Char Howland
Senior Software Engineer at Guild
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChar Howland is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in privacy-first, interoperable digital identity systems, with six years of experience building API-driven products in Python and TypeScript. They combine hands-on backend work—contributions to prominent open-source projects like ACA-Py and Hyperledger Indy—with leadership across standards bodies, co-chairing wallet interoperability and Indy contributor groups at the Linux Foundation/OpenWallet ecosystem. At Indicio they led engineering teams, drove multitenancy and migration projects, and helped add SD-JWT support to ACA-Py, advancing privacy-preserving verifiable credentials. Comfortable balancing architecture and coding, Char has steered product strategy, mentoring, and cross-team delivery while continuing to ship core features and test suites. Based in Denver, they bring a physicist’s analytical rigor—from laser optics research—to complex distributed ledger engineering and community-driven standards work.
6 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Study Abroad Spanish, Study Abroad Spanish at Universidad del SalvadorBachelor of Science - BS Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS Physics at Willamette University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (10)
testing10
indy10
json10
data-serialization10
python10
blockchain10
serialization10
database-management9
verifiable-credentials9
base587
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
hyperledger/indy-node
Feb 2022 - Apr 2022
The server portion of a distributed ledger purpose-built for decentralized identity.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 13 comments, 1 issue in 2 months
Contributions summary:Char primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and data structures of the `indy-node` server, which is designed for decentralized identity. Their contributions involved adding and modifying schemas for NYM transactions, introducing versioning, and implementing validation rules to ensure data integrity. The user also implemented size limits and validation for DIDDOC_CONTENT, further strengthening the data model. Additionally, they were involved in resolving issues related to retrieving historical data.
blockchaindecentralizeddecentralized-identitydistributed-ledgerpurpose
openwallet-foundation/acapy
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
ACA-Py is a foundation for building decentralized identity applications and services running in non-mobile environments.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 4 PRs, 1 issue in 3 months
Contributions summary:Char primarily focused on enhancing the ACA-Py framework, specifically in the area of ledger interaction and wallet functionality. They implemented features related to routing keys, including constructing attribute JSON objects and propagating endpoints from mediation records. They also made several updates to the test suite. These contributions improved the interaction with the ledger and wallet functionality.
pythonvonethereumdecentralizedverifiable-credentials
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