EPF Dev Update #12

Time really flies when you're enjoying what you do - there's only a few weeks left on the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship program, and it's a good time to reflect for a bit and think about what I'd like to achieve in the next few weeks.

• Working with Rust has been an awesome experience - I've learnt a lot just from getting my code to compile . The error messages and documentation are very well written and super helpful! Thanks to everyone who's helped me I'll continue to learn and get better with it while I can!
• Builder updates for EIP-4844: I've spent time working on both the ethereum specs (beacon-APIs, builder-specs) and the implementation (lighthouse), and I think being able to experience the end-to-end of how a feature gets implemented in Ethereum (i.e. working as a Ethereum core dev) is very rewarding and fun! I also got to experience that getting consensus on spec changes is sometimes time consuming but can be worth it, as I ended up learning a lot, and the collaboration has usually led us to a better place
• In the final weeks, I'd really like to wrap up most of the work that I have started, continue to learn about Ethereum and Rust, and hopefully this would prep me for the next steps after EPF!

Project links

• Project: EIP-4844 Consensus Client
• Design: Builder API for Blobs

Summary for week 13 (2023/1/23-2023/1/30)

This is going to be a (relatively) short update due to public holiday here (Australia day🇦🇺🦘) and I've been more focused on closing out my existing PRs.

• I've been working on getting Capella & Denebs types into mev-rs, a library used by some tests in lighthouse. There's a bit of challenge, as it's the first time introducing versioned data into this repo, and modifying types would lead to many changes across multiple modules in the code base. I'm not sure what the best approach is, I'm planning to implement this on one builder endpoint, and hopefully reach out to @ralexstokes for some early feedback.
• builder-specs changes #60 and #61: little progress on these and I won't go into too much details, but got some more feedback and it looks like we're getting close to merging the Capella changes (#60).
• ethereum-consensus changes #168 and #170: continue to address review feedback - appreciate the review and help from @ralexstokes on this!
• There are a few more PRs that I haven't been able to make much progress on, and I'm not going to duplicate the contents here - for more info, see the last update here
• Continuing with learning Rust, and read this great article recommended by one of my mentor and friend: Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier. kudos to @rauljordan, it summarises Rust concepts really well, and especially useful for someone coming from another programming language.
• In other news, I'll be attending ETHDenver! I'm really excited about this and looking forward to meeting other EPF participants in person!