Four-plus years herding a protocol nobody owns.
Ethereum doesn’t update itself. Network upgrades happen because a lot of independent people — client teams, researchers, EIP authors — get coordinated, and the Cat Herders exist to do the coordinating. I started as a Wrangler in early 2019: occasional note-taker for the All Core Devs call, EIP shepherding, identifying ecosystem needs, and lending code where it helped.
Later, as Catblazer, the role turned outward — a self-defined ops position hunting for coordination problems across the ecosystem and beyond: dev onboarding, sentiment gathering, initiative discovery. In 2021 that included running the Cat Herders podcast end to end — finding guests, prepping, interviewing, publishing — with guests like samczsun, Lefteris Karapetsas, Taylor Monahan, and Tomasz Stańczak.
As one of the original and active members, I was also a long-standing signer on the multisig.