Brink is proud to announce a developer grant for Michael Ford (fanquake). He will be joining the Brink office in London to continue his work as a maintainer.
About Michael
Michael writes of his Bitcoin experience and goals:
I first contributed to Bitcoin Core in 2012. Since then, I’ve contributed initially part time, and then full time capacity to the project; primarily working on the build system. I became a Core maintainer in 2019. In the past I’ve worked on the transition of our release system from Gitian to Guix, ported our release time security checks to use LIEF, and contributed to the final stages of removing BIP 70, and then OpenSSL.
I plan to continue working full time on Bitcoin Core, primarily focussing on the build system, security and reducing the number of dependencies used in the codebase. I have a number of in-progress projects, including migrating our macOS toolchain to use a fully LLVM-based toolchain, adding support to our build system for producing static binaries using musl libc and improving support for us to begin using LTO.
Additionally I plan on collaborating with Carl Dong as he continues his work on the libbitcoin kernel project, and the Guix-based system we use to reproducibly create releases.
I also plan on working with Cory Fields, to develop LLVM-based tooling that will help the project more safely refactor and modularise its code base, as well as automate away somewhat trivial concerns that can sometimes consume too much developer time (linters, formatters, etc).
I’ve had various organizations sponsor my work on Bitcoin Core, and for the last 3 years, that has been BitMEX. Moving to Brink is the next step in my Bitcoin development journey, and I’m looking forward to building out, and working with, an office full of Bitcoin Core developers in London!
About Brink
Brink is a Bitcoin research and development centre, founded in 2020 to support independent open source protocol developers and mentor new contributors. If you or your organization is interested in supporting open source Bitcoin development, feel free to email us, donate@brink.dev.
Developers interested in either the grant or fellowship programs can apply now for the next funding round.
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