Cole Brown
Cofounder, CTO at Kiosk
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCole Brown is a pragmatic computer scientist and engineering leader with 14 years of experience building distributed systems, backend infrastructure, and developer tooling, now serving as Cofounder and CTO in New York. He has a strong research pedigree and a history of shipping core networking work at Protocol Labs—contributing to the widely used go-libp2p project and improving DHT performance and testing at scale. Cole has repeatedly scaled teams and technical direction, from hiring and architecting an L1 blockchain at Burnt to growing engineering from 7 to 70 engineers at Rhino. Equally at home in code and strategy, he moves quickly across languages and systems to refactor critical networking components, design protocols, and harden performance. His background blends formal CS training with applied system design—he also holds a BA in English, which informs his clear technical communication. That combination of deep architecture knowledge, open-source credibility, and hands-on leadership makes him effective at turning complex distributed research into production-grade products.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Rochester
Github Skills (15)
algorithm10
data-structures10
algorithms10
protocols10
go10
dht10
network-protocol10
networking10
data-structure10
libp2p10
testing10
data-storage6
datastore6
docker4
dockers4
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
libp2p/go-libp2p-examples
Jul 2018 - Jun 2019
Example libp2p applications
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 5 PRs, 9 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Cole implemented several stages of a libp2p example application, focusing on core functionality and protocol design. Contributions include implementing transports, muxers, and security layers, as well as defining and handling a custom chat protocol. The user also integrated DHT discovery and message handling using protobufs to build a basic messaging application.
libp2p
libp2p/go-libp2p
Jun 2018 - Aug 2019
libp2p implementation in Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 82 commits, 9 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Cole primarily contributed to the implementation of core networking functionalities within the go-libp2p project. Their commits focused on modifying the swarm and stream handling mechanisms, as well as the mock net components for testing. These changes included enhancements to the directionality and metadata of streams and connections, introducing supporting features like connection and stream statistics for monitoring and performance. The work involved incorporating improvements to the address management system and underlying components.
golibp2pnetworking-stackp2p
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