Committer of the Month – Chris Freels, QA Engineer

Introducing Chris Freels to our Community

We at Shardeum People Operations are glad to bring you the 2nd edition of ‘About Shardeum Team‘ with the spotlight on Chris Freels who is a QA engineer in the project. He is also the committer of July 2023. He works on the operations pod ensuring Shardeum dev team members can iterate efficiently and ship fast. He focuses on automation and internal tool integration. He is an avid explorer of the DeFi space and a firm believer in the boundless potential of the blockchain. Outside of work you’ll find him PC gaming, traveling, at the bouldering gym, or playing around with the latest generative AI art tools.

You can find him here and here.

Let’s Chat With Chris Now

Jereme/Will: What are you building at Shardeum?

Chris: I work on the operations side of things at Shardeum, focusing on making our technical processes more efficient. One of my key projects is a Discord bot that helps log dev hours, report updates, and even uses ChatGPT to help review code. Our current project is to build out our automated integration testing framework. We have a lot of great tools built by the tech team to run tests against our network. Our goal is to be able to kick off all our integration tests with the push of a button. This will really accelerate our development process while ensuring we maintain a high level of quality.

Jereme/Will: What is unique about how you are building here in the context of an open-source blockchain project?

Chris: The huge community around Shardeum makes it a really exciting project to work on. The surface area for testing a blockchain is huge so already having a large community eager to run nodes and build on our beta network is a huge help. For me I think that just puts even more of an emphasis on building robust tooling and automation. By ensuring seamless and automatic integration tests for every code contribution, we can confidently and efficiently incorporate more input from our expansive community. This not only streamlines development but also ensures that our standards remain uncompromised, regardless of the source of contribution. This will be a big win as more of our code is open sourced and we continue to grow our community of committers.

Jereme/Will: How can our community of committers help Shardeum QA?

Chris: The community has already been incredibly helpful in testing our beta network and providing bug reports and feedback. I think once our Automated Integration Testing framework is ready, I hope we can make it easy to contribute to expanding the test suite. So we ask the community to stay tuned to our socials about this framework.

Jereme/Will: How did you get started in Web3?

Chris: I got into Web3 last year through DeFi. I was holding some Bitcoin and Ethereum, and was starting to hear about some new chains. I got excited when I found out about DeFi and learned there was more I could do than just hodl. I definitely ate a lot of high ETH fees back then! What really got me excited was the transparency and being able to see my transactions and the exact contract code that would be called before I click a button in a dapp. I think there is a huge opportunity for developers to create really creative and innovative apps in the web3 space that take advantage of the openness and composability.

Jereme/Will: Thanks Chris. We appreciate you sharing a bit about your experience and your continued growth here at Shardeum. It’s a great reminder of why we do what we do. Our people are our greatest asset, and by investing in their growth we can make a real difference, both within our walls and beyond.

Note to the community: If you want to be part of our exciting team, please do keep a tab on our careers page on the website and submit your applications as needed.

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