Back in 2010 I help start an IT business solely focused on small businesses in the Chicago (US) area. Our mission and passion was to help small business navigate the technology choices and instead of viewing IT as a necessary expense how choices with technology can help them achieve their business goals faster and more efficiently. We didn’t want to be consultants we wanted to start at the ground level of issues (Help desk) and rebuild small business IT support with a new focus. A lot has changed over the years both with technology and small businesses but our passion there has not and we are still excited to help new small businesses.
Switching over to Cardano my background is in electrical engineer and early on I did a lot of work with microprocessors, automation, and other electronic devices. The name of IRF comes from one of the first power MOSFET chips that I replaced in an amplifier on one of my early repair jobs. The part of decentralization that really got me excited is the number of individual pools that are needed to keep the blockchain safe and resilient. Proof of Stake (PoS) made more sense to me on a hardware level as you don’t need dedicated hardware that has very little purpose outside of the one task (antminer or GPU farms) and the lower power requirements made it a bit more sustainable. Cardano took PoS a bit further by developing hardware requirements that were more available for people to get started.
Joining the Cardano space was overwhelming. There is a lot of information out there and a lot of people on the software side making some great tools and systems. I stumbled into the xSPO alliance whose mission was to build a community of small pool operators to help encourage and grow. Since joining it has further excited me to continue on as a small pool operator and helping small pools.
I want to grow the IRF stake pool into a team of contributors to focus on helping small pools with the hardware and general understanding of how a stake pool works, what all is out there, and an overview of what other pools are doing on hardware and general setups.
Just like in my IT business I want to help the small guys in the Cardano space understand technology choices and help them grow as a pool operators. I’m excited to see what all this will bring to the community.