Charles Iliya Krempeaux

AI Community

AI (short for “artificial intelligence”) is the intelligence of machines. Although often the topic of sci-fi, AI is an important technique and tool used by specialists.

Charles founded and led, what was at one time, the largest AI, machine learning, and data science community in western Canada.

He took the community from 0 (zero) to over 10,000 members — made up of software engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, university professors, and others.

Its nexus was the data science meetup, machine learning meetup, and the learn data science meetup.

He headed and actively organized the community for 11 years — from 2012 to 2023.

WHATWG

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is the working-group responsible for setting the standard for many of the core technologies on the Web and Internet — the most famous probably being HTML5.

The WHATWG primary focus has been on the Web — further developing it as a semantically-rich cross-platform application development platform.

Charles was an active member of the WHATWG from 2005 to 2010.

Charles' most notable contribution was in helping to the create the now ubiquitous HTML5 (with the other members of the WHATWG) — one of the core technologies of the Web and the Internet. And in particular focusing on bringing <video> to the Web.

Show In A Box

The word “vlog” appears in most modern English dictionaries as both a noun and verb.

vlog (noun): A weblog using video as its primary presentation format.

vlog (verb): To post a video to a video weblog.

The origin of this word (“vlog”) goes back to an online community founded in 2004 — the “videblogging” mailing list. The noun “video blog” (short for “video weblog”) was (itself) shortened to “vlog”.

(Historical context note — mailing lists were, during this era, one of the dominant forms of social-media. What most people think of as social media today (such as Twitter, Instagram, and others) were nascent technologies back then. Back then it was common for online communities to form on mailing lists.)

This video blogging (i.e., vlogging) community was the first video blogging community.

This video blogging online community existed during a era of the Web & Internet where the Web was still largely text and image based. Where video was still mostly not practical. But where a group of people, whose nexus was on the videoblogging mailing list, wanted to change things, and bring video to the Web and the Internet.

Charles was part of this community — the “videblogging” community.

In 2007, Charles (as a software engineer) created the first open-source vlogging software — VideoPress.

Later in 2007, a small number of people from this video blogging community (including Charles) created the first open-source social-media software for video — it was called “Show In A Box” (SIAB). VideoPress became part of Show In A Box.

Charles' contribution was as lead software engineer. He created the VideoPress vlogging software, which was a part of Show In A Box.

This was an important technology for the era, as nothing like it existed at the time.

Online Advertising

Today, online advertising is more than a USD $260+ billion industry. It is a staple of the Web and Internet — today's ubiquitous Web and Internet likely wouldn't exist without online advertising.

The institution that makes online advertising a USD $260+ billion industry is — the ad network. The market places by which online advertising space is bought and sold.

Charles (co-) created the first (online) ad network.

As a software engineer, Charles was an early pioneer in the online advertising space. He used a confluence of software engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), and business skills to create it.

The technology he created later was acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft later sold the technology to Facebook.

He later went on to create ad networks for some of the largest companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Mono Handbook

.NET is the technology platform that (via Unity) famous video games such as Pokémon Go, Among Us, and Cuphead were created with, that is a staple of fortune 500 enterprises software and product development, and that the C# & F# programming languages are built on.

Mono was the first open-source implementation of .NET. (At the time, Microsoft's implementation of .NET was still closed-source.)

The Mono Handbook is a guide (a textbook for software engineers) to the Mono runtime, related tools, libraries, and .NET itself, developed by the Mono team.

From 2002 to 2003, Charles was part of the Mono team.

In 2003, Charles co-authored "The Mono Handbook".

(He wrote the chapters on GTK#, GNOME# and Rsvg#.)

Charles' contribution was as an author of a textbook for software engineers.

Netscape Open Directory

Founded in 1994, Netscape was at one time one of the most famous companies on the Web — being the company behind the most popular web-browser at the time. Their flagship product, the Netscape web-browser, was for a long time the doorway to the Web for most people in the world. To many (perhaps most) people of the time, in their minds Netscape was the Internet.

In 1998, Netscape created the Netscape Open Directory via an acquisition of NewHoo (which was previously named ‘Gnuhoo’) — a human created & curated multilingual open-content directory of references to web-sites and web-pages.

The Netscape Open Directory later rebranded to the Open Directory Project and dmoz (short for “directory.mozilla.org”).

This was during an era of the Web when the problem of searching the Web hadn't been solved yet — during the surfing-the-web era. When human curated directories of references to web-sites and web-pages were still important.

From 1997 to 2000, Charles was an editor on Netscape's (and later AOL Time Warner's) Open Directory Project (a.k.a. "dmoz").

Charles' contribution was as an editor — where his work was used by corporations such as: Google, Alexa, AOL, Lycos, Netscape, and many many others (which were famous and well-known tech companies of that era) — and his work was used by hundreds-of-millions of people.

#SpaceHost

#SpaceHost is a fully-managed hosting server for all of the Fediverse and the open social web.

From 2022 to the present, Charles has been CEO of #SpaceHost.

While performing his duties as CEO — Charles also worked as a senior product manager, and a senior principal software engineer on #SpaceHost. (In a start-up enviornment, you tend to wear-many-hats.)

Charles' major accomplishments at #SpaceHost include —

• founding #SpaceHost in 2022 with Massoud Seifi and Chris Trottier,
• doing the market research & industrial product research,
• identifying the market need,
• coming up with the product concept,
• recruiting and hiring the initial team with Massoud,
• providing the vision for the company,
• leading a team to build the initial MVP,
• leading a team to for the on-going product & technology development,,
• marketing #SpaceHost with Chris,
• managing the day-to-day activities of the company,
• doing software engineering work to develop new Fediverse software,
• creating a company with a product in the market and paying customers.

Railtown

Railtown is a Vancouver based search lab, incubator, and accelerator.

The origin of Railtown goes back to 2016. Over the years Charles has served as Managing Director, General Partner, Executive Chairman, CTO, and CPO, and CEO, and senior principal software engineer as Railtown evolved.

Charles' major accomplishments at Railtown include —

• growing a startup studio incubator from 1 (one) person to a team of over 50 people distributed globally across the world — including executives, investors, executive entrepreneurs, software developers, UX researchers, illustrators, concept artists, animators, QA specialists, marketers, recruiters, and more,
• bringing in funding from investors,
• managing the relationship with investors,
• (initially) recruiting and hiring — until we built up a team of recruiters and interviewers,
• building up a management structure within the company,
• training, mentoring, and providing guidance to staff and executive entrepreneurs,
• managing the day-to-day operations of the company,
• providing the strategic decisions for the company.

Koho

Koho is a Canadian fintech company providing banking services to Canadians. Koho is first modern, mobile, online-first (neo) ‘bank’ in Canada.

In 2015 Charles joined Koho, as its founding Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Charles took Koho from nothing to having a product in the market with customers.

Charles built the banking system himself. He later hired a team of software engineers, product managers, and others to scale development. And led the day-to-day activities of the technology and product development.

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts (EA) is one of the largest video game companies in the world — known for making Star Wars, FIFA, Apex Legends, Titanfall, Command & Conquer, Need for Speed, NHL, and many many other video games.

In 2013, Charles (again) re-joined Electronic Arts (EA) as principal software engineer & architect.

Charles' major accomplishments at Electronic Arts (EA) include —

• creating the core platform technology for the 2nd largest video game company in the U.S. and Europe,
• solving some of EA's major infrastructure & back-end scaling problems,
• creating a plan to move EA to taking a data-driven and scientific approach to marketing, employing machine learning, statistics and data science,
• starting the software engineering & architecture work on a distributed reinforcement learning system, and
• creating numerous back-end APIs,
• helping any team or department within EA with any urgent back-end development or infrastructure work work.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular enterprise-class social media management platform, that allows users and enterprises to manage multiple social-media network profiles, schedule messages and tweets, track brand mentions, and analyze social media traffic. Hootsuite was at one time the №1 Twitter application in the world. HootSuite supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Mixi, MySpace, Ping.fm, and WordPress; as well as supports Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Trendspottr, Constant Contact. Digg, Flickr, Get Satisfaction, and InboxQ through HootSuite Apps. Today Hootsute is a has more than 1,000 people on staff, has 13 office spread out across the world, and is worth around $1 billions,

In 2011, Charles joined Hootsuite while it was still a startup, with only a handful of people working on Hootsuite in a back-room behind the Invoke office. (Charles was recruited by Hootsuite's employee №1 — Beier Cai.) Charles joined as a senior software engineer but later became an engineering lead (when the company grew large enough to need an engineering lead).

Charles' major accomplishments at Hootsuite includes —

• creating Hootsuite's integration with Facebook,
• creating Hootsuite's integration with LinkedIn,
• creating Hootsuite's integration with Foursquare,
• creating Hootsuite's app platform and app directory,
• (re)building Hootsuite's webfeed (RSS, Atom, etc) system,
• creating numerous back-end APIs,
• providing engineering leadership for 4 teams:
  • the analytics team,
  • the app directory team,
  • the acquisitions integrations team, and
  • the web team,
• onboarding new software engineering hires,
• training & mentoring software engineers,
• supervising software engineers,
• performing design reviews of other engineers' designs,
• performing code reviews of other engineers' code,
• ensuring, encouraging and enforcing the quality of engineering work of other performed by other engineers.