now, and I am thoroughly excited :)