Software Engineer with 9 years’ professional experience working in web and app development. Have worked in startups and as a full-time open-source developer. My experience in the startup industry revealed a divide in communication between the different teams and a slowing of progress that only gets worse as the team gets larger. This led me to start working on my own open-source projects focusing on bridging the gap between engineering and design, along with reducing barriers towards innovation.
My open-source work has involved research and development in the design systems field, collaborating with maintainers of other projects and building apps for the Zcash ecoystem. I learnt about Zcash and became active in the community in 2021, while I have had an interest in crypto and Bitcoin for much longer than that.
The vision that I align with regarding the future of Zcash is that it should be a tool everyone can make use of, for day-to-day payments, as a short/medium-term store of value and as something that can grow to be a scalable private, pseudonymous identity and messaging layer; a basis for a new version of the internet that works on microtransactions rather than big data and advertising. I believe strongly in changing the narrative from cryptocurrency solely being an investment or way to quickly earn money, to an asset that can be used by a majority of the population.
I have received two grants from ZCG: the first, for Elemental Zcash, a design system and component library for Zcash applications. This work has been adapted and evolved into ZECpublish, and I plan to continue iterating on the project together with Elemental Pay, an ecosystem of payment processing libraries that can interoperate with projects such as BTCPayServer. While there is a valid concern about conflict of interest around ZCG committee members having accepted grants in the past, I feel that having the firsthand experience of applying for a grant provides valuable insight into the whole process and how it can be improved, especially on what can go wrong, tracking milestones, together with encouraging transparency when it comes to scope increase or delays and offering feedback or suggestions that may guide the project towards the right course.
Over the past year I took on the work of upgrading the BTCPayServer Zcash plugin to version 2.1, added support for the official setup and upgrade process and took on maintainership of the plugin repository. Thanks also to the work by Hanh on zcash-walletd, more than five merchants have started accepting Zcash using the plugin, and I’m liaising with both existing and prospective merchants. I plan to actively onboard new merchants and identify pain points that can be resolved to attract more stores to accept ZEC.
While serving as a committee member, I might consider applying for grants so long as this would be permitted and not strongly objected to by the community, and of course I would abstain from voting on such proposals and include this as part of the conflict of interest declaration as required. However, this would not be a dealbreaker for me.
If I join the ZCG team, my main priority would be to accelerate the progress of both core and external Zcash development, and drive efficient collaboration and faster innovation among Zcash builders. I believe strongly in transparency given that it does not lead to operational or security risks, and would be keen to work on projects that provide more insight into tracking how ZCG funds are spent.