Recruitment, offices and nerdy hardware

by Adam Waldenberg 3 years ago 4 min read

Between development on the Unigrid wallet and daemon, social network promotion, administrative tasks and investor contacts, The Unigrid Foundation is also moving forward with the planning of our future office space and data center server installations.

We have previously covered our talks with our future landlord and shown you our mockups for the future floor plans. If you missed that article, you can read it here:

Recently our landlord got back to us with the finished plans for our new potential offices. As previously discussed, we are going for a very open floor plan with glass walls on the second floor and conference rooms, a kitchen and a big common area on the bottom floor.

The future property we are looking at has two floors. Workstations with an open floor plan on the top floor and conference rooms and common areas on the bottom floor.

The office space will also be connected to the data center we already run in Gårda which will allow us to utilize this new space more effectively, keeping all loud servers in a completely different location on the other side of the street. In fact, servers, switches and other hardware for future use by the foundation are already procured and waiting for installation.

As we already operate many HP blade enclosures, Evan invested in these servers. An enclosure can hold sixteen servers in total, with each node capable of hosting two twelve-core (24 threads) Xeon CPU:s. This means that each blade enclosure will be able to serve the Unigrid network with 768 logical CPU cores. Each server can also hold 512GB of DIMM memory. This gives each enclosure a memory capacity of 8TB.

To further optimize resource use, bring down cost and minimize the maintenance needed for hardware - developers will work via instances and accounts on these servers. This will allow us to use quiet and compact thin clients in the office that merely connect to these powerful servers in the data center. As a side effect, the development environments can then be managed and configured centrally - something which of course results in less or even no work needed for the developers to get up and running.

In total, the foundation will have room for a potential workforce of roughly 30-40 people. Of course, how many developers we actually hire is going to depend on many different factors.

Finding the right type of developers able to work on the development of the Unigrid network is not easy. Developers with experience in object oriented programming and proper tooling is a diminishing breed. A big majority of developers work exclusively in JavaScript and other scripting languages - so called JavaScript cowboys.
Time. Developing the right team takes time. Even with funding, actually finding the right developers and people does not happen overnight. This is also why the foundation is raising funds over several years in several funding rounds. We need time to find the right people and get the appropriate media exposure.
Search locally. How many good developers and students can we find via Chalmers University of Technology? We have some contacts there and should be able to use our connections to help in this goal.

There might not be such a thing as a Swedish uncle Sam. However, if you fit the profile we are looking for, we would really want to talk to you.

To find developers for the project, The Unigrid Foundation is actively scouring developer hotspots such as Devs Heaven and Crypto Devs and working with partners. Just recently, we also published a job advertisement:

For more resources, career opportunities and information about the work benefits offered by The Unigrid Foundation, please visit our website: https://www.unigrid.org/.

Adam Waldenberg

Enterprise Java/Jakarta EE developer. Advocate of Bitcoin, blockchain technology and a free and open Internet.