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Happy Devs built HappyChain, a blockchain for fully-onchain games. Our main engineering focus was on building an onboarding experience for gamers unfamiliar with crypto, for which we built a state-of-the-art embedded wallet and account abstraction stack, as well as some connext projects like chain monitoring infra and a novel onchain randomness system.

I ran the company, including fundraising, ops, managing a team of 6, and technical leadership.

Wrote an exhaustive research report on cross-chain interoperability as the behest of the Optimism Collective.

Built roll-op, a deployment & devops tool for OP stack chains, which received multiple retro funding grants from the Optimism Collective.

Built 0xFable, a MVP fully-onchain trading card game (TCG), the first (and I think still only) of its kind. Notable for innovative use of zero-knowledge proofs to enforce random draws & keep players' hands hidden.

Delivered conferences talks at venues like EthDenver, ETH[CC] on onchain games and shared sequencing.

I worked on the design & architecture of the OP Stack, from inception to feature-completeness. The OP Stack is a L2 rollup blockchain stack, which currently secures upwards of 20B$ in assets and more than a 1B$ in daily transaction volume across more than a dozen blockchains.

I was involved in almost every design discussion, reviewed the entirery of the code base, and wrote the major part of the specification. I also led discovery & cleanup work on Georges Hotz' initial implementation of Cannon, the fault proof system responsible for securing the chain.

I dabbled in business development, where I was instrumental in bringing Velodrome Finance (a distributed exchange, now called Aero) onto OP Mainnet, where it held 100s of M$ in value and achieved 10s of B$ in cumulative trading volume. They multiplied these numbers one hundredfold on the Base blockchain (part of the Optimism Superchain) as Aerodrome Finance. I also helped handle the relationships with our "protocol partners", including organizations such as Flashbots, Shutter Network, Cartesi, ...

I delivered many conference talks, including at top venues like ETH[CC] and Devcon, on topics such as the OP Stack, Cannon, MEV-handling and cross-rollup atomic transactions.

I taught the "Languages & Translators" compiler course to a class of about 100 computer science & engineering master students. Students had to implement their own programming language for the course's project.

The class lectures & materials are freely available at norswap.com/compilers

I worked on the GraalVM project, and in particular the implementation of TruffleRuby.

My work has contributed to improve TruffleRuby's peak performance (it is the fastest Ruby implementation on a wide range of benchmarks) and reduce its warmup time.

Much of my work at Oracle is publicly visible at github.com/oracle/truffleruby/commits?author=norswap

My thesis, "Principled Stateful Parsing" explores how adding custom code to parser specifications enables overcoming many practical challenges in the field, and how to mitigate the downsides.

Teaching assistant in the cloud computing, agile programming, and programming paradigms classes.

Double major in networking/security and software engineering.

Teaching assistant in the functional programming and computer systems classes.