Evidence-0087: Retention at Rank III

Report Date	2024/11/25
Submitted by	Oliver Tale-Yazdi

Member details

• Matrix username: @oliver.tale-yazdi:parity.io
• Polkadot address: 16a357f5Sxab3V2ne4emGQvqJaCLeYpTMx3TCjnQhmJQ71DX
• Current rank: III (Fellow)
• Date of initial induction: 2022/11/21
• Date of last report: 2024/04/24
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest:
  • cross-chain message passing (XCMP, HRMP, DMP & UMP)
  • the Polkadot business-logic (aka the 'runtime')
  • pallets utilised by the Polkadot (Main) Network and its system chains
  • the internals of the frame pallet framework
  • runtime and host APIs
  • standard RPCs

Reporting period

• Start date: 2024/06/07
• End date: 2024/12/07

Evidence

I present evidence to demonstrate my continued alignment with the Fellowship and Polkadot to retain my rank.

Core Fellowship Work

My work in this area was focused on maintenance of the Polkadot runtime^{1, 2} and integration of governance requests. Integrating governance requests shows the community that The Fellowship listens to it and cares about its wishes. For example, I removed unwanted accounts from the Ambassador collective³ and implemented the new inflation model⁴. I think it is important to keep the Fellowship well positioned in public perception, which I see as my task as a Rank III Fellow.

On the SDK side, I mostly focused on review work. This was due to increasing demand from new developers and a personal preference. I believe that Polkadot has a very good feature set. Keeping existing parts maintained is equally - if not more - important to me than adding new functionality. A recent insight of mine was that the effort of adding a new feature is bounded, whereas the effort of maintaining a feature is possibly unbounded (when integrated over time). I therefore believe that we need to be very careful with how many things we add, while having to maintain them with constrained resources. In our context, it is also easier to add things than to remove them, worsening the dilemma.

One big thing that I am collaboratively working on is the Asset Hub migration as preparation for Plaza. This is a very high-impact topic and shows my focus on important tasks that have the possibility to affect Polkadot positively in the long term.

Tooling and DevEx

I created a way to keep the Polkadot ecosystem informed about our releases⁵ while improving internal workflows⁶. I try to improve DevEx by adding automation⁷ and simplifying configurations⁸. I think that automation is very valuable, since it increases the productivity of all developers through a small effort.

JAM

I maintain resources for people to learn about JAM^{9, 10}, try to help developers interact with JAM^{11, 12} and work on a JAM client in my free time (currently closed-source). I think acquiring this knowledge now will enable me to help other Fellows understand it later - once Polkadot switches to the JAM chain. This is in line with the Manifesto's requirement of "Demonstrable presence of knowledge sharing within the ecosystem".

Voting record

Ranks	Activity thresholds	Agreement thresholds	Member's voting activities	Comments
III	70%	100%	I have voted on 89 out of 95 referenda in which I was eligible to vote (i.e 93.68% % voting activity). I believe to have voted in agreement with higher ranks in all cases, although I did not check the data.