I am absolutely delighted to announce that the Haskell Foundation Interim Board has appointed
- Andrew Boardman as Executive Director
- Emily Pillmore as Chief Technology Officer
Making two appointments was not our original plan, but their applications and interviews were so strong that the opportunity was too good to miss.
Andrew will lead on broad strategy, fundraising, relationships with sponsors, and Haskell users. Emily will lead on technical strategy, facilitating technical discussion, and federating volunteer efforts (compilers, tools, libraries, etc etc). But they will both contribute across the work of the Foundation, and the exact division of responsibilities will doubtless evolve over time.
They can both start fairly soon: in late February.
Let me introduce each of them a bit.
Andrew Boardman brings a varied background as a serial entrepreneur, manager, teacher, consultant, and financial professional. He started professional programming in high school, writing text editor software for electronic bulletin board systems. Since then he has been the tech lead for the Windows build lab, lead developer for Windows Live Messenger, worked on desktop publishing software at Quark, and co-founded five startups, and much more.
Andrew was drawn to Haskell in 2015 as the best solution to solve the truly difficult problems in computer science. Most recently he was a Haskell developer and engineering manager at SimSpace Corp., working on software for cybersecurity readiness training and testing. He is extremely excited about serving the community, and looks forward to working with everyone to address pain points and build on the language’s strengths.
- Email: andrew@haskell.foundation
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewboardman/
- Github: https://github.com/myShoggoth
Emily Pillmore originally got her start in finance as a consultant auditor on Wall Street. Discovering a way to combine her love of mathematics with software engineering, she eventually found her way to functional programming and Haskell in 2016.
Emily has since developed a proclivity for OSS and community contributions, authoring or maintaining many Haskell packages, contributing to Core Libraries and Haskell.org as a board member, and serving the Haskell Foundation as its first Working Group Chair. She looks forward to seeing Haskell flourish, and building some great tech that will make everyone’s Haskell experience that much better.
- Email: emily@haskell.foundation
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-pillmore-453630ab/
- Github: https://github.com/emilypi
- Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/user/topos
Emily and Andrew make a fantastic team. I could not be more pleased. I hope you will join me in welcoming them as leaders of the Haskell Foundation, in partnership with the newly appointed Board.
Perhaps I can also mention here that at its first meeting the Board elected Richard Eisenberg as its chair, so you will be hearing more from him too. Thank you Richard!
I’d also like to offer a huge Thank You to
- Our sponsors who have given us the funds that make these appointments possible: IOHK, Github, Juspay, EMQ, Flipstone, Mercury, Obsidian, Tweag, and Well Typed. Without you, none of this would be happening. Thank you, thank you.
- The members of the HF Interim Board, who have evaluated, discussed, reviewed, interviewed and appointed, both the Board and these two positions. It’s been intense, and I am very grateful to them all.
- Our volunteers who have dedicated their time, effort, and attention to help us get to this point. Without your help, we could not have launched. Thank you immensely, and I hope the Haskell Foundation will serve you and the broader community well.
This is a watershed moment. After months of planning, provisional decision making, fundraising, and interim boards, we finally have a Board, an ED, and a CTO. Let’s get to it!
Simon Peyton Jones
Chair, Interim Board