Alex North
Independent
Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex North is a senior software engineer and engineering leader with 13 years of experience building distributed systems, developer-facing protocols, and collaboration tools, most recently as a Staff Engineer at Protocol Labs. He combines deep technical expertise in data models, APIs, decentralised systems and crypto/security with product sensibility—“building the right thing” as much as building it right. As a co-founder and VP Engineering at early startups and a former Google senior engineer, he brings both startup grit and large-scale engineering discipline. Alex is an active contributor to the Filecoin ecosystem—working on the protocol spec, FVM reference implementation, Lotus and Venus node implementations—demonstrating hands-on knowledge of blockchain VM design, actor state management and consensus-related mechanics. Based in Queenstown, New Zealand, he’s especially interested in tools for thought, education and physical-world applications, blending research-driven thinking with pragmatic shipping.
13 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
UNSW Sydney
Stackoverflow
13reputation
107reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (29)
cbor10
messaging10
api-design10
ipfs10
message-system10
serialization10
message-handler10
go10
filecoin10
specification10
blockchain10
message-bus10
error-handling10
rust10
webassembly10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
filecoin-project/venus
Jan 2019 - May 2020
Filecoin Full Node Implementation in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 240 commits, 473 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Alex contributed significantly to the Filecoin Full Node Implementation. Their commits focused on core back-end aspects, including improving the handling of precompiled proofs and refining error messages, indicating a focus on the reliability of the Filecoin node. They also made substantial changes to the API by replacing IDDetails.ID with a peer.ID object, refactoring various methods, and modifying the underlying data structures related to key types (such as address and signature) and data flow within the codebase, indicating proficiency in the project's core architecture and API design.
filecoingovenuslotus
filecoin-project/specs
Jan 2019 - Jan 2020
The Filecoin protocol specification
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 reviews, 49 commits, 104 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Alex's commits primarily involve modifications to the Filecoin protocol specification, focusing on core back-end components. They refactored the interpreter code, including message handling and gas costing. Furthermore, they defined the system actor as the sender of implicit messages, and implemented features related to actor state management and address resolution. They also worked on the block reward message and election PoSt, demonstrating knowledge of Filecoin's inner workings.
filecoinfilfilecoin-protocolfilecoin-specificationspec
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