Member Request

[kianenigma]

Membership Request

Hi, I am Kian Paimani, known as @kianenigma. I have been working on Polkadot/Kusama through Parity since February 2019 and I can categorize my main contributions to Polkadot's ecosystem as follows:

1. Maintaining and developing the staking sub-system.
2. General FRAME development, especially testing and quality assurance.
3. Polkadot-native side-projects.
4. Education

My first contribution to Polkadot is also indeed related to staking: paritytech/substrate#1915

Staking system

I joke as the Polkadot staking to be both my blessing and my curse over the years. I started working on it since the first days that I joined this ecosystem and the work is ongoing ever since. In the past, I focused on making sure that the staking system is secure and to some extent scalable. More recently, I coordinated the (imminent) launch of Nomination Pools. Nowadays I also put an extra effort on making sure that this sub-system of Polkadot is sustainable, through code refactor and educating other core developers.

Lastly, I have been the main author of the Polkadot staking newsletter, which is my main attempt at making the entire complexity and development of this part of the protocol transparent to the end-users.

I expect myself to contribute directly to the staking system for at least another ~12 months, if not more, and afterwards having the role of an advisor.

Some notable contributions:

• Offchain Phragmén BREAKING. paritytech/substrate#4517
• Decouple Staking and Election - Part 3: Signed Phase paritytech/substrate#7910
• Tracking issue for next generation pallet-staking and elections paritytech/substrate#6242
• Glue the new staking bags to the election snapshot paritytech/substrate#9415
• Staking Miner paritytech/polkadot#3141
• Partial Unbonding for Nomination Pools paritytech/substrate#11212
• Fast Unstake Pallet paritytech/substrate#12129

FRAME

Historically, I have contributed a variety of domains in FRAME, namely:

• Early version of the weight system refactor: Transaction-Payment module paritytech/substrate#3816 Weight annotation. paritytech/substrate#3157
• Early version of the transaction fee system
• Primitive arithmetic types Refactor: fixed point arithmetic for SRML. paritytech/substrate#3456
• Council election pallet srml-module: Phragmen election paritytech/substrate#3364

Many of which were, admittedly, a PoC at most, if not considered "poor". I am happy that nowadays many of the above have been refactored and are being maintained by new domain experts.

These days, I put most of my FRAME focus on testing and quality assurance. Through my work in the staking system, I have had to deal with the high sensitivity and liveness requirement of protocol development first hand (I believe I had to do among the very first storage migrations in Kusama) and consequently I felt the need to make better testing facilities, all of which have been formulated in https://forum.polkadot.network/t/testing-complex-frame-pallets-discussion-tools/356. Some relevant PRs:

• Migration testing runtime API/Bot paritytech/substrate#8038
• follow-chain testing mode for try-runtime (and revamp CLI configs).  paritytech/substrate#9788
• Runtime State Test + Integration with try-runtime paritytech/substrate#10174

Regardless of wearing the staking hat, I plan to remain a direct contributor to FRAME, namely because I consider it to be an important requirements of successfully delivering more features to Polkadot's ecosystem.

Polkadot-Native Side Projects

I have started multiple small, mostly non-RUST projects in the polkadot ecosystem that I am very happy about, and I plan to continue doing so. I have not yet found the time to make a "polished product" out of any of these, but I hope that I can help foster our community such that someday a team will do so. I consider my role, for the time being, to put ideas out there through these side projects.

• https://github.com/substrate-portfolio/polkadot-portfolio/
• https://github.com/kianenigma/polkadot-basic-notification/
• https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-scripts/
• https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-debug-kit/

Education

Lastly, aside from having had a number of educational talks over the years (all of which are listed in my personal website), I am a big enthusiast of the newly formed Polkadot Blockchain Academy. I have been an instructor in the first cohort, and continue to contribute for as long and as much as I can, whilst still attending to the former 3 duties.

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With all of that being said and done, I consider myself at the beginning of the path to Dan 4, but happy to start at a lower one as well.