jeffro256: part-time dev work 2022Q3

"as I am rather busy with schoolwork and my job"

Can you honestly commit to 30 hours a week for 3 months?

edit: i'm not a coder
edit: my opinion on the technical merit of this proposal is irrelevant, but what i can say is selsta will benefit from help, and i will wait for the devs to provide opinions on this proposal, and that jeff seems like a nice guy who has contributed to monero already :)

I think @plowsof makes a valid point- maybe just clarify that the hours will be achieved regardless of whether or not they're in the 3 month timeframe.

Beyond that, watching the dev chat, I think you're doing a great job, you have a great attitude, and it's refreshing to see someone attempting to clean up and improve the existing codebase.

I look forward to funding this CCS and encouraging others to do so as well.

Good luck!

-Gramps

@plowsof @RealCryptoGrampy Thanks for taking the time to look at this proposal, it really means a lot! I should clarify what I meant by the sentence "as I am rather busy with schoolwork and my job". Currently, I have to work at my part-time job to meet some of my day-to-day expenses. The combination of both school and work means I can't spend as much time on Monero as I would like, but the funding, if provided, would allow me to tune down my hours at my job and focus on Monero development instead. I have worked >20 hours during the school year with little to no issues, and since the majority of the hours will occur during the summer, I have even more time allocated to work instead of school, which can be reduced to make room for Monero development.

Furthermore, I plan on keeping a log of my hours and reporting each month to maintain a certain level of accountability. If something comes up in the 3 months which I can't foresee and I am unable to complete all 360 hours in the allotted time frame, I will either 1) push back the payout date or 2) complete the hours regardless after the timeframe. I truly am passionate about this project and intend to stay as long as the community deems me useful.

Beyond that, watching the dev chat, I think you're doing a great job, you have a great attitude, and it's refreshing to see someone attempting to clean up and improve the existing codebase.

Thanks :D

Supporting based on what @plowsof and @RealCryptoGrampy say. Also because I belive protecting monero-newcomers in simple mode from getting scammed out of their XMR is really important.

I like working with you, but I'm also sure that you'll run out of "dead code" to clean up very soon. This is the simplest and lowest hanging fruit out there, that's not very nutritious at the same time.

What I'd personally wish from you, if I may, is to review just a few PRs of mine at a time and approve or discuss to help approving them. You did this well for the Unity Builds. Some of my PRs are hard, I know. Therefore I didn't really expect you to review them for free, but you did make the steps that make me confident, that you can handle the rest, once you get funded. But like I said: one after another, as reviewing other people's code is a demanding activity.

@mj

but I'm also sure that you'll run out of "dead code" to clean up very soon

Yes, I sure hope I do!

What I'd personally wish from you, if I may, is to review just a few PRs of mine at a time and approve or discuss to help approving them

I try to review anyone PRs if I can. For those PRs which I don't have the knowledge to review, I will not. Some of your PRs are beneficial, but outside of the scope of my immediate knowledge, so I put off reviewing them indefinitely or until I can fully understand the changes made. What I want to avoid is approving any negative changes, so I try to be conservative about which PRs I leave a review on.

Some of your PRs are beneficial, but outside of the scope of my immediate knowledge, so I put off reviewing them indefinitely or until I can fully understand the changes made. What I want to avoid is approving any negative changes, so I try to be conservative about which PRs I leave a review on.

Yes, always this way. Obviously. But thanks for saying it for those to whom this isn't obvious.

Actually honest (and I really mean honest) reviews by various/diverse parties are the only way of safeguarding projects from malicious takeovers by groups of closely cooperarating malicious individuals. Many times cooperating covertly.

Bear in mind that you will easy spot them by apparent lack of empathy or "soul", as they have too little mental energy to be able enjoy any higher emotions, thus are forced by nature to be parasitic.

Truth will always win.

I also think so! word wipe

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6fb31c5b - Updated hours and exchange rate

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Hi all, it has been a full month since I first pushed the proposal, and I hope you are doing well! Since it is getting closer to the school year, I have dialed back my hours on this proposal in make sure that I don't over-promise on the hours I can deliver. I have also updated the exchange rate from $153.11 USD/XMR to $139.26 USD/XMR. You can double-check my numbers here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/historical-data/

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29a0c9c8 - exchange rate update

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merged

mentioned in commit e3f4690e

Update

Hello! Thank you to everyone who donated to my proposal! I can never thank you guys enough; you're a huge reason why the Monero community is so great. I also want to thank those who supported my propsoal and spread the word. Without you all, I would not have been able to spend as much time as I did on this project the last month. It blew my mind how fast the proposal was funded once it reached funding stage, so much so that I was not fully prepared for development on this project, as I was still working another job. I gave them my 2-weeks notice immediately to focus on my work here. It has been over a month since I was funded, so I want to drop an update report. Here are some links to some of my recent work on Github:

Authored PRs:

Reviewed PRs:

Here's an incomplete timesheet of the times where I sat down for bigger blocks of time and worked. This timesheet is not exhaustive, as I spent a lot of time outside of the listed times to do research, compile others' builds, do smaller reviews, debug, get more familiar with the core codebase, etc. I also stopped counting hours after September 17th once I hit the 80 hour mark. I don't want to be compensated a certain amount for if I do less work, so this milestone took a little longer than one month, and for that I apologize.

Week of August 7th

August 9th -- 4 hours -- serde: create serialization-side basic functions
August 10th -- 4.5 hours -- serde: first epee binary deserializer
Augest 12th -- 5 hours -- serde: resdeign the visitor so no template knowledge is needed for Deserializers to interface with it
August 13th -- 3 hours -- serde: start struch.h (similar to keyvalue_serialization.h)
Augest 14th -- 3 hours -- serde: linear key search in struct.h

Week of August 14th

August 15th -- 3 hours -- serde: struct.h first compile
August 16th -- 3 hours -- serde: refactoring
August 17th -- 5 hours -- serde: visitor visit_end + SelfDescribingDeserializer + simplify visitor + refacor dependencies
August 18th -- 5 hours -- serde: switch deserialize base function to ADL operators, start working copy of serde branch
August 19th -- 2 hours -- serde: keyvalue macros and working tests
August 20th -- 2 hours -- serde: KV_SERIALIZE_PARENT required redesigning how struct fields are handled

Week of August 21st

August 23rd -- 6 hours -- serde: JSON arbitrary values and deserializer
August 24th -- 5 hours -- pull 8535 and further serde work
August 25th -- 4 hours -- serde: compat folder and storages/serde_template_helper by analyzing exceptions and API usage of portable_storage_template_helper.h
August 26th -- 4 hours -- serde: blob overhaul
August 27th -- 2 hours -- serde: blob overhaul

Week of August 28th

August 30th -- 5 hours -- serde: more blob factoring and std::set support
September 1st -- 4.5 hours -- serde: visit number by lexical string and network addr variant
September 2nd -- 4.5 hours -- serde: cleanup visitor and network addr variant
September 3rd -- 2 hours -- serde: model/limits.h

Week of September 4th

September 5th -- 3 hours -- serde: model/limits.h and Deserializer state
September 6th -- 6 hours -- serde: almost finished on working branch
September 7th -- 4 hours -- serde: serde compiles and pushed
September 8th -- 4 hours -- serde: more testing and filling out custom serializations
September 9th -- 2 hour -- review #8556, #8544, and #8540

Week of September 11th

September 17th -- 5 hours -- reviewing #8564 and generally debugging Ubuntu 22 builds

As you can see, the majority of my time was taken up by this PR: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/8557. I started this about 1.5 weeks before I knew I was going to be funded, and I didn't want to the work to go to waste because it is genuinely needed. If you would like, you can read more about it in that link. @vtnerd is currently working on a goal similar to this, and after I created the inital pull request, him and I have begun talking more about the direction of this feature and how to combine our efforts. My PR is closer to being "completed", as replace_p2p_serialization does not yet have JSON working publicly, but his is more performant and makes smaller binaries. Deserialization/serialization was not specifically in my original CCS proposal, and while it IS related to the crytonote protocol and will help me towards my goal #5 (closed) in my proposal, if the community deems that it is too off-topic, then I will not count those hours towards my milestone.

Goal #8 (closed) was completed here: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/8340. Goal #9 (closed) did not end up working out: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/8354.

The Future:

For this next month, I plan to work almost exclusively on the GUI wallet (goals #1 (closed), #2, #3 (closed), and #4 (closed)) and wherever else needs immediate work. My priority will be securing remote GUI connections with SSL. I will communicate more with vtnerd to finish up the serialization/deserialization code, even on off time, but I won't put that in my offical hours. I plan to begin counting new hours starting September 24th, 2022.

Payment:

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I, jeffro256, wish to be paid for CCS milestone 1 from proposal "jeffro256: part-time dev work 2022Q3" at
https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/319 to the following address:

8A1ua1oW2DJQZVr8h7UNRS1Y41Zx3UvDV5L9chiiYTgWULaXEHFzRThJdKgtG8yNAvLAAMCojW7dSW2GZULU6JHc4jrG6xs
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Again, thank you to everyone who helped sponser me! I really can't express how grateful I am to get to be supported doing work like this. :)

Thanks for your extraordinary dedication

I wish I could just give all my drags a 2 week notice

Howdy, I'm back again with another milestone update!

Milestone update 2

This month I mainly worked on the community node goal. I opened a Github issue to gather ideas, critiques, and awareness from the community. I began writing the community node selection code here. I started on writing the NodeRPCProxy refactorings here, here, and here. The NodeRPCProxy refactorings are currently awaiting review of @j-berman's scan_tx PR. This next milestone period, I plan on fleshing out the node selection code, pushing more NodeRPCProxy refactorings through, and adding that support to the GUI wallet.

Here is a list of PRs I authored during this milestone period:

And here is a list of PRs I reviewed during this milestone period:

Again, I want to thank everyone who contributed to this proposal, thanks to everyone who participated in the community node discussion, and I'm sorry this milestone took longer than expected. If you would like any questions answered, I'll be happy to answer!

Hello, this is my final milestone update!

Authored PRs:

Reviewed PRs:

Some more notable contributions this period by myself was the decoy algorithm PR which avoids using coinbase enotes as decoys when spending non-coinbase and vice versa, a PR to protect against accidental double spending added into the protocol from a certain cache change, and a PR to make obtaining the RCT output distribution from the blockchain database faster. On the tx_extra limitation PR by tevador, I also contributed a snippet of code which will cause an error when trying to construct a transaction which breakes the tx_extra limitation relay rule, instead of it erorring out before trying to send it to a node for broadcast.

Thank you to all who contributed!

jeffro256: part-time dev work 2022Q3

What

Who

Why

Trusted community node system and high fees (1 & 4)

RPC connection integrity indicator and fine-grained SSL control (2 & 3)

Levin/Cryptonote Specification (5)

OpenSSL 3.0 Compatibility (8)

EC OpenSSL certificates (9)

Nice-to-haves (6, 7, 10, 11)

Funding

Activity

Update

Authored PRs:

Reviewed PRs:

Week of August 7th

Week of August 14th

Week of August 21st

Week of August 28th

Week of September 4th

Week of September 11th

The Future:

Payment:

jeffro256: part-time dev work 2022Q3

What

Who

Why

Trusted community node system and high fees (1 & 4)

RPC connection integrity indicator and fine-grained SSL control (2 & 3)

Levin/Cryptonote Specification (5)

OpenSSL 3.0 Compatibility (8)

EC OpenSSL certificates (9)

Nice-to-haves (6, 7, 10, 11)

Funding

Merge request reports

Activity

Update

Authored PRs:

Reviewed PRs:

Week of August 7th

Week of August 14th

Week of August 21st

Week of August 28th

Week of September 4th

Week of September 11th

The Future:

Payment: