Contribute to Grin codebase

Development and Technical Discussion
1

Dear Grin community

I’ve only posted an idea or two on the forum previously, but I’ve been following Grin for a long time. I am really enthusiastic about the project and view it as the reference implementation of MimbleWimble.

I’ve witnessed the frustration in the forums and on keybase, and although I think this kind of heated debates is a sign of a thriving democracy and absolutely necessary, I am more and more driven to try and contribute.

From what I can gather there is a need for programmers, which I am. I have about 10 years experience, and I am comfortable coding in Rust. I have been following cryptocurrencies for several years and I am quite read up on the higher level ideas, but I have to admit that this would be my first professional contribution to a cryptocurrency project. That said, I wanted to ask for some thoughts on what projects you would consider lower hanging fruits at the moment, in that their ideas have been explored for a while, and that they would contribute the most to the project.

Personally the only one concrete task that I find lacking at the moment is the ability to easily run the Grin node through a SOCKS5 proxy, but I think I read in a post recently that somebody else was going to work on it. I am also quite interested in the Lightning Network, so I would find it interesting to for example investigate the possibility to use one of the existing LN nodes with Grin, however this task would in my view require a pretty substantial effort and I’m not sure if it would be the most pressing matter for Grin at the moment. I’ve had a look at the post 5 wish list Planning: Post 5.0.0 wish list · Issue #385 · mimblewimble/grin-pm · GitHub, but any additional suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

With the replies to this I might write a funding request if I feel comfortable that I would be able to contribute within a reasonable amount of onboarding into the actual codebase.

Thanks for reading

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Why don’t you just fork the repo and start coding fixing issues?

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I agree that it’s best to start contributing by writing code. While I think funding a few individuals to enable them to work full time on Grin is a great idea, we should do that only for people that have proven themselves and have been around for some time. There are some nice cases that are exceptions to this, but it’s important we don’t make funded contributions the standard way of contributing. This is not meant to discourage anyone making a funding request, I love the current paid contributions and having such people full time is a blessing. However, we need to balance things out and have code contributors that don’t apply for funding as well.

I hope you don’t take this personally as this paragraph is not targeted at you, it’s describing the general situation.

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Thank you both @davidtavarez and @oryhp for your replies. I suppose this was my way of gauging the present opportunities for working on Grin, and I appreciate the sincere feedback.

I’ll see what I can do.

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