xiphon part-time coding

What

Would love to prolong my part time Monero coding for another 3 months.

There are some specific tasks i would like to work on first.

• Add Socks5 support in Monero GUI Advanced mode (remote node only).
  Tails, Whonix or any system with restricted network access (through socks proxy).
• Portable mode for Monero GUI.
  USB stick with Monero GUI. Right now there is no way to quickly access your monero on another PC except manually copying the wallet files and installing Monero GUI there.
  Use Monero GUI without leaving a trace on the PC.
• Docker Monero GUI Linux static build. Includes finishing CMake integration first.
  Provides an easy way (it's literally a one step process) to build Monero GUI from sources.
  Also might be used for Monero GUI reproducible builds in the future.

As usual will be working on Monero Core and Monero GUI code:

• Inspecting and implementing ongoing feature requests
• Submitting bug fixes
• New functionality
• Code review
• Putting my efforts where it is appropriate

Who

I'm Xiphon, active contributor to Monero Core and Monero GUI since July 2018.

My previous CCS proposals:

• !99 (merged)
• !55 (merged)
• !122 (merged)

During the recent 30h/week proposal i implemented:

• Improved automatic public node selection algorithm used in Simple mode (---bootstrap-daemon-address auto)
  https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/6357
  Introduced a scoring system for automatically discovered public nodes, penalizing failing nodes and prioritizing the stable ones.
  Please see the linked Github pull request for technical details.

• Monero GUI one-click update downloading and verification
  https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/pull/2832
  https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/pull/2824
  https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/pull/2819
  Verifies update binary using shasum-compatible (SHA256 algo) output signed by two maintainers.
  Downloads both required files from getmonero.org:

  • hashes.txt - signed shasum output generated by a maintainer
  • hashes.txt.sig - detached signature of hashes.txt generated by another maintainer

  Hardcoded @binaryFate, @fluffypony, @luigi1111 public keys.
  Update verification requires using any 2 of them.

• Reduced Monero daemon startup time (Work in progress)
  https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/6443
  It takes quite a long time to just start the daemon, sometimes it takes up to ~90 seconds on my test machines.
  Plan to significantly reduce the daemon startup time.

Submitted numerous bug fixes and improvements to both Monero GUI and Monero Core repositories.

I strongly encourage you to visit the following Github links to see the amount of work done by me, its quality and importance for the Monero Project.

Please check the following links to inspect my Monero-related activity:

• Monero Core - https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Axiphon
• Monero GUI - https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Axiphon

Proposal

Looking forward to coding and accomplishing mentioned and ongoing tasks and issues. Implementing new code/functionality that will be needed. Investigating bug reports and submitting bug fixes, fixing build and compilations errors/warnings/etc. Would like to inspect and complete/fix/address issues and feature requests that are reasonably desired and/or worth to spend time on. Improving GUI, fixing UI/UX issues, implementing design changes.

Dedicate 30 hours per week to Monero Project, at 55 USD/hour rate for a total of 371 XMR. XMR/USD rate is based on the 14-day moving average exponential on Kraken from 15 Apr 2020, which is approximately 53.40 XMR/USD.