Fri 18 December 2015 by Mark Evenson
Introducing our Commodore x40
We're back for our fourth team member introduction: Mark Evenson is yet another co-founder of CloudFleet. Mark was born in Springfield – but with five digits on each hand. Mark considers himself a jack-of-all-trades, a seasoned generalist who knows how to specialize when needed — and is currently coordinating the engineering activities towards our first customer "ship", which includes designing and implementing a zero-knowledge backup system.
Writing and the pre-commercial internet
Mark grew up in various parts of the world before settling in Ithaca, N.Y., for his studies. Torn between English and Physics, he eventually pursued the natural science route at Cornell University, reasoning, "I could always pick up a pen to write or a book to read later on, but wouldn't always have access to a particle accelerator to fool around with".
Open Source and Mathematics
As a co-founder, he's fully dedicated to product ship date for Cloudfleet. To pay the bills, he works as a contract software developer. One of his most recent projects was designing, developing and deploying a full-stack next-generation electronic health record system for the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine. Like many of our team members, he also works on and contributes to various open source projects, the most prominent being Armed Bear Common Lisp, a language implementation that runs on a JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
"I currently am working through ideas towards a systematized taxonomy of known algorithms for quantum computers", he says when asked about his hobbies and interests. Besides recreational mathematics, once in a while he tries to make time for surfing "on real waves on a real beach".
Privacy for the Commodore 64
To Mark, privacy was important since the very beginning: "Instinctively, I have always been an online privacy advocate since the first days of dialing up local BBS numbers via a 300 bp/s modem from my Commodore 64 in the 1980s (the 'x40' in my CloudFleet title is a reference to these days, being a representation of '64' in hexadecimal)". His interest in privacy has come down to the realization that we only get to build one Internet: one where everyone can be spied on, or one on which no one can be spied on. "Privacy is not just about hiding things; it is also about how we assert control over creating our public persona. If we have no private aspect to our persona how can we be said to even believe in a public commons?"
Mark saw an opportunity to put his ideas about privacy into practice when he joined CloudFleet. "I am determined to not let the 'Snowden moment' pass into history without having been said that I did not try to make a different world".