| layout | page |
|---|---|
| title | About Bob |
| permalink | /about/ |
Bob Summerwill is a software engineering leader in Vancouver, BC. He spent fifteen years at Electronic Arts, most of it on EA SPORTS titles (FIFA, NBA, NHL and the first EA SPORTS UFC), then a decade in Ethereum infrastructure and ecosystem leadership: core developer on the Ethereum Foundation's C++ client, lead architect at the launch of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative from 2019 to 2024, and Head of Ecosystem at BlockApps in 2025 and 2026, where he drove the open-source release of STRATO.
He is now looking for his next role: leading an engineering team in Vancouver, hybrid; developing engineers, helping teams work effectively, and staying close to the technical work. Not sales or marketing. If you are hiring, start with the résumé, then get in touch.
- The Early Days of Ethereum, a history project he runs for fun: an oral-history archive of the project's founding era, with fourteen long-form conversations so far, profiles of more than 180 people, and a timeline from 2013 onwards, all CC BY-SA.
- Local LLMs and agents at home: a Hermes Agent instance running against a self-hosted Qwen 3.8 27B model, served by llama.cpp from a 2 x RTX 3090 + NVLink workstation and shared over Tailscale with the rest of his Linux machines. There is always some new model or tool being tried out.
- Next up: Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 3 and Devcon8 in Mumbai, November 2026. Past and upcoming talks are on the schedule page.
- Head of Ecosystem at BlockApps in 2025 and 2026: the open-source release of STRATO under Apache-2.0, AI-assisted development tooling for the engineering team, and the public face of the project at EthCC[9] and ETHDenver 2026
- Executive Director of the ETC Cooperative from 2019 to 2024, the 501(c)(3) that funded and coordinated open-source client development for Ethereum Classic: up to ten staff, two client teams, seven network upgrades. Vice-chair of the EEA Technical Specification Working Group from 2020
- Organized Proof of Work Summit conferences in 2023 and 2024, and ETC Summit in 2019
- Worked full-time on the launch and first year of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in 2016-2017 while working at ConsenSys
- Various Hyperledger activities on-and-off since 2016
- Core developer on cpp-ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation in 2016
- cpp-ethereum-cross ARM Linux cross-builds for resource-constrained devices in 2015-2016
- Smartwatch developer in 2015
- DevOps Solutions Architect at TD Securities in Toronto, and a PlayStation programming consultancy for Sony, in 2015
- MonoTizen port of Mono tooling to Tizen mobile Linux (and later Sailfish OS) in 2014
- Mobile game development at Roadhouse Interactive and DeNA in 2014
- Eighteen years and 20 AAA game credits (7 x FIFA) in the games industry at Psygnosis and Electronic Arts from 1996 to 2014. At EA he started in the UK studio (The FA Premier League Football Manager series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), moved to Vancouver for FIFA in 2003, and went on to technical leadership of the studio's configuration-management group for the Xbox 360 launch titles, company-wide configuration management at EATech, EA SPORTS Label Software Architect, and finally software architect for the group that built NHL and the first EA SPORTS UFC
- Programming since 1984, as a ten year old - BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, XBOX, XBOX360, XBOX One, Gamecube, Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux.
- Originally from the UK, he has lived in Vancouver since 2003, and is now a dual citizen of Canada and the UK.