Hello everyone! I'm George and I've been at Parity since July 2023. I'm a member of the system parachain team and my areas of expertise are FRAME internals, pallet and runtime development. I would like to become a I Dan in the Polkadot Technical Fellowship.

I am an independent and resourceful contributor to the Polkadot protocol, driven by curiosity and the novelty of the underlying technology. My core values are:
- provide economically fair and safe functionality
- maximize adoption of said functionality through emphasizing user experience
- be frugal with the compute resources the network uses

My noteworthy contributions to Polkadot:
- Simple election mechanism for permissionless collators
    - [PR introducing the functionality in `pallet-collator-selection`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1340)
    - Completely owned the feature as I designed, implemented, tested and supported the audit.
    - Went through multiple iterations of the design to ensure the problem of "first come, first served" collator spots is solved in a fair and minimally invasive way.
    - Supported the existing collators adapting through the changes in the [System Parachain Collators](https://matrix.to/#/#statemine:matrix.org) Element room.
- Diagnose and fix crash of parachain nodes syncing from genesis
    - [Root cause](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/1566#issuecomment-1740649027) a crash of nodes running AssetHub from genesis after upgrading to `v1.1.0`, introduced while merging support for async backing.
    - [Own the fix on the node side](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1788).
    - [Make necessary changes on the runtime side to correctly support the async backing](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1251).
- People chain development
    - Reduced complexity in `pallet-identity` by [making the information generic and configurable](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1661); owned design, implementation and testing.
    - [Simplified the interfaces in `pallet-identity`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2048) which were made redundant with the previous change
    - Contributed to the discussion in the people chain genesis and migration and [supported the effort](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2088).
    - Made the authority interaction with usernames in `pallet-identity` [more user-friendly](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4646)
- Allow scheduled tasks to be retried
    - [PR introducing the functionality in `pallet-scheduler`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3060)
    - Owned the feature as I designed, implemented, tested and supported the audit.
    - The chosen design did not require migrations or increase complexity for the existing task scheduling functionality.
- Staking development
    - Analyzed and participated in the design of [`pallet-stake-tracker`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1933), provided [reference implementation](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3468) for refactoring.
    - Analyzed and participated in the [refactoring of `StakingInterface`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3889).
    - Analyzed and supported the refactoring of the [staking-related pallets](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3904) to allow for [usage of funds in nomination pools in governance](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3905).
- General transaction [RFC](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/RFCs/pull/84)
    - Allows the introduction of a new transaction format
    - Defines the new General transaction format and provides the [motivation](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/RFCs/pull/84/files#diff-b529cc9bb7063a82d734f359c84a453c8aeb4f2b9655884956fd2dc5e530f6afR13) for the change
    - Updates the extrinsic formal specification through a [version bump](https://github.com/polkadot-fellows/RFCs/pull/84/files#diff-b529cc9bb7063a82d734f359c84a453c8aeb4f2b9655884956fd2dc5e530f6afR35).

I support others in developing and advancing Polkadot by providing insight in the [General: Rust, Polkadot, Substrate](https://matrix.to/#/#engineering-general:parity.io) and FRAME Element rooms.

GitHub: [georgepisaltu](https://github.com/georgepisaltu)
Polkadot address: 128pmEUBSGjGeXZXNaAmomAJgVn77L74YT7Zdjd3fP63HWNP