Russell joined Protocol Labs in early 2022 and handled maintenance and improvements for IPFS Desktop , IPFS Web UI , explore.ipld.io , the IPFS public-gateway-checker , and various other libraries, tools, and applications. He has helped organizations throughout Protocol Labs by interviewing potential candidates and assisting with hackathon mentoring & judging. Russell is passionate about improving DX for internal and external teams while building performant software that can scale. Russell now helps to maintain Helia  and js-libp2p  and runs the Helia Working Group . Russell is an ex-senior Software Engineer and Bar-Raiser from AWS, an ex-Nerdery Co-President, ex-PayPal Engineer, and he is proud to mention that he is a USAF veteran.