Overview

Bob Summerwill is Executive Director for the ETC Cooperative and has been working full-time on blockchain projects since late 2015.  He worked on Ethereum and Hyperledger in earlier years, followed by a switch to Ethereum Classic and a belated Bitcoin orange-pilling.  He has a growing interest in privacy projects.

Bob has been programming since 1984 and as a professional software engineer since 1996 (primarily working on AAA video games).  Originally from the UK, he has lived in Vancouver since 2003, and is now a dual citizen of Canada and the UK.

Biography

Bob was foundational in the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, working full-time on that project for ConsenSys from October 2016 to October 2017. He co-presented the Technical Roadmap (5:05) at the EEA launch event and served first as Secretary of the Technical Working Group and subsequently as Vice-Chair of the Technical Steering Committee.

That role followed a spell at the Ethereum Foundation, where he was a developer on the cpp-ethereum client, leading a major refactoring and revamp of the codebase (cpp-ethereum-1.3.0 “Homecoming”) and led a failed effort at re-licensing cpp-ethereum which was intended to open up the possibility of an Ethereum client within Hyperledger seven months before Monax contributed Burrow and three years before PegaSys contributed Besu.  If the earlier attempt had succeed then the work of the EEA would likely have occurred within Hyperledger, with Ethereum and Hyperledger communities bridged by mid 2016.

Bob previously worked as a DevOps Solution Architect for TD Securities in Toronto for 6 months in 2015, as well as starting work on cpp-ethereum-cross through his doublethinkco company. Toronto is where his Ethereum journey really got serious.

Prior to that, Bob had an 18 years career in video games, starting at Sony Psygnosis in 1996 and then moving on to AAA titles at Electronic Arts for 15+ years (FIFA, NHL, NBA, UFC and more), mainly for PlayStation and XBOX. Bob served in many different technical leadership roles at EA, culminating to his appointment as the first ever EA Sports Label Software Architect and Chair of the Architecture Council, EA Sports in 2012.

After EA, Bob worked for short time on Unity3D mobile titles at Roadhouse Interactive and DeNA, followed by a short period of consultancy at the Sony SCE San Diego studio.

During this period, Bob was also doing Tizen development, building MonoTizen, writing for Tizen Experts and contracting on Tizen smartwatch development, as well as starting on Mono for Sailfish. Tizen was not a happy experience, but he learnt a lot and made some good friends in both the Tizen and Sailfish communities.