Hi, this is my first update so I’m going to introduce myself a little bit before I start. My name is Teri (Tereza) and I’m a cybersec/computer science master’s student from the Czech Republic. I’ve been interested in Ethereum for quite some time, I’ve visited a few conferences, hackathons and my bachelor’s thesis was kind of a “baby” version of Ethereum research.

I spent Week 0 and Week 1 researching the new division of layers after The Merge, since I haven’t spent a lot of time reading about all the new functionality during the last year and need to familiarize myself with the technicalities to be able to choose the best project for my abilities. I’ve been doing some notes that I’m going to share in a future update. Simultaneously I’ve looked into different implementations of the layers to get used to how the specification looks in the “real world”. I’ve ran into a few challenges during this initial “researching & figuring out the project” phase:

• It’s difficult to understand the implementation for someone who kind of knows how everything works theoretically but hasn’t seen a lot of Ethereum code. There’s a lot of clients and each of them is in different phases of implementation or research and the code is variously organized and they have different kinds of detailed issues. It’s important to be able to understand already existing complex implementations.
• I do not have a lot of experience with contributions to open-source code and find it difficult to recognize how to meaningfully contribute, especially as I would prefer a project that I would be able to do alone or with a smaller team that would not require daily coordination and must take into consideration the size of the project, which needs to match the time window and my abilities.

I’m trying to come up with an area of interest or a project to research further:

• I’ve worked in a few languages, with my strongest being C and Python. I’ve been interested in learning Rust and I’ve read some of the documentation and examples even before applying to this cohort, so I think it would be a good choice, although it’s not set and I can also use other languages.
• I’ve been thinking about what Josh said in the kickoff about being able to both choose something we’re familiar with or choose something completely new and mainly learn in the process. I want to learn new stuff and I also want EF to get their worth of money that they offered, so I’m ideally going to choose something that I can somehow finish and contribute with but would prefer implementation instead of research (I’m quite an experienced programmer but have only done research in the Ethereum area, so Ethereum implementation is new).
• I feel like working on a consensus client would suit me better, so I’ve been looking at the Lighthouse client quite a bit – the project proposals and the issues.
• I’ve read about SSLE and find it interesting, but I’m not really sure if it’s in my scope of abilities and I’m also not very familiar with TypeScript in case some implementation in the Lodestar client is needed, so this needs further research and some discussions with mentors, at this point it’s just an area of interest.
• I’ve read some of the Ephemery testnet specs and would like to find out how to possibly contribute at this moment in practice and if it’s something that would possibly fit me.

I really hope to find some of the answers to my questions during this week and possibly have a better idea of the area that I’m going to contribute to in the next update. For now, back to exploring code and all the new concepts and ideas!