Request for funding @jaspervdm, March-May 2020

I would like to request funding to work in a full time capacity on Grin development. In line with previous funding requests by others, I am asking to be funded for a period of 3 months (March to May 2020) for an amount of €10k/month. I think this allows for a good balance between accountability towards the community and stability for me.

The plan is to work on both the node and wallet. Below is a rough list of things I would work on, although priorities could change over time:

  • Improvements to both node and wallet. Examples include:
    • node: fully move p2p communication to async/.await (already in-progress), better integration between the different async components
    • wallet: increase performance by supporting different backends, improve slate format
  • Bug fixes on both node and wallet side
  • Bringing back integration tests between node and wallet (in collaboration with others)
  • Investigate Stratum V2, possibly resulting in an RFC
  • Make it easier for exchanges to integrate Grin by creating guides, a “best practices” list and other tooling if required

About me

Before venturing in the crypto world, I completed a masters degree in Subatomic Physics and a few years of research in the same field.

I have been a long-time member of the Grin community. I am 1/3rd of vault713, an open source collaboration that is behind grinbox (open federated relay service for Grin transactions) and wallet713 (Grin wallet that supports transacting with grinbox). Within the community I am probably best known for work on atomic swaps, but I made other contributions such as switch commitments and an improved bulletproof rewind scheme.

Next steps

The intention is to discuss this funding proposal at the upcoming Governance meeting on the 25th of February.

14 Likes

Please help work on bug fixes.
The wallet is very buggy which makes it very hard to use in production.
The node stops syncing and gets into states where the only way to recover is to delete the chain data and re-sync.
Fixing some of these issues will make grin easier to use, and IMO are much more important than new features.

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This request was approved: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-pm/blob/master/notes/20200225-meeting-governance.md#decision-approve-jaspervdm-funding-request

Has any work been done?

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That’s a good question and one we should not at all feel uncomfortable to ask.

It seems that in his funding period of €30k, jasper pushed several bugfixes to wallet and node repos, and wrote an incomplete RFC regarding Parallel IBD.
While he seems like a very capable guy, and his long-going efforts for grin development deserve much appreciation, the fact that he completed only 1 of his 6 points (and even that one for only half of the funding period) does raise serious questions about the aforementioned ‘community accountability’.

Let’s hope that jasper is going to take this seriously and clarify his meaningful contribution to the project in that period, or return a part of the grant to the fund.

edit: I’ve been made aware that jasper said he will come back and honor his commitments. Looking forward to having him back.

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March through May of 2020 (through now and beyond) have been a crazy time that none of us will forget. More communication and/or direct communication would be nice but I dont think it is unreasonable to have everyone be more understanding during these crazy times. All indications are that Jasper is a stand-up guy and will make good of his word and funded tasks. Worst case scenario, this is one of the benefits of using small time frames for these agreements. Most jobs are paid after the fact though, it may be smarter to have the payouts be at the end of the funding period rather than the beginning.

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To be honest… this is what we are hearing for months now. If he is the professional everyone claims he is then the least he can do is respond to sincere questions about this absence. Just on a forum. ffs.

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I would agree with you, in usual circumstances, a message would not have hurt indeed in that case and seems the normal thing to do, even if not giving much details. Hope he is Ok, and welcome back anytime

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All fair points. However, from my understanding based on a discussion in Grinhub, there hasn’t been any communication from Jasper aside from when @lehnberg reached out.

So paid in arrears vs paid in advance. That would certainly make everyone more accountable.

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Hey everyone,

I’m just writing a quick message here to notify everyone that I am back. Apologies for my absence, it was for personal reasons. I intend to make good on the time commitment made in the funding request. Therefore I will be working full time on Grin until the end of October. I will be focusing on the work ahead of me, so I will participate less in non-technical discussions.
I will be creating a new progress thread and post weekly updates in them. The first one will be posted at the end of this week, where I will summarise what I am working on now and what the plan is for the remaining period.

Thank you all for your patience

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glad to see you back! Do you have any plans to continue working past the October?

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Thank you! At this point I cannot say one way or the other. Due to my situation I think I have to put in the work to prove myself again first, and we will go from there.

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