Insight is a technical P-Rep team led by infrastructure architect (Rob Canon) and experts in DevOps (John Taylor) and blockchain engineering (Mitchell Krawiec-Thayer).
We collaborate closely with Insight engineers, who contribute to ICON projects while completing their DevOps, Decentralized Consensus, Security, Data Science and Data Engineering programs. In 2019 alone, Insight had 1000 fellows graduate and go on to get jobs in top tier tech firms. From the last session we had three fellows with a combined 15 years industry experience focus on ICON projects. We aim to grow the team tenfold during 2020 as Insight has expanded to locations in 7 cities across the US and Canada.
We also started an accelerator program in 2019 to take full advantage of the immense brain power that comes through our doors at our headquarters in San Francisco.
At Insight, we’re passionate about de-siloing the blockchain ecosystem and creating open-source tools that lower barriers for new participants. ICON’s position as a leading interoperability network attracted our initial attention, and we were excited to discover that our blockchain + DevOps expertise is perfectly aligned to address many of the main technical challenges in ICON’s ecosystem. We see ICON as an opportunity to plug in and provide ecosystem-wide value through our strengths in engineering, operations, and DApp development.
Insight specializes in several highly-technical areas (open-source infrastructure, automation, and reference architectures) that we are currently applying to the ICON ecosystem. We open-sourced a fully-automated deployment of P-Rep nodes on AWS, and shared the code and best practices with the entire community.
With automation comes many opportunities, such as the ability to rapidly deploy large TestNets with various node configurations / network topologies. These enable us to simulate adverse conditions such as DDoS attacks, double signing, and network outage recovery planning. Learnings from these tests will be instrumental to informing node operators how to optimize MainNet operations for all P-Rep teams.
All DApps require some kind of off-chain infrastructure, and they will share many common components. We will support the DApp ecosystem and developer experience by sharing common reference architectures encoding best practices. Any ICON DApp developer will be able to use the templates we share to easily spin up web servers to deploy various components of DApp infrastructure (which will seamlessly integrate with on-demand TestNets). As we create this developer-friendly toolkit, we’ll be onboarding more Insight Fellows to leverage these tools and create new ICON DApps and functionality.
Currently, we are maintaining over 10k lines of code spread over 30 repositories, the largest code base of it’s type for ICON. Everything we create for ICON is immediately available to all DApp developers and P-Rep teams.
One of the biggest things that sets ICON apart is its delegated proof-of-contribution (DPoC) model, which rewards those who are able to contribute the most to the ecosystem. Insight has amazing talent coming through our doors and it’s great that ICON has a built-in governance/funding system that enables us to support them on projects that have a meaningful impact.