| 14 Jul 2016 |
Summary
Ever wondered about the people who help keep the World Community Grid platform and infrastructure running? In this article, learn more about a member of our tech team who has been with World Community Grid from (almost) the very beginning.
Kevin Reed (pictured above with the World Community Grid Webby statuette), has led a number of major projects since joining the team in 2004. World Community Grid’s hands-on architect, Kevin Reed, grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “It was an intensely scientific community,” Kevin recalls, “This is one of the things that attracted me to working with World Community Grid.”
After receiving a bachelor’s in Mathematics and History from Rice University, Kevin taught high school in Houston, Texas for a few years before joining IBM in 1997. In the summer of 2004, a brand new philanthropic initiative at IBM needed a technical lead for the website development, and Kevin was assigned to World Community Grid from almost the very beginning. (World Community Grid officially launched in November 2004, but development work began earlier that year.) In addition to being a long-time IBM employee by 2004, Kevin had also been a contributor to SETI@Home for several years and immediately understood the potential of World Community Grid.
That was 12 years ago. Kevin has served World Community Grid on many major back-end projects, including overseeing the integration of BOINC with the existing World Community Grid website and United Devices Grid MP system, and leading the hosting migration in early 2009, among others. “The challenges inherent in World Community Grid present constant learning opportunities,” he says. “We’ve always been a small and hard working team. We can rely on each other to get things done well. The level of trust among the team members is very high.”
Kevin and his wife Amy (pictured above) recently took a family vacation to Montana with their two children. Kevin has also been able to explore different directions in his career that he feels were largely possible because of his involvement with World Community Grid, such as co-authoring five papers on various aspects of volunteer computing. “To be able to do something that matters–and have fun doing it–is a tremendous opportunity,” he says.
Currently, Kevin is working on modernizing World Community Grid’s front-end development and website infrastructure. He is also working on developing the new Tell a Friend feature, which we are about to try out for the OpenZika project. He explains, “Development technology and processes have changed significantly since our code was originally developed, so we’re improving our implementation of technologies for continuous integration, automated testing and automated deployments. This will simplify our development processes and cut down on errors.” With Kevin’s level of experience with World Community Grid, and his commitment to its mission, we are lucky to have him as we move further into our second decade.
Congratulations on making a new friend, Kevin!
