Kenton is technical lead and co-founder of Sandstorm. He is a hard-core systems hacker with a penchant for solving problems in ways no one else has tried. Kenton has been open sourcing all of his personal projects since high school, from game engines to mod music players to programming languages. From 2005 to 2013, Kenton worked at Google, where he worked on infrastructure for Universal Search as well as sharing and access control for Google Drive, but was best-known for his work on Protocol Buffers. Kenton wrote most of Protocol Buffers v2 and turned it into an open source project, which is now used widely both inside and outside Google. After leaving Google, Kenton developed Cap'n Proto, a successor to Protocol Buffers which is "infinity times faster" and features an object-capability RPC system, which has in turn become the basis of the Sandstorm platform. More recently, Kenton joined Cloudflare where he started the Workers project, which allows people to run JavaScript across Cloudflare's edge network. -
Jade Wang curates geek communities and is a co-founder of Sandstorm. By background, she is a research scientist, having graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in neuroscience, pursued a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, and worked at NASA Ames. Over the past half decade, she co-founded Chez JJ, a network of live-work communities for tech entrepreneurs and geeks of all stripes, and worked for two years as Meteor’s Chief Culture Officer. At Meteor, she focused on highlighting and empowering leadership wherever it appeared in the community, bringing a research mindset to community growth. Recently, Jade joined Cloudflare to lead the Developer Relations team. -
From 2014 through 2016, these people worked full time on Sandstorm funded by a group of angel investors. In early 2017, Sandstorm transitioned to a community-driven model.
-Jason Paryani is a software engineer irresistibly drawn to systems topics. This passion led him to Philadelphia-area finance firm Susquehanna International Group, LLP. While at SIG, he worked on the backtesting team where he worked at the intersection of a .Net Windows stack meeting a Python managed Linux high performance cluster. In 2013, he moved to Mountain View to co-found Statsketch, a software startup focused on delivering easy to use data visualization tools for the web. He got to know Kenton when he implemented pycapnp, the Python port of Cap’n Proto. -
David Renshaw is a mathematician turned programmer. As an undergrad at Caltech, he published research in combinatorics, and as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon he developed techniques for building machine-verified proofs of safety properties for aircraft controllers and surgical robots. Some of his side projects have included a framework for crowdsourcing playthroughs of javascript games, and contributions to a Standard ML port of the Box2D physics engine. Prior to joining Sandstorm, he spent two years hunting for vulnerabilities in robotics software at the National Robotics Engineering Center. David is leading development on the Rust and Java implementations of Cap'n Proto. -
During college, Asheesh organized the Xbox Linux project’s documentation into a wiki, submitted written testimony for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s OPG v. Diebold case, revived the Johns Hopkins ACM chapter, and served as web team lead for Students for Free Culture. After graduation, he engineered software Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation and co-founded OpenHatch, a non-profit that helps people get involved in open source software. In 2011, he co-founded the Boston Python Workshop for women and their friends and delivered a talk at PyCon that triggered the formation of PyLadies. In 2013, he took a one-year vacation from free software-related work to hone his skills as a Security Engineer at Eventbrite. Asheesh is a Developer in Debian and holds a B.A. in cognitive science, with minors in women & gender studies and French literature, and an M.S.E. in computer science. -
Nena is a design strategist and artist from Vancouver, Canada. She enjoys experimentation and has designed many things from toys to interfaces to branding assets. Previously, she worked for the Government of Canada leading business intelligence intitiatives to redesign dashboards and other interfaces for regional managers across western Canada. As for higher education, she holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree specializing in Business Technology Management as well as Finance. She is a business development and technology enthusiast with a passion for crafting great user experiences. Outside of design, she enjoys painting, cooking, biking, boardgames, and video games (mostly Dota 2 & Overwatch). -
Drew Fisher is a technology enthusiast who cares deeply about usability, security, and agency. He earned his M.S. in computer science at U.C. Berkeley working with Björn Hartmann and David Wagner. While there, he helped reverse-engineer drivers for the Kinect and showed that people make rational choices about sharing personal information when given appropriate tools. After graduating in 2012, he joined AeroFS, where he built usable, secure self-hosted collaboration tools for enterprises, dealing with everything from security review and response to filesystem change notification APIs, distributed algorithms, developer tooling, and cluster management. In 2015, he joined Sandstorm to focus on contributing more back to the Free Software community. In his free time, he loves solving and writing puzzlehunts, playing board games, tinkering with hardware, and eating delicious foods. -
Born only in early 2014, Garply's rise to the top of Sandstorm has been meteoric. Weighing in at 16 lbs. and growing, Garply is not your average cat. His primary responsibilities at Sandstorm include eating, cuddling, and unexpectedly dashing across the room knocking things over. Garply is also responsible for running Sandstorm's continuous integration infrastructure and chastising those who break the build. -
Kenton Varda launched Sandstorm in 2014 via an Indiegogo campaign, before co-founding Sandstorm Development Group with Jade Wang to develop Sandstorm as both a Software-as-a-Service offering for consumers, known as Sandstorm Oasis, and an enterprise offering for businesses, known as Sandstorm for Work. SDG included Jason Paryani, David Renshaw, Asheesh Laroia, Nena Nguyen, and Drew Fisher. SDG operated from 2014 until 2017, significantly expanding both Sandstorm itself, its collection of applications and developer tools such as vagrant-spk, and developing Blackrock, a scalable version of Sandstorm to back Oasis. SDG was also advised by operating system and web security experts including Brian Swetland, Andrew Lutomirski, Jasvir Nagra, Mark Seaborn, and Mark S. Miller.
-As Android's Systems / Kernel Lead from 2004 to 2012, Brian built the lower levels of what is now the world's most-popular operating system. Prior to that, Brian worked as a kernel engineer for BeOS and Danger, Inc. -
Andy is a Linux kernel developer focused on security. Every month or two, he sends us a message: "I found another Linux kernel vulnerability, but Sandstorm's seccomp filter blocks it." That seccomp filter? Andy wrote it. -
Jas is a web security expert, formerly of the Google security team, where among other things he led the Caja project to create a variant of Javascript that enforces capability-based security. -
Mark is a Linux kernel security and sandboxing expert on the Google Chrome team, where among other things he helped build the NaCl sandbox and developed the first working exploit of the Rowhammer hardware security flaw. Previous to Google, Mark developed Plash, a capability-based sandbox for Unix shell commands. -
Mark is one of the leading experts -- arguably the leading expert -- in the field of capability-based security. He is the designer of the E Language and the CapTP protocol on which Cap'n Proto (Sandstorm's underlying communications layer) is based. -
In early 2017, Sandstorm Development Group ran out of funding and the team primarily joined Cloudflare. Sandstorm development continued with a major rewrite of the HTTP proxy, a refactor of the account model, and the addition of localization support. However, the pace of development slowed, and the Oasis free plan was discontinued in 2018. Finally, Oasis shut down for paying customers at the end of 2019.
-In 2020, a group of Sandstorm enthusiasts began a community effort to revive development of Sandstorm. Ian Denhardt did a significant amount of work improving the experience of authorizing network requests from Sandstorm apps, refactoring older code, and making the codebase more maintainable. In 2021, this community group participated in FundOSS and was able to pay a developer to modernize our Etherpad package. As of 2022, Sandstorm Development Group has been completely dissolved, and development of the Sandstorm project has transitioned to a community-run model.
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Special thanks to key corporate and individual sponsors: draw.io, HumanWeb, Uniregistry, Roger Wagner, Audrey Tang, and Open Source Collective.