Request for funding @trevyn, Apr 2021

Governance
#1

About me

  • Software & hardware engineer for over 30 years, including at a big-5 tech company.
  • 1 year intensive Rust experience.

Scope

I expect to continue making regular contributions of a similar variety, quality, and pace as I have over the past 7 days.

These contributions have included detailed technical responses to community support requests, bug fixes and related research, and code maintenance tasks. While these tasks have all been self-selected, I am also eager to focus on any prioritized issues that arise.

In the past 7 days, I have authored and/or made contributions that resolve these issues and PRs:
grin#3596 Defork croaring
grin#3545 Support Apple Silicon (node)
grin-wallet#571 Support Apple Silicon (wallet)
grin-wallet#479 Build error when targeting Apple iOS for grin-wallet
grin-wallet#596 Clippy easy wins (code clarity and cleanliness)
grin#3610 Tracking issue for Tokio 1.x
grin-wallet#554 The Trust Settings Record was corrupted
grin-wallet#533 cargo warning when updating grin crates
grin-wallet#556 Compilation error when using grin_wallet_libwallet as dependency
forum.grin.mw/8413 Failed to start a new grin node
forum.grin.mw/8456 Cargo Build Failed
grin#3548 grin v5.0.1 core dumped
grin#3595 Panic in cursive dependency

Future Directions

Based on what I’ve learned so far, and as funding is available, I expect to be able to increase this scope over the longer term. Areas of interest to me include:

  • Improving the development bounty experience and recruiting and onboarding new Rust engineers, including via direct outreach to qualified individuals. Triaging atomicity of issues, proposing specific, approachable bounties, and proactively driving this process.
  • Working with the community to identify specific areas of community interest, and translating these into actionable development plans and bounties.
  • Maintaining high-level architectural documentation.
  • Prototyping improved UX for end-user transaction flows. (I have significant frontend and UX design experience as well.)
  • Making the tools that third-party developers need to easily embed great Grin experiences into their applications.

Request

Full time, 10,000 EUR/month. I have no other time commitments. I’m flexible on the length of the term and the payout schedule, and propose “the month of April” as a starting point for discussion.

I’m aware of the recent conversations about time-based vs. project-based requests, and after consideration, I believe that I would work best with a time-based request. That said, as a new contributor, I’m open to payout at the end of the period after a formal re-evaluation if there is any concern about my reliability or ability to contribute.

(Posted Monday March 22. Next formal step: discussion at Tuesday March 30 Governance meeting.)

29 Likes
@trevyn - Progress update thread
#2

Great to see!

If you don’t mind sharing; I’m curious how you found out about Grin? and what made you decide to get involved now?

#3

I’m curious how you found out about Grin?

From this Reddit post: Neo_Reacton comments on Official /r/rust "Who's Hiring" thread for job-seekers and job-offerers [Rust 1.50]

and what made you decide to get involved now?

Grin’s community-oriented philosophy and governance are very appealing to me, and I have some familiarity and positive experience with the process of distributed governance and decision-making from my involvement with the Rust ecosystem.

I also have an interest in the underlying technologies and implications of distributed, cryptographically-secured communication protocols in general, and Grin specifically is an ecosystem that I’d be proud to contribute to.

It seems like Grin could use another experienced Rust dev in the mix, so it sounds like a win-win for everyone. :slight_smile:

11 Likes
#4

Thanks for writing this up, I’m very glad you put up a fund request. I do think you’d be a good added force to the project. I have a few questions:

  1. What is the time range of the proposal? The ones we had so far were for 1-3 months. If it is a longer term thing (a couple of months at least), then I believe we should flesh out the objectives that would be tackled a bit more. I think deciding on what exactly to tackle might be a bit hard for you as you’re new to this project so perhaps others can help with this, but we should first see what everyone thinks about this.
  2. Did you have in mind focusing more on the node or the wallet or are you indifferent on that?

Feel free to ping anyone on keybase when you have questions.

I’d love to see this one get through👍

2 Likes
#5

Thank you for the kind words! :slight_smile:

  1. What is the time range of the proposal?

This specific proposal is for one month, the month of April. That said, I would love to participate in a longer-term capacity. As you mention, having a more detailed and concrete list of objectives would definitely be appropriate for a future longer-duration funding request. As always, I’m very willing to receive feedback and adjust as necessary.

  1. Did you have in mind focusing more on the node or the wallet or are you indifferent on that?

Flexible. Wallet and node seem very intertwined anyway, with grin_wallet_util importing a good chunk of node. My primary concern is where I can be of most benefit to the project.

1 Like
#6

Hi There @trevyn nice request you made! Would you consider also to be paid ( for example 15% / 25% ) in GRIN currency?

Thanks!

#7

Would you consider also to be paid ( for example 15% / 25% ) in GRIN currency?

Absolutely!

#8

That is awesome! <3 @lehnberg perhaps we could motivate this option a bit more?

1 Like
#9

I think it’s fair to warn you that we have only a few (mostly unknown) exchanges so you might want to check the liquidity of those if you plan on immediately selling - I don’t really know the state of liquidity there. If you plan to hodl, then that’s not an issue I suppose :slight_smile:
We have only 3.8k Grin in the fund from what I can tell so I’m not sure what that means if someone wants to get paid in Grin. Perhaps that’s a food question for the governance meeting
https://grin.mw/fund

This isn’t meant to discourage you but rather to make sure you’re aware of this. I’d support any new person using the wallets and potentially identifying issues and seeking solutions for them :+1:

1 Like
#10

Added to agenda: Agenda: Governance Mar 30 2021 · Issue #410 · mimblewimble/grin-pm · GitHub

6 Likes
#11

Welcome aboard @trevyn!
As you are no doubt already aware there is no lack of work to be done…

From your contributions so far and overall willingness to just get involved from day 1 I am :+1: on this.
See you over on github and the dev channels!

And just to be clear - anybody is free to ask questions in this forum. Questions about being paid in grin are not an indication that this would actually be preferred by the current fund key holders (funds are held in BTC). The majority of funding requests to date have been funded in BTC.

12 Likes
#12

:+1: from me too.

I like your approach at getting things done. I’m impressed by how fast you are submitting PRs and fixing issues.

And agree with @antiochp, so far BTC works, in a longer term it’d be nice to pay in Grin but that’s a completely different topic.

8 Likes