Ethereum Protocol Fellowship | Becoming a core developer

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] good morning everyone hey it's uh the very last day of the conference it's morning so thank you so much for coming down here yeah I really appreciate all of you here I'm uh I'm excited to see so many faces uh this morning uh yeah considering it's last day and I'm Mario I'm from EFA I'd like to talk about um some something I believe is an interesting and important topic especially if you are interested in um contributing to ethereum itself so

yeah I'm glad you made it and before we uh before we jump into uh work on the ethereum we need to ask what is ethereum and uh always when I put this question I hear different answers because well there are many sites to it there are many opinions on what ethereum is so I would like to hear from you what is what is ethereum simple one word one sentence something short it's love it's a blockchain yeah that's right it's very much true I love that yeah it's a blockchain it's a protocol but also you know it's uh we are here right so I like to I like that Meme uh future friends right ethereum is Future sorry

collaboration cool cool yeah I would I would say something like uh yeah my coordination tool Global permissionless empowering individual we hear many of these things any other Vision Chris it's a movement I love that yeah that's great uh yeah I agree with all of that like there are many many uh viewpoints to it and um so the thing is that like if we speak like more from the material perspective if we want to touch the ethereum right it's not just like this abstract concept there is something to it there is some code some specifications and so on and that's what I would consider ethereum in like the material uh sense of the word so

um and the the sort of ethereum itself being implementation being the code being the software uh the core developers are people who work on it who help to maintain it right there is this group of people or different teams actually working on different domains and different parts of ethereum um just to give you an uh give you an overview so when we want to create this ethereum or when we when ethereum was created it just came as an idea uh with well many parts to it but we cannot build Technology based on just some idea some white paper so then we have yellow paper made based on that which creates a specification on so many eaps and uh uh specification in Python creates like the

specs how the protocol exactly has to behave right uh this is like the first thing that the core developer or researcher needs to work on to figure out how to specify the protocol very exactly so and also so it's effective to implement and it's the next steps we have the implementation of the constant as clients doing the proof of stake thing right the beacon chain and uh the execution clients where we have actual all the data all transactions all the smart contracts and so on so so we have the implementation which needs to be tested uh so we have like robust testing infrastructure of again different ways uh fuzzing and and uh cross-client testing and uh researchers who are working around all of this finding the

best possible solutions to the the problems that we are facing uh on the other hand uh if I say you know ethereum developer you can imagine like Solitaire like most of the people imagine some web3 devs so like those are people building on ethereum some different application or whatever maybe layer twos different languages using the existing infrastructure of ethereum the blockchain ethereum to build on it right now talking specifically about this like there is a bunch of them like if I talk about ethereum devs there is web 3 deaths deaths all over this conference all of the projects presenting themselves here are built on ethereum um so yeah thousands of them on the other hand if you will look into the

core contributors uh there are like there's maybe like the number would be around maybe 200 142 is members in protocol Guild which is like a magic list of core devs uh but it's opt-in uh so there is not all of them it's uh just part and um yeah I believe that it would be like small uh much smaller number two three hundred of people who are contributing to some parts of the protocol but what we need to realize is that like this whole machine that we have here is like what if what is it now like 500 billion dollars running on all the in all the tokens and everything on ethereum that's like understood the way how it works is is built by this many people let's say which is I mean it's

more than more than many other other Technologies of course but still if we want to make sure there are people who can uh you know carry the knowledge who can uh work on this and especially different parts it's it's impossible to be expert in like all of the ethereum so like these people are distributed in like many many different domains around the ethereum itself so uh yeah just to put a contrast like what is happening here the the app developers uh which I mentioned before building on ethereum using some solidity some some languages creating mostly smart contracts this is like what people can imagine as uh the ethereum dev but it's like very different environment because it's well on ethereum in a way

that uh these applications are responsible for just it's its users right and they mostly compete with other applications it's more like Market driven and I I compare it to building like fancy cars and the core development uh more to building the road itself right the platform the actual infrastructure that enables this um or I mean I would even say that like ethereum is a Bazaar right um but um so yeah the the core development is more about the low level languages which means like you know uh go rest Java C if you want and which is building the clients themselves and now these people are response for just users of some application that somebody built but for

the whole ethereum or the security of the whole thing and um and uh like it's the eaters are like the the way the core development works is very much different than uh the app development in a way that it's much more collaborative much more I don't want to say open because also the apps are open but open in a way that like there are people building the the same thing or like copy of ethereum it's a similar same implementations and different languages and they always work together they have to work together to make it work and um so it's more like people who are uh where ethos driven towards a mission and uh yeah building building this platform that allows the fancy cars so yeah what is what are they what are

they up to um why do we even need them like ethereum is running right so what are they working on these days so most importantly there is always maintenance uh there is always something to optimize to fix to improve in the code base itself some ways how we can make it make it Slimmer more effective so there is a lot of work on the clients on the software ethereum uh there is of course the new features coming in eips which need to be implemented and tested and um uh again like the testing is very robust like like we did this thing I'm going to mention it again but the merge took like few years right and the last year was basically just testing or like most of the last year was just making sure that

it's going to go smoothly which it did right theorem is still running as far as I know like making blocks and it's because of like very very robust testing and research and development cycle um yeah so again the research and generally improving ethereum like we are talking about different Visions for it whether it's finance and this and this everybody has some some idea what ethereum is but a common ground here is that we want to fulfill this Vision we want ethereum to have the Maximum Impact in whatever your vision is and uh contributing to ethereum itself then uh helps to helps ethereum to achieve this uh and I would yeah we have this we have this thing about the infant Garden right

like ethereum is a where people where people um uh working on the ethereum or kind of a gardeners or I like to say janitors or people who are you know making sure that the infrastructure runs and it's nice for everyone um I would consider it as contemporary Cypher punks uh people who are here to build the truly permissionless maybe uncensorable distributed systems which are uh parallel to whatever the corporate or the government systems are creating and um really like this this ethos is what I feel in the court of

community which is mostly again like less competitive more in like non-profits and different teams working together uh similar to like I would I would like the whole core development reminds me like 8080 labs in 60s 70s like the Unix development um and um uh like yeah so like the the development the research is uh there is there's I would say infinite amount of work on speaking about infant garden and just like you know maintaining improving this uh there is there is still enough work um so uh vitalik after after the merge says that ethereum is only about 55 finished uh

and uh uh this is the broad map which uh also like doesn't represent every everything that's happening on ethereum I would say but you see many of them like each block uh has its own domain its own expertise and you can just spend so much research on it so all of this like the whole scalability through llama right the blockchain three llama are the solutions to all of these exciting problems do things like the merch are are being worked on by the core devs but if you if I present this to you if I talk about these like really well important very hard problems I know it sounds scary well because it is because it's very complex and uh what we try to do uh is the interim protocol Fellowship

to make it actually less scary and much more easier for you to dive into these topics so uh now like what is what is the fellowship itself just to give you a brief history uh it was started by Piper who is like ethereum OG if you don't know him uh he started it originally as a cdap around two cohorts of people who we help to funnel to different projects mostly portal Network that he was running and after that we took over and also this uh we scale it and distribute it to different teams so now we had uh uh yeah uh so just talk about the program a little uh like the idea is

to give you the experience of the core Dev in a way that it's very self-directed you need to be able to uh choose what to work on and do the research and work on it uh there are people who help can help you and provide some guidance we connect people to uh mentors from the current Court of community uh however um like they are not there to hold your hands or anything just to you know give you a PR review or provide you solution to some issue that you that you are struggling with and uh it's completely open and permissionless so we have this GitHub repo where you can see all the work that's being done every update done by every fellow and I'm going to have a QR code for the repo if you are

interested I'm sorry if I wanted to do the picture um yeah and uh so so what we are doing is great harvesting this like community of peers who are working on something together like everybody's working on something different but together right uh it's a very Loosely structured thing with um uh with just few phases and uh the the execution of the project itself is like the main part of the uh of the um of the cohort uh and also like so uh before the code we open applications and we reward stipend to the most uh promising people um however you don't have to wait for

this because it's it's fully open so uh in the past cohort we had like 24 people that we awarded so I pended all together 36 fellows worked on the the court because they just can't because it's the GitHub repo and you can just come and we have an award step into some of them retrospectively because uh they proved to do a good job so yeah all from in the previous cohort we had over 600 right now we are running the fourth chord which I received like 400 applications and we also did like more than 40 interviews and accepted more than 30 people but these are the rough numbers that we're talking about here we have like weekly calls so we have this is uh office hours calls and stand-up calls as well um

and uh uh yeah uh the development updates the 300 of them that's this update provided by fellow every week or bi-weekly what they are working on right so we received over 300 of them like information from people what they are working on struggling with and over 40 percent of them uh get hired to some of the core teams or get a grant to continue working on the core infrastructure um here are some examples of projects from the previous cohort uh you see it's very diverse from like crypto economics to light clients parts of the ethereum clients account obstruction uh some research about data available

design blink uh here is example uh where uh uh ding shoe running she was working on um on DDOS protection in go ethereum and as she implemented it like week later they somebody triggered it on girly so like uh it was it was it was lucky to have that um so yeah you can you can read all of this in um this blog blog on blog.etherium.org uh we met in Denver to uh you see all the previous fellows there but right now we are as I mentioned running the next cohort so this ended in March and since then we've been preparing the court 4 which started a week ago um how it works so we are already past

the onboarding stage uh and people are starting to work like research their project so like the first two three weeks or like first maybe even first month for somebody is just learning and uh diving into a project so like from all of this uh all of the spectrum of different topics domains to work on ethereum uh they they uh uh they choose something to dive into learn about it propose a project get feedback from mentors and start working on the rest of the cohort the three months will be basically just working on it with some weekly updates and uh yeah uh we're looking for people who have some technology Foundation who are

excited to work on ethereum uh who have passion for this and uh they're you know able to work with other people remotely uh be self-directed um self-motivated um so it's open right now you can join the calls you can come to the you can come to the repository and just just be contributing we will be similar to Denver before we'll be meeting a Defcon act with presentations and mentors uh I get a skip trig but please this is the repo check this out so it's eat Dash protocol 4 right now where you can see again all the updates all the instructions there is the program guide a directory where you have all the information about uh

how to participate in the program and you can still join it's like the best time to join like this next week because you can still jump on the train of learning and then working on it and uh again like for active people who did even sub and application but it showed up and provide some valuable contributions we can provide stipend uh maybe for travel to Dev connect or somehow award you for being part of us uh so yeah here are here are the QR codes and that's that's it I get it I gotta finish I know I'm late guys I'm sorry uh it's uh slow morning so yeah if you want to the Google group is a mailing list where you can hear about updates from the the uh the program but Discord for repo is

important yeah so like let's work together on finishing ethereum and that's it thank you so much again guys um and please catch me around I work on this with my colleague George Davis he might be around here uh feel free to find me or or uh any of us to learn more about this thanks a lot yeah [Music] foreign

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