Hi I'm Alex(github:alexggh) and I'm part of the parachain core team since May 2023 and I would like to join the Polkadot's technical fellowship as a 1st dan member.

For the past 1 year, I've been working on topics that help increasing the scalability and stability of the polkadot network.

See bellow several things I've been involved and contributed to:

- The optimization and hardening of the approval consensus protocol to allow increasing the number of parachain validators and available polkadot cores to 500 validators and 100 cores: https://forum.polkadot.network/t/raising-awareness-new-network-validation-protocol-version-v3-coming/5639, evidence:
- [Approve multiple candidates with a single signature](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/1191)
- [Add feature flag to enable v2 assignments](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2444)
- [approval-distribution: Update topology if authorities are discovered later](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2981)
- [Fix accidental no-shows on node restart ](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3277)
- [Fix recurrent westend finality lags](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4153)
- [Referenda for enabling the optimizations](https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/888)

- Participated in the last mile effort to enable async-backing on Kusama and Polkadot, issues and PRs:
- [Async backing enablement checklist](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/3226)
- [statement-distribution: fix parachains stalling on async_backing enablement](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3063)
- [Fixup backing group computation time](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3170)
- [Fixup multi-collator parachain transition to async backing](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3510)
- [collator-protocol: Always stay connected to validators in backing group](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3544)
- [statement-distribution: Fix Unexpected Statement](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3223)
- [Kusama enable async backing](https://kusama.subsquare.io/referenda/374)
- [Polkadot enable async backing](https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/688)

- Built subsystem-benchmarks for approval-voting, to better estimate the HW and networking requirements for our protocols, PRs:
- [Introduce approval-voting/distribution benchmark](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/2621)

- Root caused and fixed various bugs affecting production networks:
- [Kusama parachains block production slowed down](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/3314)
- [Fix kusama validators getting 0 backing rewards the first session they enter the active set ](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3722)
- [Forward put_record requests to authorithy-discovery](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4683)
- [Prevent accidental change of network-key for active authorities](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3852)
- [authorithy-discovery: Make changing of peer-id while active more robust](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3786)
- [statement-distribution high cpu usage ](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4192)
- [Fix Rococo finality stall](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/3105)

- Designing and prototyping the next round of optimizations that should allows to scale up to 1000 validators and 200 cores: [Introduce approval-voting-parallel ](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4849)

Polkadot address: 14uA7Vc828e2Q6oL5GBHP9UzTkEvwqbroERwRmucGrLmPuuL