Background information of the applicant
My name is Christopher Kalule I am based in Uganda. I come with 8+ years of experience in full stack development but now more focused on Rust & Blockchain. In the past, I have worked with Golang, Javascript and QA. Proving my ability to build reliable, performant, scalable, and secure Web2 and Web3 systems. I believe open source would help me grow into a better engineer and that is how I stumbled onto Polkadot-SDK. With good rust skills which I earned in the Let's Get Rusty Live program. Link to certificate. Allowed me to tackle some contributions I will Elaborate on below. And also a graduate of PBA-X Wave #4. This was a mind blowing experience. I also volunteered as a technical mentor at Polkadot Africa(Uganda) technical workshop in preparation for sub0, where is spoke on why blockchain & tokens to building a Poet Auction smart contract with ink!v6.
Motivation(s) for applying to the Polkadot Technical Fellowship
Becoming Developer Advocate for Polkadot Africa (Uganda) on October 9th crystallized what I want to accomplish. The Fellowship represents the technical depth I need to be effective in that role not just explaining Polkadot, but actively building with it. I want to contribute to the SDK while staying plugged into new implementations so I can create relevant, timely content for developers in my region and others. Working with experienced engineers would accelerate my web3 principles and Rust development while ensuring the guidance I give other developers is grounded in real practice, not just documentation.
Area(s) of interest in relation to the Polkadot ecosystem.
- I'm interested in Node SDK work and runtime development—building the core components that parachains depend on. Smart contracts, especially through Pallet Revive, also fascinate me because that's where we're lowering barriers for developers coming from other ecosystems. It's the intersection of infrastructure and accessibility
- JAM
Contribution(s) to Polkadot SDK (if any)
- My work on Polkadot SDK spans three main areas: building out runtime support for XCM benchmarking across sibling parachains, collaborating with maintainers to remove legacy feature gates and reduce technical debt in core subsystems, and automating testnet setup for Omni Node to make development more efficient Link to Contributions
Link to the GitHub profile of the applicant
- https://github.com/EleisonC