Welcome to the IOTA Foundation – October 2021
Abdulrahim Al Methiab
Abdulrahim joins the Identity team as a Fullstack Engineer. In this role, he will focus on improving the usability of the identity framework. Abdulrahim lives in Berlin, Germany, and has recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. During his degree, he worked as a software engineer in the automotive industry and has gained experience in desktop, web, and mobile application development.
Since I learned about IOTA's technology and mission, I recognized its potential in contributing to a more free, secure and decentralized digital world by designing an innovative Distributed Ledger Technology that overcomes the limitations of traditional blockchain. The implementation of Self-Sovereign Identity caught my attention since it's an emerging yet crucial technology for many applications, particularly for connected devices in the Internet of Things. I am honored to have the opportunity to join the team and I hope I will be able to contribute as well as grow and learn.
Arnau Orriols
Arnau joins the Engineering team as a Senior Software Engineer. Deeply passionate about Rust and communication protocols, he will focus on the Streams project. Arnau lives in Barcelona, Spain. After 10 years developing software products for the machine to machine sector, the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) sector and Industry 4.0 sector, he joins IOTA to fulfill his vision on what the IoT should become:
IoT has already conquered our lives and is increasingly present in our everyday experience. However, it has failed to deliver on the exponential economic return that was promised during the initial hype. In pursuit of this forecastedly easy economic success, many proprietary enterprises have resorted to cheap development practices whose lack of accountability has brought this industry into being righteously associated with opacity, security vulnerability and unreliability. The IOTA Foundation, with its unique open-source Distributed Ledger Technology protocol and solutions like Streams, Identity and Access, is in a prime position to lead a revolution that should embrace security, transparency, accountability and ownership as the essence of a new internet where devices and humans interact as peers and are empowered to build towards a better society instead of the mutual oblivious consumption to which we are currently being led.
Eris Sulce
Eris joins the Human Resources team as a People Operations Specialist. In this role, she will be responsible for mastering all people-related administrative and operational matters of our global non-profit organization. Eris lives in Athens, Greece. She comes from a corporate background, with more than seven years in the telecommunication industry, where she learned and developed a lot within the Human Resources team. She joins the IOTA Foundation because she is interested in working in an international, diverse, and very inclusive environment.
I feel honored and super excited to be part of IOTA Foundation's big family. I look forward to learning and growing with the Foundation.
Larry Ivange
Larry joins the Engineering team as a Software Engineer. In this role, he will focus on the Smart Contracts project. Larry lives in Buea, Cameroon, and started programming in C on Linux back in high school. He is an open-source enthusiast and has been an active contributor to open-source since 2015 while still in the university and has contributed to multiple projects across different domains. Professionally, he’s been working remotely for startups for more than four years.
Larry enjoys designing and implementing efficient, scalable, and maintainable systems. Larry also enjoys running developer communities and giving conference talks. He used to be the lead of Docker Buea and is currently the lead of Cloud Native Community Buea.
Back in school I really enjoyed solving challenging problems. C was my favorite programming language and I used to spend a lot of hours solving challenges on hackerrank and answering questions on Stack Overflow. But for the sake of being employable, I had to pick up Java and started building webservices in Java and later JavaScript and Python. But all of this was not really fulfilling. I always felt like something was missing. The problems I was solving just weren’t challenging enough with a lot of repetitions and I prefer building scalable distributed systems. Then I heard about Golang. Going through the official tutorial I fell in love with the language immediately. I knew I’d want to make Golang my full time programming language but I just didn’t know how I was going to make that happen. I was also very interested in DLTs and blockchains mostly because they seem challenging and would provide much satisfaction overcoming those challenges and I also did see a lot of use cases for it locally like in the healthcare space. I tried contributing to some open source DLTs but got overwhelmed mostly due to poor documentation. Then I heard about the IOTA Foundation from a friend. I watched the IOTA space for about a year and finally decided that I want to be part of this project. I think I chose the right DLT to be part of and since joining IF, my expectations have not been cut short. I’m part of a brilliant team solving really challenging problems and every morning I look forward to opening my laptop and building software.
Lukas Möller
Lukas joins the IOTA Wasp team as a Senior Software Engineer. In this role, he will focus on the development of the node in Go and Rust. He lives in the Ruhr area in Germany and has around ten years of professional experience in software development. During his career, he developed backends, frontends, and apps with varying architectural patterns, languages, and roles for industries such as automotive, logistics, e-commerce, trade, production, and more. While he started to work professionally at the age of 17, his interest in programming started in his early childhood.
When I heard about IOTA at the end of 2017, I just saw an investment opportunity at first. However, the more I dug through all the ideas, I became very confident that this project can really improve and revolutionize our day to day life in the future. After trying out parts of the ecosystem in personal proof-of-concepts and hosting nodes, I just had to apply to the IF. I am really grateful for the chance to learn from the team, to help the project to become a reality, and to work on something meaningful which I am passionate about. I am really excited about what's to come.
Menno van Rijn
Menno joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior Consultant and Project Lead. He will focus on market adoption, developing and coordinating IOTA Foundation strategic projects, and client and partner engagements, including for example the development of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). Menno is an Aerospace Engineer with a degree in Digital Business and has developed his career in innovation consultancy, technology go-to-market, and business development in various sectors and fields, most recently focused on emerging tech such as blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence for industry applications at GFT IT Consulting.
I feel privileged to have the opportunity to contribute to the development and market adoption of the IOTA protocol, especially because of the huge advances that are being made at this time. Since starting work on blockchain, DLT and crypto four years ago, IOTA already caught my attention with the promise of a highly scalable, feeless and sustainable infrastructure that has the promise to be the backbone for a trusted data and value transfer on the Internet of Things. Now I am looking forward to being part of the amazing work IOTA Foundation team is doing in making that a reality and building towards a new decentralized internet for the machine economy, with the countless positive impacts this can bring to society as a whole.
We are very happy to officially announce that Abdulrahim Al Methiab, Arnau Orriols, Eris Sulce, Larry Ivange, Lukas Möller and Menno van Rijn have joined the IOTA Foundation. Give them all a very warm welcome!
