Committer of the Month – Caralee Jackson, DevOps Engineer

In our latest edition of ‘About Shardeum Team‘, we have Caralee Jackson, who is also the committer for the month of September 2024.

Caralee grew up in a rural community in central Illinois where her dad, always the engineer, ensured they had the top technology in town and encouraged her to play around on an old DOS/Win3.1 machine. She later went to college and got a business degree in CIS, graduated in 2001 and moved to the Chicago suburbs for work. Now Caralee owns a 2 flat on the west side of Chicago and have friends living in her upstairs apartment as well as her dog, 8 cats (6 are hers) and 2 snakes!!

Caralee loves to snowboard and attend live music events, particularly festivals. She has attended Bonnaroo every year for the past 11 years when she started the Bonnaroo Craft Beer Exchange, now the most attended camper created event at the festival! She also like to do some handiwork around her house and have taught herself a number of skills including how to sweat copper pipe, install tile, electrical wiring, and some minor automotive repair on her little orange beetle convertible and diesel short bus that she hopes to convert into an RV one day.

You can find Caralee on LinkedIn (career-related) and Instagram (for personal-related)

Let’s Chat with Caralee!

Jereme/Will: What are you helping to build at Shardeum?

Caralee: I’m working on the Systems and Automation team, essentially Build Engineering, primarily focused on code quality and tests. My background is primarily in Jenkins both as an admin and developing pipelines. At Shardeum, I’m also doing a lot with GitHub Actions/Workflows as well as GitHub administration. The way I look at it, the developers are my customers and my job is to make sure they can do their jobs better by automating mundane tasks in a way that prevents issues and enables developers. Too little process and automation can open the project up to human error while too many things will become difficult to manage. We just have to be balanced here.

Jereme/Will: What sets Shardeum apart?

Caralee: Everyone really believes in not just the technology, but also the purpose of Shardeum. The Web3 community overall is so dedicated to decentralization and everyone at Shardeum especially wants to bring that to the world and that’s the goal of this project – decentralization for everyone. Everyone on the team is also some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.

When I was offered the position at Shardeum, I had a competing job offer at your typically large, old corporation and part of the reason I selected Shardeum was in my interviews I thought “These interviewers are incredibly smart and they wouldn’t be working here if this wasn’t something pretty special.”

I could go work for the same-ol, same-ol if I wanted to, but this was a chance to be part of something unique on the forefront of technology.

Jereme/Will: How can our community members help Shardeum?

Caralee: Everyone at Shardeum appreciates the community and their feedback is the most important because they’re the ones that will really be using Shardeum! Give us your constructive criticism, ideas, etc. and we’ll listen! Shardeum is nothing without the awesome community we have supporting us and helping us.

Jereme/Will: What was your journey into Web3?

Caralee: My journey here is probably different from most of the rest! In 2001 I graduated college with a business degree (CIS) and started writing mainframe JCL and some COBOL for a cellular billing system (this was back in the day when the cell phone company owned your phone number and switching companies meant getting a new number). They lost their contract and laid off the entire team at which point I went to work for Accenture, staffed at a local utilities company, implementing Microfocus COBOL and Oracle database procedures on Linux where I honed my SQL writing and tuning skills.

However, my background in COBOL was hindering me at the time until I spoke to a former colleague of mine who needed an experienced dev who knew Java, but couldn’t afford an experienced Java dev. He brought me on knowing I could probably figure it out (I always say I only know one thing and that’s how to learn new things). I worked with that team on an e-commerce site for a few years, using Git for the first time and getting experience in build and release management. I then moved to take a 2 year contracting gig working on the McDonald’s mobile app where I managed deployments of the base app to markets around the world, assisting the smaller teams with deployment and testing of their market’s customized app.

It was in that job that I was told one day “Our iOS dev’s visa expired and he left”. I was subsequently handed a macbook and asked to figure out how to build and deploy the iOS app even though I never even owned an iPhone (learning more new things!). After that ended I went back to Accenture, now working in DevOps, and got experience in Jenkins and Bitbucket administration working for an internal team at JP Morgan Chase where I wrote a customized version of a Jenkins plugin for internal use. During the pandemic I left JPMC looking for a permanent remote position and went to work for (the now famous) Crowdstrike for a few years, primarily doing application administration and building Jenkins pipelines, while getting some great perspective on the security industry. I built some fairly complex pipelines for their product security team and consulted on development and release of a Crowdstrike plugin for Jenkins.

Following that period, I briefly worked for a company building an AWS native application to process genomic data and now I’m here at Shardeum in Web3 learning about yet another new world. My experience has given me a lot of insight on so many different industries, types of roles and types of companies from enterprise to startup. I do my best to understand things from every perspective so I can take a holistic approach when designing solutions.

Jereme/Will: Wow, it was so insightful and humbling. This blog series is designed exactly to introduce our community to the dedicated committers like you behind the project. And for all the Shardians out there — if you’re eager to join our dynamic team or one of our ecosystem projects, be sure to keep an eye on our careers page for exciting job opportunities across the network.

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