Membership request

[sorpaas]

I'm Wei Tang and this is my membership request to Polkadot Fellows.

During 2018-2021, I worked on various components for the Substrate repo. This includes the PoW consensus engine and EVM support (now lives in the Frontier repo). I also helped with several things in the BABE consensus engine (secondary block VRF, etc), smaller pallets like atomic swap, and, during earlier stage of Substrate, child trie. There are also things that I, unfortunately, wasn't able to finish and remain in draft status, like the draft Sassafras consensus implementation that I worked on for a considerable extent.

At this moment I mostly work on the Frontier project -- the Ethereum compatibility layer in Substrate used by various parachains like Moonbeam and Acala.

[rrtti]

Great to see you here, @sorpaas! As a note, regarding the requirements for III Dan:

section 6.4.1. states:

Promotion should involve an in-person grading during which superiors may invite the individual to answer specific questions concerning their contributions.

• Defense should include a chat on the philosophic principles and their relation to the technology where they demonstrate expert knowledge confidently and betray no misinterpretations.
• At least three published long-form semi-technical articles concerning Polkadot.
• Played a primary role in implementing a major component from start to finish.
• At least one ecosystem presentation on Polkadot or some component of it.

I believe you fulfil these requirements and I am wondering if you could share with us the links to the 3 published long-term semi-technical articles concerning Polkadot. Please ensure that all requirements set out in the Manifesto for this rank and any prior ranks have been met and are clearly demonstrated. Please note that for III Dan and higher, a high degree of availability for the network must have been demonstrated (which I think its the case).

Thank you!

[sorpaas]

I am wondering if you could share with us the links to the 3 published long-term semi-technical articles concerning Polkadot

My blog is currently suffering some downtime, so I'm posting the Wayback Machine links:

• Staking OOM: written around the time the two OOM incidents happened on Polkadot, for the community to understand various efforts / PRs fixing the issue.
• Capability-based runtime modules: an (unused) design of not all pallets having "root access".
• Wrapper block: originally as an idea to migrate a full Ethereum(-alike) blockchain over to Substrate, now partially used in Frontier Ethereum-compatibility layer.
• Various proposals for Polkadot governance before the Goverance v2 era.

[gavofyork]

Thanks for the application, Wei.

Your contributions to the Polkadot ecosystem, particularly the creation of the Frontier project, are massive.

That said, neither the EVM pallet nor the PoW subsystem is a part of the Polkadot core infrastructure as per Manifesto 2.3.1, so contributions there cannot be considered as contributions to the core. (Though if they were, I think an even higher rank than 3 could be supported.)

Thankfully, there are numerous other examples of significant contributions to the core codebase, so I don't feel that this is an issue. For specifics, I think the child trie work fulfils the rank 3 requirement of "Played a primary role in implementing a major component from start to finish". I also think that work on implementing PoW consensus, Sassafras consensus (even though incomplete) and contributions to Babe, clearly demonstrate the understanding required.