Blain Smith

Blain Smith photo

Blain has spent 27 years working in web, video streaming, gaming, cloud services, distributed systems, and networking. He has held many technical lead roles and worked closely with product leadership to build software solutions.

Most of his career in gaming and video streaming was doing consulting, so he has a unique perspective to understand not only the technical side but also the business development and product development side. His roles as Lead and Staff Software Engineer have afforded him to be in the room with lots of decision-makers to be able to design and build these complex systems firsthand while at Subspace and StackPath and work collaboratively with other engineers from Cloudflare and Fastly.

Blain has a soft spot for designing simple systems for complex problems, especially in distributed systems and low-level networking. He has given numerous conference talks on various subjects in these areas. Most notably, a talk on processing network packets at the Linux kernel level in order to measure timestamp information for billions of packets every minute to inform BGP routing changes.

Blain prioritizes free and open-source software and building sustainable systems built on a foundation of privacy, ethical, and moral values to instill trust in people who use the software he makes. He is an avid reader of arXiv and loves RFC1925, his favorite RFC.