Good news, everyone!
I’ve got a surprising invite to spread the word about Nim and Nimbus at one of the biggest Ruby conferences in Japan, known as RubyKaigi (18-20 Apr):
The topic of the talk will be the art of translating dynamic languages to static ones - I’ll be able to tell the story of how Nimbus started as an automated port of py-evm, the challenges we faced along the way, and how this experience compares to our more recent work of keeping up with ETH 2.0 specs. Nim has some unique advantages in being able to emulate the constructs of many of the dynamic languages and the techniques that were developed for Python can be applied to Ruby as well. In fact, the interest of the Ruby community was provoked by an attempt to create a Nim port of one major Ruby project that will be unveiled at the conference.
While our team considers this a pretty good opportunity for outreach, the high cost of getting to Japan would be hard to justify for this benefit alone. Luckily, we have the opportunity to combine the travel costs with another event of significant importance - the EDCON conference that will be taking place in Sydney, Australia just few days before RubyKaigi (8-14 Apr):
The EDCON conference will feature many prominent speakers from the Ethereum world, but most importantly, it will be the next venue where the Serenity development teams will gather together for a private meetup. The planned agenda includes important topics such as the design of light clients, the access lists in the ewasm execution model that are important for stateless clients and the coordination of the launch of the shared Serenity testnet. We’ve recently made a proposal for an efficient light client design and we feel it’s important for us to advocate for such solutions that will benefit the Status network in the long run.
Budget
A brief research of the available flight and accommodation options suggests that the cost of sending someone from out team to EDCON will be around $3000. We are still considering what would be our ideal head count there and we’ll appreciate your thoughts (possibly just 1 developer). My appearance at RubyKaigi will add additional $500 on top of this.