| Report Date | 2026/09/17 |
| Submitted by | Stephen Lawrence |
@stevenlawrence:matrix.org16Xj1rSgNBtzHch3Jb9SfW7dK749s9WbCqKcwmZCFkR2pnaiStephenlawrence00I'm Stephen Lawrence. I build and operate complex software systems, and for the past year most of that time has gone into the Polkadot SDK and the fellowship runtimes. I came in through a Polkadot Africa SDK workshop, started on isolated feature work, and have since moved to the parts of the stack production runtimes depend on.
Most of what I do is find the places where the code quietly does the wrong thing, and fix them on both sides of the stack. A state snapshot that looks valid but was built from a lagging RPC provider. A dry run that actually delivers the messages it was only meant to simulate. A burn on a system chain that never moves the issuance figure Asset Hub tracks. None of these fail loudly, and most surface only in production or in the tooling used to verify an upgrade before it is enacted. That work runs across both repositories, because a fix usually needs a primitive in the SDK and a runtime willing to adopt it, and the issues I open are there to keep the two halves in step.
Below are my substantial works over this period.
polkadot-fellows/runtimesDustRemoval into a pallet-accumulate-and-forward account and teleport it to Asset Hub to be burned there, so a burn on a system chain moves the TotalIssuance figure Asset Hub actually tracks.DustRemoval on Asset Hub Polkadot resolves into the DAP staging account rather than burning, so dust is deactivated like every other Polkadot sink. Carries tests for the recursion question raised in #12130.pallet-remote-proxy silently dropped the newest relay storage root, so proofs anchored at recent relay blocks failed with UnknownProofAnchorBlock. Fixed by skipping duplicate BlockToRoot entries for the same relay parent and evicting the oldest entry rather than the newest when the bounded vector fills. Reported in #1230.py/ctbrn is swept to zero daily with Preservation::Expendable, so sub-ED dust arriving while it sits empty is burned outright, because can_deposit refuses a deposit that would leave an account below ED.paritytech/polkadot-sdktype RewardSource (pay rewards from a pot account instead of minting) and type Slash (route slashed deposits to a handler instead of burning) to pallet-election-provider-multi-block::signed::Config, so the signed phase stops silently minting and burning and TotalIssuance stays reconcilable with the DAP emission curve on Asset Hub. Reported in #12813. The shape of the API owes a lot to @sigurpol, who pushed for the reward payment to be recoverable rather than silently skipped, for the no-op reactivation to be opt-in rather than the default, and for keeping DAP and EPMB free of a dependency on each other.pallet-accumulate-and-forward's on_idle now records the block of the last forwarding attempt and forwards once now - last >= TransferPeriod, instead of requiring an exact multiple of TransferPeriod, which a parachain reading the relay chain block number can miss indefinitely, leaving accumulated funds forwarded never. Reported in #13149.remote-ext treated per-item RPC errors as empty values, so a lagging provider produced a snapshot that looked valid and was quietly wrong. Such errors now fail the batch, the computed storage root is verified against the block header before a snapshot is cached, and providers lacking the target block are excluded up front. This is the tooling used to dry-run runtime upgrades, so a silently corrupt snapshot is a bad failure mode. Reported in #12264.pallet-xcm's dry_run_call and dry_run_xcm in a rolled-back storage transaction so simulated XCM execution never mutates caller state. Before this, dry-run outbound messages were silently delivered via process_messages(), meaning emulator tests asserted against a world the dry run had already changed. Reported in #11486.try_state invariant checks to pallet-proxy, and gives it a storage version plus a MigrateV0ToV1 migration that sorts the delegate list in every Proxies entry so lookups can rely on the ordering. Wired into the Migrations tuple of five Westend runtimes.frame-benchmarking pallet backend.SystemWeightInfo and ExtensionsWeightInfo as #[pallet::no_default] and removes their () defaults from the frame-system default configs, so a runtime can no longer silently inherit the Substrate reference weights and must set its own explicitly. Reported in #10758.FreezeIdentifier and MaxFreezes from pallet_balances in favour of RuntimeFreezeReason.ParaLifecycle, leaving Onboarding, Parachain and OffboardingParachain, so every registered para onboards directly as a Parachain. This reflects the coretime model, where holding a lease is no longer a property of the para itself. Reported in #3402.decl_runtime_apis! generate parameters bounded by EncodeLike<T>, so any type producing the same SCALE bytes as T can be passed in its place, adds where Self: Sized for dyn compatibility, and updates mock_impl_runtime_apis! to decode generic arguments back to concrete types. Reported in #5951.StakingLedger mutation in pallet-staking-async (update, bond, set_payee, set_controller_to_stash and kill) in a transactional storage layer that rolls back atomically if the post-mutation consistency check fails, closing the class of state corruption described in #3245 and #3697.pallet-xcm's deprecated LockableCurrency with the fungible freeze traits, so locally locked assets are held under a new FreezeReason::AssetLock rather than the py/xcmlk lock, with a multi-block migration and a lazy fallback for pre-existing locks. Part of #7226.I try to scope work before writing it, and to track the operational consequences of my own changes rather than leaving them for someone else to discover.
pallet-election-provider-multi-block's Slash and RewardSource to DAP on Polkadot Asset Hub once this repo bumps past it, with the config mirrored from Westend Asset Hub.pallet-proxy's MigrateV0ToV1 to the Asset Hub Polkadot and Kusama Unreleased tuples, and records the crate pin that blocks it until an SDK release carries the migration.MigrateV0ToV1 from the five Westend runtimes once each is at storage version 1 and the tuple entry is only a version read on every future upgrade.try_state)A systematic pass adding try_state invariant checks to pallets that had none, so state corruption is caught in try-runtime upgrade checks rather than in production. Led by pallet-proxy (#12710), listed above as approved, with the same treatment for:
pallet-preimage (#12716) · pallet-identity (#12713) · pallet-vesting (#12712) · pallet-multisig (#12711) · pallet-scheduler (#12426) · pallet-whitelist (#12425) · pallet-salary (#12424)
Full record: merged SDK PRs · merged runtimes PRs · all PRs · issues authored
My work is concentrated where the Fellowship's responsibility actually sits: the runtimes Polkadot and Kusama run, the FRAME pallets underneath them, and the tooling used to verify an upgrade before it is enacted. The issuance workstream in particular required carrying one problem across two repositories and several releases, writing the SDK primitive, using it in the runtime, and tracking the cleanup afterwards. That is the kind of end-to-end ownership I would like to keep doing as a Member.
At Rank I, I intend to carry the issuance and AHM work through to completion, keep expanding try_state coverage across FRAME, and take on review responsibility in the areas I now know well.
N/A. I am a Candidate seeking promotion and have no voting history yet. Per the Manifesto there is no minimum period of service for Candidates seeking to become Members, and no activity or agreement thresholds apply at Rank 0.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | N/A | N/A | N/A | Candidate, so no voting rights or obligations. |
| I | 90% | N/A | N/A | Thresholds apply from Rank I onward; I will meet them once promoted. |
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Comment(s): I was inducted as a Candidate on 2026/09/16 via application #26. Per the Manifesto there is no minimum period of service for Candidates seeking to become Members.
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