Behind The Blockchain: an interview with Thomas Uebermeier, VP of Engineering ex-Parity Technologies

In this edition of Behind The Blockchain I spoke with Thomas Uebermeier. Thomas shared his career journey so far along with the skills he has learned along the way which have helped him grow and develop. Thomas shared his opinions on challenges in Web3 which still need to be overcome and the future of the relationship between blockchain, cloud and DevOps. We talked through his role at Parity Technologies and some of the challenges they had to solve.

So, let's get into it...

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Jack "For people who don’t know who you are, could you Introduce yourself?"

Thomas "I am Thomas, Thomas Uebermeier, an engineering manager and leader with nearly 25 years of experience. I have seen a wide variety of industries and work including a few years in the web3 industry, having been the VP for the Substrate Engineering at Parity Technologies. Since summer last year, I left Parity and am now a freelance consultant helping companies making use of web3 related technologies and solving problems of scaling engineering organisations."

Jack "Can you talk us through your career journey so far?"

Thomas "I taught myself coding when I was young from books and tested my code at warehouse home computers, later I started to study computer science, but left to write code for early web1 applications. Nearly 20 years ago, I then left my home country Germany to work on the Open Source revolution with Red Hat. Since then I have held different roles in 4 countries and spend a lot of time solving problems with large-scale systems or low-latency setups.

I always had one leg in leadership positions, I always joked it was because I am the only one who liked sitting in meetings."

Jack "Could you talk us through the skills, both soft and technical, which you needed to develop to reach your current position?"

Thomas "Looking back over time, it is mostly being able to adapt to new technologies. Programming languages, frameworks and architecture changes every few years, if you are not staying curious for all the new things out there then you don't progress. Many engineers find one tech they really like and use it as their tool to solve everything. You know it very well, it is convenient, because you only need to apply your knowledge and you can make it fit. But we all know if your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail and you become a one-person anti-pattern.

Keep eyes and ears open to what people tell you, assume there is always someone with more knowledgeable in the room."

Jack "Can you talk us through some of your predictions for how the landscape of Web3 will change over the next few years?"

Thomas "Every hype cycle has a valley of disillusions after the inflated expectations, that's where we are now, the unlimited investment money gone and will be for some time.

There are many similarities to the Dot-Com Bubble, not only from an economic view, but also from the inside. In the late 90's there was also so much money pumped into developing the tech and it needed years to mature, years to find use cases. The classical home page and pet.com dies, but companies like Google and Meta were born in this time.

The current market will sort out a lot of actors, but the tech will not disappear. Solid mature products will hit the market in the next few years."

Jack "What are the most pressing needs (technically) for scaling the use of Web3 and decentralised technologies?"

Thomas "Web3 products currently face a problem where monetisation is too easy and can be done before the product is useful, leading to an oversaturated market of financial services. To attract and retain new users, web3 projects should focus on building products and services that provide real value to people in their daily lives, while being easy to understand and use, addressing privacy concerns, lowering the barrier for entry and creating user-friendly interfaces. This will create a sustainable ecosystem that is not just reliant on the buying and selling of tokens."

Jack "In your opinion, what are some of the potential problems which need to be overcome before blockchain becomes mainstream?"

Thomas "Crypto has gotten a bad reputation due to insufficient regulation, we need to stop this. Many projects seem to target only exiting crypto enthusiasts, which leads to a null-sum game for web3, we need to create products which help established businesses as well as everyone's mom to get out of the valley."

Jack "How would you go about solving the regulation problem?

Thomas "Regulating crypto and web3 technologies is a challenging task for governments globally, as these technologies are inherently not only location-independent, but also borderless. To effectively address this issue, international cooperation is necessary to establish clear and consistent rules. Once regulations are clearly defined, it will likely lead to increased adoption and usage by the general public."

Jack "As someone with a strong Infrastructure background, how do you see the relationship between Blockchain, DevOps and Cloud evolving over the next few years?"

Thomas "Great question! I think it is similar to IoT - we are getting into a world where we have many devices, some are owned and controlled, some are external or semi-external. How to trust signals, computations and data? I think a blockchain could add the trust layer we will need. Projects like ICP and Protocol Lab's IPFS are also interesting projects which merge infrastructure and blockchains together."

Jack "What is your opinion on decentralised storage and compute?"

Thomas "It will always be slower than centrally organised data, but using a blockchain layer to only certify otherwise stored data can only guarantee if the data has been manipulated with or not, if it has been modified, where do you get the real one from? A blockchain stored dataset (or computation) has guaranteed the data and is unstoppable. In some cases this difference might be important."

Jack "Is there a future in which we move away from centralised cloud providers?"

Thomas "I don't think centralised cloud providers will get replaced, they provide scaling and affordable computing resources which will always be needed, but there will be room for another layer to safeguard tamper proof data."

Jack "We're seeing an increasing number of L1s and L2s enter the Blockchain space. How can we evaluate which ones are needed, or which ones are going to make it?"

Thomas "I look out for the novelties and which try to solve real world problems. In today's market it just isn't enough to convince an VC with some slides, you need to convince people to buy the product and blockchain as a product is provided by the L0's.

Make it a product which solves people's problems and they will spend money on it."

Jack "You were the VP of Engineering at Parity, leading the team who created the Substrate and Ink! technologies. Could you talk to us a little bit about the road to creating those technologies?

Thomas "The framework was taken out of Polkadot's early code written by Gavin Wood and the early Parity team and followed Gavin's light paper."

Jack "Why didn't you just use what was already available?"

Thomas "Some technologies such as parachains as well as nominated proof of stake (NPoS) did just not exist in 2016."

Jack "What roadblocks did you hit which were particularly tricky to overcome and how did you overcome them?"

Thomas "Parity was working on research and technologies which did not exist before, as well on long running roadmaps (years long). In such a setup it is difficult to keep focus over such a long time. We ran into dead-ends, design limitations and in some cases we needed to adjust our targets massively after releasing.

It's easy to build something which is just a variation of what already exists, it is an adventure to discover the unknown."

Jack "If you were given an unlimited pot of money, what challenge in Web3 would you like to solve?"

Thomas "An unlimited pot of money already seems to have gone into the web3 world and we just digest it. What is being developed in terms of scaling, usability for both end users as well as institutional, new use cases and ideas is amazing. At this point, it is time to lean back, be patient and let the engineers do their work.

One exciting problem Parity tries to solve is to make cross-chain communication within the Polkadot ecosystem possible. In a dream, we could connect everything from Ethereum to all the other L0's."

Jack "As an engineering leader in Web3, what advice would you give to people looking to follow in your footsteps?"

Thomas "Work on what you believe in and what brings you joy. Stay curious and accept that the world changes around you. What might be a weird thing today might be mainstream tomorrow. If you stand still, you sink like a stone. If you adapt, you fly. Be courageous and take risk. And most of all: believe in people."

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We really enjoyed understanding Thomas' career journey. Thomas shared some interesting thoughts on Web3, the future of DevOps and decentralised cloud and shared some brilliant advice on skills to learn and develop to build your career.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Thomas' journey for years to come!

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To get involved with Behind The Blockchain or for recruitment related conversations reach out to Jack on Jack@unveilrecruitment.com