I discovered the Bitcoin Core project through my full-time position at the Electric Coin Company, creators of Zcash, a code-fork of Bitcoin Core. Upon discovering a small bug in Zcash in 2019, I found that the bug also existed in Bitcoin Core; the fix became my first PR. I immediately fell in love with the development community, and since then have been contributing review and a few small PRs on my own time, while continuing full-time with ECC. I was accepted to the 2020 Chaincode Residency program in New York, which was canceled, but I did participate in the Chaincode study group. My goal is to gradually move to working on Bitcoin Core full-time.
It's well-know that Bitcoin Core is in crucial need of PR review, and this grant will allow me to spend one day of each week (20%) reviewing and testing PRs, while continuing 80% with ECC. I especially plan to take advantage of the weekly Bitcoin Core Review Club. I'll work with community members to find which PRs would be most important and productive for me to help review. I may contribute some small PRs that arise from review. I have long-time experience with data storage system backend software, and the mindset there is one of absolute correctness -- if data are ever corrupted or lost, there goes the system's reputation. So I'll be focusing on correctness, thread-safety, code organization and maintainability, test coverage, logging (for problem analysis), and related areas. I'm a big fan of the Unix philosophy's emphasis on simplicity. (Tony Hoare said, "There are two ways to write code: so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.")
I'm very grateful to have been welcomed and mentored by many people in the Bitcoin Core developer community, and I'd like to especially thank John Newbery, Amiti Uttarwar, Adam Jonas, Gloria Zhao, and Dhruv Mehta.