Member request

[drahnr]

Intro

I've been involved with polkadot for 2.4 years, as core developer and team lead at parity. From the beginning of it's implementation starting with individual subsystems, introducing typed error management and later shifting my focus to reliability and observability topics, and onboarding new-joiners.

Direct Contributions

My list of merged PRs and contains a spectrum of PRs, most noteworthy:

• overseer pattern and message graph generation [orchestra] extract graph logic and enhance with cycle detection + coloring paritytech/polkadot#5614
• overseer refactor to give compile time guarantees feat: allow subsystems to send only declared messages, generate graphviz paritytech/polkadot#5314
• observability cross referencing jaeger and prometheus traces observability: tracing gum, automatically cross ref traceID paritytech/polkadot#5079
• subsystem impl implement bitfield distribution subsystem paritytech/polkadot#1368
• initial thiserror based error handling introduce errors with info paritytech/polkadot#1834
• fatality based error levels fatality based errors paritytech/polkadot#4448

and a few more scattered ones for the polkadot relay chain runtime.

Created the initial concept of malicious integration tests, checking the odd-cases as in broader scope by using polkadot subsystem replacements.

I implemented the currently used, optimized erasure coding implementation together with Jeff - from survey to draft, to debugging, down the fuzzing road.

Related

Besides that, worked on specifying the initial outline for Zombienet and seeded the idea of polkadot-introspector.

Education

I have been an instructor in the first cohort, and will be one of the Polkadot Dev Camp instructors too.

---

Given the above, Dan 4 seems to be reasonable.

[rphmeier]

I have nothing but positive things to say about the work @drahnr has done. He certainly meets the technical requirements of the III Dan:

As a foundational grade, a Fellow represents both a ceiling and a floor: becoming
a Fellow indicates the individual has enough knowledge and skill to build
substantial protocol components (i.e. all but the major protocol components,
e.g. a pallet or 2-10,000 line crate) alone and with high expectations that they
will be completed correctly and to a high standard. They should be able and willing to support that which they built
given that it is running 24/7 on a public network. This means a commitment to availability even when it may be
inconvenient for them and, in periods of lesser-availability, taking on a responsibility to make this clear to their team
prior

When it comes to the IV Dan, I have two objections:

• Time: it requires ~3 years from the attainment of I Dan to progress to the IV Dan

• "Rather than (just) plentiful incremental low-level improvements to the
  protocol, substantial valuable individual contributions to the (r)evolution of the protocol should have been demonstrated
  through the design, architecture and/or implementation of key future components which were (ultimately) found valuable
  by the Fellowship."

  • While @drahnr has many examples of committing high-quality implementations of components as well as of high-level software architecture and design, I believe that IV Dan would require more examples of attributable design and architecture work at the protocol or SDK level. The work on 'Malus' and 'ZombieNet' and 'polkadot-introspector' may already fit this bill.

Therefore I recommend acceptance to the III Dan for the time being

[gavofyork]

Time-wise III Dan seems defensible. I would refer to the Manifesto 6.4.1 regarding contributions required for III Dan:

• a commitment to availability even when it may be inconvenient for them and, in periods of lesser-availability, taking on a responsibility to make this clear to their team prior.
• Played a primary role in implementing a major component from start to finish
• At least three published long-form semi-technical articles concerning Polkadot.
• At least one ecosystem presentation on Polkadot or some component of it.

Could be that https://github.com/paritytech/reed-solomon-novelpoly satisfies point 2. However, I don't see anything presented to satisfy points 1, 3 and 4.

[rphmeier]

I support @drahnr for III Dan - given his published contributions to the Polkadot Parachains Implementers' guide, some presentation and discussions at Rust meetups, and educational work in the developer academy, I believe that the spirit of the outreach requirements are met.

I would stress the fact that inclusion at III Dan requires a high degree of commitment to availability and participation in the development of Polkadot's core code

[drahnr]

I do understand the time commitment and I'll be around and contributing to the polkadot git repo primarily, the contribution stream will pick up again towards the end of Oktober/early November.