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I mostly worked on the design & architecture of Bedrock, from inception to feature-completeness. Bedrock is the new release of the Optimism L2 (rollup) blockchain, which currently secures upwards of 1B$ in assets. Bedrock is also the basis for the OP Stack, an open-source modular rollup architecture available to all.

I was involved in almost every design discussion, wrote the major part of the specification, as well as the Bedrock whitepaper (to be released soon).

Additionally, I did the initial discovery & cleanup work on Cannon, as well as set a tentative roadmap. Cannon is a fault proof system (the system that secures optimistic rollups like Optimism) originally devised by the legendary Georges Hotz. Cannon will be one of the main focus on Optimism going into 2023.

I also dabbled in other functions. On the side of business development, I was instrumental in bringing Velodrome Finance to Optimism, a distributed exchange (DEX) onto Optimism, where it now has 75M$ in total locked value, and just shy of 3B$ in cumulative transaction volume. 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 Bedrock, Cannon, as well as ideas regarding future direction like 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 was selected as one of about ten grant recipients for the core developer apprenticeship, in a pool of more than 400 applicants.

As part of the apprenticeship, I went from barely knowing what a blockchain was to understanding Ethereum in depth, wrote a state-of-the-art reviews on blockchain state expiry and a research proposal on miner extracted value. I also wrote my own implementation of a large chunk of Ethereum's execution layer for education purposes.

All the work I did during my apprenticeship is available at norswap.com/cdap

I am working 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. I have also collaborated closely with our customers at Shopify.

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.

Famest was a fashion-centric social network that let users showcase their outfits and connect with brands.
I rewrote the hastily-writen Famest iPhone app (which would routinely crash after any quick succession of user inputs) in order to make it realiable and maintainable.

Double major in networking/security and software engineering.

Teaching assistant in the functional programming and computer systems classes.