miraclx

Led and oversaw protocol development. Led the transition from the transactional, blockchain-like model to an eventually consistent one, opening the door to non-determinism, which was a big win. Wrote a paper on eventually-consistent state sync, which was then adopted and implemented. Implemented recursive sync between nodes on the protocol, which aids privileged state catchup, blob sharing, and key distribution. Reviewed > 95% of PRs merged, with maximum scrutiny, considering we were building a kernel for decentralized applications. Frequently spending 5-6 hours of the workday on reviews. Reviewed every protocol proposal and supported other team members in making them. Led the effort to transition from the old, hacky node structure to a cleaner setup with the actor model, ensuring ideal separation of concerns, and significantly reducing the bar for external contributors to participate. Following the initiation of our bounty program, supported external contributors to get familiar with and succeed in their efforts contributing to the protocol.

Built all the pieces that make up the Calimero protocol, which started as my submission for an internal hackathon and quickly became the company’s future. Built the networking stack (using rust-libp2p), and did lots of experimenting to make sure we account for numerous edge-cases, connecting geographically distant nodes, hole-punching in the best case, relaying in the worst, but consistently maximizing connectivity, resilient streaming, etc. WASM Runtime (using Wasmer), built from the ground up, accounting for structured message passing, and built to accommodate trivially swapping out the engine. Storage: built layers of abstraction over storage implementations to allow structured storage & retrieval, encoding relationships between high-level structures and their state representation, while still allowing for provider-specific optimizations. Coupled with the ability to iterate over structured data, staying zero-copy if possible. Development Environment: Built the SDK for guest app development, which turned out to be a bunch of proc-macros + FFI to talk to the WASM host runtime, employing various design patterns to avoid many macro potholes that impair a developer’s experience. Wrote a paper on end-to-end encryption in dynamic groups, which improves on libsignal in group settings. Mentored the entire team in their adoption of the Rust Language. Hosted many knowledge-transfer meetings to help in their journey.

Code owner of several parts of the development effort. From nearcore (the reference Client of the NEAR protocol) to the JSON-RPC server/client, to contract runtime and development environment (near-sdk-rs), developer tooling, Actions (CI), Automated Releases / Publishing (CD). Rust mentor to many, frequently hopping on calls to aid other teams in resolving their blockers.

Led the introduction, standardization, and stabilization of strictly-typed AccountId. Led the effort to get many crates from the workspace independent enough to be published to crates.io. Built and maintained an internal tool (themis - named after the Greek God of “Order”) for guaranteeing crate compliance in the workspace according to a set of pre-defined rules. Built CI pipelines for automating crate publishing, compliance, sanity, integration, fuzz, and simulation testing. Refactored and maintained the node runtime and JSONRPC server.